⋆˚࿔ Since I’m an university student, I won’t be online a lot, but I’ll try my best to post as fast as I can!
I’m a huge nerd — I loooove gaming, writing, Miraculous (obvi), reading, and I used to watch a lot of anime! Outside of my nerdy interests, I really love drawing, baking, cooking, dancing, and fashion! ✨
I also listen to a lot of music, and my favorites are Michael Jackson, Chase Atlantic and Pierce The Veil! In K-pop, my ult group is ENHYPEN, but I also love ILLIT, Stray Kids, CORTIS, and ITZY (I listen to more groups, but these are my top favorites) !!
Make sure to follow me on instagram hehe, I post a lot there and my older works are up there to see :P — enhypen / miraculous ᨳଓ .
summary: you’re assigned a group project with nishimura riki, but after a string of arrogant, borderline insulting texts, you decide he’s impossible to work with. turns out the messages were never from him — and now he’s stuck trying to undo a first impression he never made.
Warning: Suggestive Jokes
Ft: Donghwa (Kickflip), Moka (Illit), Martin (Cortis) and Rei (Ive) as y/n’s friends.
content: smau ⟡ tattooartist!riki x reader ⟡ profanity ⟡ suggestive ⟡ mature (minors dni) ⟡ riki lowk a freak
a/n: that's a wrap on aftercare yippee! onto the next series...
go follow my insta @ nishimmortal ! i post teasers and polls for future posts on there so check it out :)
to be added to my taglist, please visit my taglist post!
Summary: Heeseung spotted a really pretty woman at the Han River. Wait... she has a son? And she's not married? Does he actually stand a chance?
Some important points: Heeseung and Yunah are siblings. jungwon, yunah , reader are best friends since before debut of ENHYPEN. Reader has a three year old son. Ft: Yunah of ILLIT
in which ── .✦ you and heeseung were born into rival political dynasties and expected to be enemies, but instead, you end up falling in love. wc: 11k ༄.° — req by anon 𑣲
tags: secret relationship, smut mdni, a lil fluff, politics, unprotected sex, degrading AND praise cus yk, heeseung on his knees obviously, secret sex, the usual ⊹ ࣪ ˖
the annual political fundraiser was the last place you wanted to be at right now.
you hate the bright flashes from the cameras, you hate the stupid reporters invading your privacy asking absurd questions, you hate how everyone— every single person, has a fake smile plastered on their face. it’s disgusting, it’s boring and your father knows how much you hate it.
after what felt like hours faking your smiles for photos while hanging onto your fathers arm like a child, you finally managed to slip away from the public and make your way to the balcony which was thankfully empty.
cool air brushed your skin as you leaned towards the railing, finally giving you time to breathe.
‘trying to escape too?’
his voice was familiar, yet you couldn’t quite place who it was. you turn around and see a boy your age, stood at the doorway. you had to admit, he was kinda cute.
‘is it that obvious?’ you softly laughed.
‘just a little’ he lets out a smile, walking towards you before leaning towards the railing himself.
you guys stood in the cold air, sharing your complaints about how dumb the event was, how flashy it was and how exhausted you both were from constantly having to watch your expressions in front of everyone.
then a voice came from inside, ‘heeseung!’
you could recognize that name from anywhere, no way. it’s impossible, were you just having a conversation with your fathers rivals son? fuck, you just hope nobody saw you two. you knew your father would be so angry with you if you got into a scandal involving his literal sworn enemy.
‘wait- your heeseung? as in.. lee heeseung?’
‘yeah, and you?’
you scoff, ‘i’m y/n fucking l/n!’
his eyes widen instantly, you both stay silent for a moment before his laugh uncontrollably spills out. you just stare him in disbelief, what the hell?
‘well’ heeseung says with a small smile, ‘this is awkward’
soon after, your own laughter starts coming out.
since you were born, you’ve heard the nastiest things about heeseung and his family. you automatically assumed he’d be a whore just like his father, but surprisingly he looked less like the enemy you were programmed to hate for years, and more like a normal person.
after that fundraiser, it was like heeseung had his fingers in every single fold of your fucking brain. you had promised yourself you would never ever think of him after that night, but you have never been so painfully wrong.
you thought of heeseung all the time, when you were in class, when you would eat breakfast, when you would get ready, and even when you would talk to your father. your mind had always wandered back to that night you two had talked.
so now you lay in your bed, angrily trying to tell your brain to forget about him because you will never talk to him again.
the only light in the room is the dim, warm glow of your bedside lamp. you are trying so so hard to just sleep everything off, that is until your phone buzzes on the side table.
unknown: still trying to mentally recover from that fundraiser?
you just stare at the message, how the hell did he manage to get your number?
you also couldn’t help but let out a tiny smile while rereading his message for the 57th time.
you: unfortunately.. what abt u?
unknown: i might just break my leg so i don’t have to go to the next one
you felt like you were sixteen again, secretly messaging a boy and giggling while reading his texts like you were in high school. from that night, you and heeseung had texted every single day.
you would even eat dinner early, rushing back to your room and telling your father ‘your super sleepy’ just so you could have two hours at night to call him and shit talk both of your families.
you two would complain about the fundraisers, your parents, your mutuals, the reporters. you guys would just talk about anything, even going as far as sending pictures randomly throughout the day to each other to give updates.
for the first time, you had finally felt understood.
one night, after hours of texting while your father thought you were peacefully sleeping, heeseung messaged you something you could never tell anyone about.
heeseung: so.. when am i seeing you again?
your heart has genuinely never raced faster, you knew you should say no. you have to say no.
instead, you replied,
you: how does wednesday sound?
heeseung: perfect
then came wednesday, you have been preparing yourself for this day all week. you even got your hair recolored, did laser, washed your hair with your delicious toasted vanilla shampoo, and even used your special occasion ‘chocolate shower gel’ all over your body.
you two agreed on meeting at an underground bar, meant for celebrities who want to take a break without getting mobbed by invasive people. you thought it would be way too risky to have heeseung pick you up, so instead you both separately arrived at the bar.
the building was super sketchy, the wallpaper was barley on and dust was collected everywhere. you did your best to hope that you wouldn’t get kidnapped and entered the even sketchier elevator. once you reached the basement, you were met with the most beautiful bar you’ve ever seen.
it was dark, the light wasn’t yellow or white, it was red. the red light created a surreal atmosphere and wasn’t too intense, there were a few people, not any you knew. you looked around and locked eyes with the softest gaze you’ve ever seen.
‘hi y/n’
‘hi heeseung’ you smiled
you both sat at a two seater table, it was intimate, but not awkward. you guys actually managed to get along really well, probably even better than when you guys would text or call. his knee would occasionally brush over yours, but he never moved it away first.
and safe to say, it went pretty well.
until your phone started ringing, and the only people who would call you were heeseung or your father. clearly it wasn’t heeseung so your body instantly started heating up when you realised who it was. ‘fuck- my fathers calling me’
‘oh uh.. come with me’ heeseung grabbed your wrist, his touch feeling feather light. he quickly dragged you to an unused room where no one was allowed. ‘answer the call here, it’s quiet’
you answer his call, putting on that fake smile you always have with him even though he can’t even see you.
‘hi daddy! what’s up’ your voice shaking just a bit,
‘where are you?, you know we have to attend a campaign early tomorrow’ your fathers voice has that familiar aggressiveness to it.
‘oh- i’m trying to buy a new dress for it, you know.. and i also need makeup so im shopping, ill be home soon i promise’
‘be home before 12, it’s already 10 and the campaign is at 8am tomorrow.’
you blindly agree with anything he says and manage to convince him you will definitely be home by 12. you cut the call and sigh while putting your phone back into your pocket, apologizing to heeseung.
you notice it, you notice how heeseung can’t take his eyes off your lips, you notice how his hands hover over your waist, you notice his breath becoming uneven.
you take it upon yourself to grab his collar and crash your lips onto his, his fingers digging into your waist as his knee finds its way between your thighs, settling right onto your cunt.
his hands guide your hips to grind him, his mouth muffle your moans he quickly makes his way onto his knees.
‘heeseung..’
‘just let me do this baby, just relax okay?’ his pushes up your dress until it rests on your hips, uncovering your drenched panties. ‘fuck, already soaked? just from grinding?’ he laughs.
your grip tightens in his hair, ‘shut up’ you smile despite yourself. he slides your panties down to your knees, not bothering to take them fully off. he pushes your thighs apart making your legs open giving him a a full view of your aching heat. the smile on his face doesn’t leave even when he latches his mouth right onto your clit.
fuck, you don’t know if it’s because of how hot he looks on his knees, or the adrenaline pumping through your veins knowing you may get caught, or if it’s even the fact your father thinks your buying dresses instead of having his rivals son eating you out, but the coil in your stomach tightens insanely fast.
you didn’t think he could be this skilled, his tongue takes its time exploring every inch of you, intertwining with your folds while his fingers finally ease their way into your heat. his tongue and fingers working simultaneously making you uncontrollably spill out moans, you were so vocal and responsive it didn’t take long for heeseung to become frustrated with his own growing hardness.
he increased his speed and pressure, sucked deeper till your fingers pulled on his hair so hard his scalp started burning. when he layed a gentle kiss right onto your clit, you instantly became undone. ‘look at you, dripping onto my tongue and shaking from just my fingers’
he smoothly got up, his hair messed up from your grip. his fingers push past your lips and you instinctively suck on them, tasting yourself on him. ‘good girl’ he releases his fingers from you, taking the into his own mouth to clean up whatever you left.
‘heeseung please,’ you say out of breath
‘tell me baby, what do you want?’ his hands travel up your sides and he gives you small kiss onto your cheek.
‘i want you to fuck me’
he lets out a smile once again before diving back into your mouth, his tongue forcing its way through your lips and savoring every inch of your mouth. he pulls himself away, a strand of saliva still connecting you two while you help him undo his belt and take his jeans off.
to no surprise, he was big. your mind instantly questioning if he would even fit in you. ‘wait..will it fit?’
he kisses you again ‘i’ll make it fit’ he pulls you into his arms and makes you wrap your legs around his waist before slamming your back into the wall, and in one thrust, burying himself in you. fuck, you thought you teared something from how much he stretched you.
he didn’t wait for you to adjust, he instantly started thrusting, your dress riding up higher and higher your body. you’ve been fucked before, but most guys were clumsy and only cared about making themselves cum. but heeseung? he could make you cum untouched, he repeatedly hit the spot inside of you that put you in absolute euphoria. your eyes squeezed shut, trying hard to not scream and get the employees attention while you get fucked in a room you are definitely not allowed to be in.
‘fuck baby, you’re so- tight’ heeseung groans himself, it was like you were made for his dick, perfectly molded to fit him inside you. ‘your father would fucking kill you if he saw you right now, moaning- fuck- moaning like a slut on his rivals sons dick- shit- right?’ he could feel you clench tighter at his words, he was right. you knew nobody could find out about this, you both would be dead. it didn’t take long for you to cum all over him again, your cunt already sensitive from the last orgasm. shortly after he thrusted harder, faster, chasing his own high. you suck on a spot on his neck which makes him instantly release hot ropes of cum inside of you. you felt him filling you up entirely, you were so fucked out you didn’t even care he didn’t wear a condom. you’d figure that out later, a morning after pill will fix it right?
he stays inside of you, your legs still wrapped around him when he meets your gaze. he looks just as fucked as you are, he rests his lips on yours again. your hands making way to his jaw, pulling him closer.
content: smau ⟡ tattooartist!riki x reader ⟡ profanity ⟡ suggestive ⟡ mature (minors dni) ⟡ riki lowk a freak
a/n: that's a wrap on aftercare yippee! onto the next series...
go follow my insta @ nishimmortal ! i post teasers and polls for future posts on there so check it out :)
to be added to my taglist, please visit my taglist post!
Summary: Heeseung spotted a really pretty woman at the Han River. Wait... she has a son? And she's not married? Does he actually stand a chance?
Some important points: Heeseung and Yunah are siblings. jungwon, yunah , reader are best friends since before debut of ENHYPEN. Reader has a three year old son. Ft: Yunah of ILLIT
Summary: Heeseung spotted a really pretty woman at the Han River. Wait... she has a son? And she's not married? Does he actually stand a chance?
Some important points: Heeseung and Yunah are siblings. jungwon, yunah , reader are best friends since before debut of ENHYPEN. Reader has a three year old son.
Ft: Yunah of ILLIT
NISHIMURA RIKI fell from heaven for refusing to destroy someone undeserving and ends up bleeding out on a Nevada trail in 1878 where you find him and bring him home to the only danger you’ve ever known. He isn’t a man — not exactly — and the scars on his back are proof of it. He is not a man known to the love of humans but his protective instinct for you is enough to love for a lifetime
𖤍 parings… Nishimura Riki x Female Reader
Fallen Angel AU | Historical Fiction | Slow Burn | Romance | Angst with Happy Ending | Dark Themes | Supernatural
𖤍 wc. 14.5k
[ warnings… depictions of domestic abuse, parental abuse, violence, character death, blood, period-accurate misogyny, supernatural elements, kissing, skinship, themes of grief and isolation,, emotional distress, ANGST with happy ending ]
🫕 angst and a Sunday evening go hand in hand, I’m working on kiss and tell part two I’m so sorry i didn’t get it finished for last week but exams have been consuming me and yeah! this has been in my drafts for like ages and it’s very angsty but a happy ending! thanks for supporting my work yall ily pls enjoy🫰
The order came the way all orders did — not in words, not in sound, but in the particular quality of the light. A shift in the gold of it. A direction embedded in the warmth the way iron is embedded in rock — not placed there, not added, but of it, native and irrefutable. He had felt it ten thousand times before, or a hundred thousand, or a number that made both figures meaningless. The light moved and he moved with it. That was the whole of his existence, distilled: the light moved, and he followed.
He had never questioned it. That was the truth he would turn over later, in the long unmeasured dark of his falling — that he had never, in all that incomprehensible span of time, questioned. Not once. He had gone where he was sent. He had done what was asked. He had been, above all and before all, obedient.
But he had also watched. That was his particular nature, the quality that distinguished him from the others, though he had never been told as much — he simply knew it the way he knew the names of stars. He watched. He learned the specific tremor of a human hand when fear moved through it. He learned the sound grief made when a person believed themselves entirely alone — that low, animal register, nothing like the weeping done for an audience. He had watched ten thousand years of human life unspool beneath him like a river seen from a very great height, and he had catalogued it all, and said nothing, because there was nothing to say. It was not his place to feel. It was his place to serve.
The man they sent him to destroy was kneeling in a field of winter wheat. Praying. Of all the things he might have been doing in the last moments of his life — praying, hands laced together on his thighs so tightly the knuckles had gone the colour of bone, head bowed, lips moving in the particular quiet rhythm of a man who had done this every morning of his life and intended to go on doing it.
Praying to the very God who had signed his death. Because he did not know. He could not have known. The sin assigned to him was not a sin he had chosen — it was a circumstance, a thing that had happened to him the way weather happened, the way drought happened, indifferent to his character or his goodness or the particular devotion with which he pressed his hands together every morning in a field of winter wheat.
Riki stood at the edge of that field for a long time. The light pressed. It has been decided. Go. He thought about obedience. He thought about the word — the weight of it, the comfort of it, the way it had functioned as a kind of home for as long as he had existed. He thought about the man’s hands. He thought about the word mercy, which he had heard humans use for ten thousand years, which he had categorised and filed and never once applied to himself, because what would it mean for something like him to be merciful? He was an instrument. Instruments did not choose.
He looked at the man in the wheat. He put the judgment down. There was no drama in it. No declaration, no rebellion dressed up in bright colours. He simply — set it aside. The way you set down a tool you have decided, quietly and finally, not to use. And then he stood at the edge of the field with empty hands and waited to learn what that decision cost.
The answer came immediately. The light went out. Not gently. Not the way light fades at the end of a day, slow and amber and resigned. It left him the way a river leaves a riverbed in drought — all at once, and completely, and with a terrible indifference to what it left behind. Everything he had been, the vastness of it, the certainty, the sense of being held by something larger than himself — gone. Between one breath and the next. And then the wings, which went last, which was the worst of it by a measure he had no language for. The tearing began at the joint and finished somewhere interior, somewhere that had no name in any anatomy, somewhere that would ache for the rest of whatever he now was.
He had not known, until he lost them, how entirely he had lived in them. He fell for a long time after that. Or no time at all. He was no longer made of the stuff that could tell the difference.
The desert was red. That was the first coherent thing — the colour of the earth beneath his cheek, a deep arterial red, the kind of red that looked like something had bled into it long ago and the land had simply kept the stain. He lay with his face against it and breathed, which was new, which was strange, which his body insisted upon with a stubbornness that left no room for argument. In and out. In and out. The sun pressed down on the back of his neck like a hand.
His back was agony. The scarring — already scarring, already sealing over in the graceless way of mortal wounds — pulled across his shoulder blades every time his lungs expanded. He lay still and breathed anyway because there was nothing else to do.
He was thirsty. The indignity of it was almost impressive. That this body, this small and breakable and sweat-damp thing he now inhabited, would announce its needs so plainly, so without shame. Water, it said. Water and shade and rest. As though he were a horse. As though he were a field that needed rain.
He got up eventually, because lying in the dirt was not a solution to anything. The land around him was vast and red and smelled of sage and something beneath sage — something mineral, something that had been here before people had names for things and would be here long after. Scrub brush. A sky so blue it looked painted. The silence of a place that had never been required to be quiet for anyone, because no one came here to need quiet. It simply was.
He walked. He had always known where to walk before. The not-knowing was its own particular weight, something he carried in his chest alongside the ache of the absence of wings, and he did not examine it too closely. He simply walked, because the alternative was to stop, and stopping felt like a kind of surrender he was not prepared to make. The trail appeared the way things in deserts appeared — gradually, then all at once. A thin pale line worn into the rock by boots and time and the particular human insistence on going places. It led upward. He followed it because upward was instinct, still, even now, even stripped of everything that had made upward meaningful.
He did not make it far. His legs — unaccustomed, unreliable, apparently bearing some kind of grudge — buckled without much warning. He went down hard on the rock, gravel opening the skin of his palms, his back igniting with fresh complaint. He lay on the trail in the full weight of the afternoon and looked up at the sky and thought, with the detached clarity of something that had recently lost the ability to feel sorry for itself, that this was probably fitting. He closed his eyes.
Boots on rock. Light, practised, the sound of someone who knew every loose stone on this trail by memory. Then shadow — a mercy, small and immediate — falling across him, and the soft sharp sound of breath caught in surprise. He opened his eyes. You stood over him with a canteen in one hand and the particular expression of someone who had gone out expecting solitude and found instead a problem. Wide-eyed. Mouth soft with surprise. Your hair was coming loose from its braid in pieces, strands of it lifting in the dry hot wind, and there was red dust on your cheekbone and a worn canvas pack on your back and your boots were the boots of someone who covered ground in them regularly, scuffed pale at the toe.
You looked at him the way he had looked at the man in the wheat field. With your whole attention. Taking stock. Then something in your face settled — not resolved exactly, but decided — and you crouched down to his level and said, in a voice that was careful and unhurried, the voice of someone who had learned that stillness was its own kind of language: “You’re hurt bad.”
He said, “Yes.” His voice came out strange to his own ears — too much in it, or too little, calibrated for a register this body didn’t quite have the range for. He cleared his throat. Tried again. “I am aware.” Something moved in your expression. Not quite amusement. Something more careful than that. “Can you walk if I help you?”
“I believe so.” “Alright then.” You stood, resettled the pack on your shoulders, and got an arm under his before he had processed that you intended to. The warmth of you was — startling. Simply that. The solid, living warmth of a human body against his side, entirely unguarded, offered without hesitation to a stranger bleeding on a trail. He did not know what to do with it. He filed it somewhere new. Somewhere without a label yet.
“There’s a farm,” you said, already moving, already taking some of his weight with a matter-of-fact ease that suggested this was not the first time you had managed something heavier than you looked like you could. “Not far. My daddy’ll —” A pause, brief, weighted with something he couldn’t yet read. “There’s a farm. We’ll get you seen to.” “That is —” He searched for the right word, unused to needing to search. “That is very kind.”
You made a small sound that wasn’t quite agreement. Looked out at the trail ahead rather than at him. “Don’t go thanking me yet,” you said quietly. “Let’s just get you down first.” The desert stretched below, red and enormous and indifferent, and you walked him out of it as the sun began its long descent, the sky going amber at the edges, your shoulder steady under his arm and your voice low when you spoke — about the footing, about the path, about nearly there now, careful here, there’s a loose bit — talking him down the mountain the way you might talk something wild back from the edge of a very high place.
He let you. It was, he would think later, the first mercy anyone had shown him in longer than he could measure. He did not yet know he was about to walk into a house that needed some of its own.
The farmhouse sat low against the land like it was trying not to be noticed. That was the first thing Riki observed about it — not its size, not its condition, though both were notable, but the particular quality of its relationship to the earth around it. Most structures built by human hands reached, in some small way. Aspired to verticality. This one did not. It hunkered. It pressed itself into the red dirt as though it had learned, over long years, that drawing attention was not in its interest.
The wood of it had gone grey with weather. The porch listed slightly to the left. A barn stood some distance behind the house, in marginally better repair, and a vegetable garden occupied a patch of ground to the east, fenced against rabbits with wire so mended it was more repair than original. Practical. Relentless. The garden of someone who could not afford to let things die.
You had not spoken much on the walk down. Neither had he. The silence between you was not uncomfortable — it had a texture to it, a kind of mutual accommodation, each of you making room for the other’s quiet without requiring explanation. He had noticed that about you already. You did not fill silence for the sake of filling it. “Home,” you said, when the farmhouse came into view. The word came out level. No particular warmth in it, no particular coldness. Just — identification. This is the place. This is what it is. He filed that too.
The sun was low by the time you came down off the trail, the sky doing something extraordinary in shades of copper and rose that he observed with the distant part of himself that still catalogued beauty out of long habit, even now, even diminished. Your shadow stretched long ahead of you across the dust. His own shadow, beside it, was a strange thing to look at. He had not had a shadow before. You brought him to the porch and settled him against the railing with a care that was businesslike rather than tender — efficient, practised, the movements of someone accustomed to managing things on their own. Sit here. Don’t move. I’ll get water. You went inside without waiting for his acknowledgment, the screen door swinging shut behind you with a sound like a small argument.
He sat. He breathed. He looked at the land. Nevada in the last light of day was a different thing entirely from Nevada at noon. The harshness of it softened without becoming gentle — it was still vast, still indifferent, still the kind of landscape that would kill you without malice if you made the wrong decision. But the light turned it amber, turned the red rock gold, turned the scrub brush into something that almost glittered. It was beautiful the way difficult things were beautiful. Uncompromisingly. Without apology. He was looking at it when the door opened.
Not you. He knew that before he turned — the weight of the footfall was different, heavier, the particular tread of a man who had decided long ago that the ground owed him something. The man who came through the door was tall, broad through the shoulders, with the weathered look of someone the sun had worked on for decades and the eyes of someone who had decided, also long ago, what things were and saw no reason to revise his conclusions. He looked at Riki. Riki looked back.
The man’s gaze moved over him the way a hand moves over a fence line — checking for weakness, for threat, cataloguing. Then it moved to the blood dried rust-brown on Riki’s shirt, the state of his hands, the particular stillness of him, and whatever calculation was happening behind those eyes resolved into something that was not welcome but was not yet refusal. “Found him on the Hartley trail,” you said, appearing in the doorway behind your father with a tin cup of water and a cloth that had seen better decades. “He was down. Couldn’t leave him.”
Your father said nothing for a moment. Let the silence do something with its weight. “Couldn’t leave him,” he repeated, finally. His voice was the voice of a man who had learned that repetition was a kind of pressure. Low. Even. The tone of someone who had never needed to raise his voice because other methods worked just as well. “No sir,” you said. Your own voice had changed. Not much — you were careful, clearly practised at careful — but enough. A fraction quieter. A fraction smaller. The way a candle dims in a room where the window has been opened.
He noticed. He noticed the way you held the cup and the cloth with both hands, occupying your hands. He noticed the precise distance you maintained from your father in the doorway — not touching, never quite touching. He noticed the way your eyes moved to Riki briefly, checking, and then back to your father, and the particular quality of that check — not seeking reassurance, not quite. Something more complex. Something he did not yet have enough information to name. “He’ll need somewhere to sleep,” you said. “Just until he’s fit to travel. The barn —”
“I know where he’ll sleep,” your father said. Still that same measured quiet. “I make the decisions about this house.” “Yes sir.” A pause in which several things that were not words were exchanged. Then your father looked at Riki again, and something shifted in the assessment — still wary, but recalculating. “You well enough to work?” he asked.
Riki considered the question honestly. His back was a sustained misery. His hands were lacerated. He was thirsty in a way the cup of water you were holding was not going to resolve. He was also, he was discovering, possessed of a stubbornness that had apparently survived the fall intact, because the answer that came out of him was: “I am.”
Your father made a sound that was not quite satisfied and not quite dismissive. Somewhere in between. A sound that reserved judgment while implying judgment had already been made. “Barn,” he said. “You sleep in the barn. You earn your keep or you move on.” “That is agreeable,” Riki said.
Your father looked at him for one moment longer — something faintly unsettled in it, the look of a man who has heard a perfectly ordinary sentence and cannot explain why it struck him as odd — and then he went back inside. The door did not slam. That was almost worse, somehow. The deliberate quiet of it.
You let out a breath so small it was barely a breath at all. Then you crossed to the railing and crouched in front of him and held out the cup. “Drink,” you said. Back to that other voice now — the trail voice, the one that was unhurried and direct and entirely your own. As though the version of you that existed in the doorway with your father was a coat you put on and took off. He drank. The water was warm and tasted of the tin and was the best thing he had consumed in — he did not know how long. He drained the cup.
Something moved in your expression. Almost a smile. Not quite. “I’m going to look at your back,” you said. “There’s something wrong with it. I could feel it when we were walking.” He went still. “You don’t have to tell me how,” you said, already matter-of-fact, already reaching for the hem of his shirt with a clinical efficiency that suggested you were not going to make this strange if he didn’t. “I’m not asking. I just need to see what I’m working with.”
He thought about the scars. The twin masses of them, the raised and ruined topography of what had been taken. He thought about what they looked like to human eyes — whether they would frighten you, whether they would make you ask questions he could not answer truthfully without revealing things he was not certain you should know. He looked at your face. Your expression was open and patient and entirely without agenda, the face of someone who had asked a practical question and was waiting for a practical answer, the face of someone who was very good at waiting.
“Very well,” he said. You were quiet for a long moment when you saw them. He did not look at your face. He looked at the last of the light on the Nevada flats and felt the careful, impersonal touch of your hands at the edges of the scarring — not recoiling, not pressing, simply — present. “Does it pain you?” you asked. Quiet. “Yes,” he said. “Though less than it did.”
“Alright.” You exhaled slowly through your nose. Something in it that was not pity — something more careful than pity, something that took the fact of his pain and simply acknowledged it, made room for it, did not try to fix it into something more manageable. “I’ll bring salve. And something to eat, when he’s —” A beat. “When supper’s done.” When he’s settled, you had been going to say. When he can’t see.
He did not say that he had understood. He simply nodded. You stood, collecting your cloth and your empty cup, and you looked at him once more with that level, considering gaze — taking stock the way you had on the trail, the way that felt less like scrutiny than like a kind of serious attention, the kind usually reserved for things that mattered. “What do I call you?” you asked.
He thought about his true name. The sound of it, the weight of it, a thing made of frequencies this body’s throat could not reproduce and this body’s ears could not properly hear. A name that belonged to something he was no longer. “Riki,” he said. It was not his name. It was the closest this mouth could come to something that had once been his, worn down to something human-sized, something that fit.
You nodded like that was sufficient, like names were practical things and you had been given enough of one to work with. “I’ll be back directly,” you said. You went inside. The screen door said its small argumentative piece behind you. The Nevada dark was coming in from the east, slow and purple and enormous, swallowing the last of the copper sky, and Riki sat on the listing porch of a grey-weathered house and listened to the silence of a place that had learned to be very quiet, and understood, with a clarity that had nothing to do with any power he had lost, that he had not walked into a house.
He had walked into a situation. And for the first time since the field of winter wheat, he felt something that was not grief and not confusion but something altogether more purposeful settle into the empty place where his wings had been. He was not certain yet what to call it. He suspected it was anger.
—
He did not sleep. This was not, he was discovering, unusual for him. Sleep was a thing this body was capable of in theory — he had felt the edges of it, that soft dissolution, the way consciousness went loose and unheld at the end of the previous night — but had not yet managed to fall fully into. He lay in the barn on a bedroll you had brought out without being asked, a folded quilt on top of it that smelled of cedar and something floral and faintly of you, and he looked up at the rafters and listened to the dark.
The horses knew he was there. They had known from the moment he crossed the threshold, both of them moving to the far end of their stalls with that particular animal precision that had nothing to do with thought and everything to do with the part of a creature that existed below thought. They were not panicking. They had made their assessment — strange, strange, not right — and had simply relocated themselves as far from him as the barn permitted and were pretending, with great determination, that he did not exist. He found this quietly respectful. He did the same for them.
The barn settled around him as the night went on, its old wood contracting in the cool, making small sounds of adjustment. An owl worked somewhere outside. The wind came off the flats and pushed at the walls and moved on, indifferent, the way wind in Nevada moved — not around things but through them, or past them, without acknowledgment. He thought about the way your voice changed in doorways. He was still thinking about it when the sky began to go pale at the edges.
You were already up when he came out. The surprise was his own — he had assumed, given the hour, that the farmhouse would still be dark and closed, and had half-formed a plan to be useful in some visible, unobtrusive way before anyone emerged to direct him. Instead he found you at the pump beside the house in the grey pre-dawn, working the handle with the mechanical patience of someone who had done this ten thousand mornings and would do it ten thousand more, filling a bucket without ceremony or complaint, your hair still in its night braid, your feet in unlaced boots. You looked up when you heard him. “You’re up early,” you said. Not accusatory. Just noting.
“I did not sleep particularly well,” he said, which was true enough. You looked at him for a moment with that level morning gaze — assessing, the way you seemed to assess most things, with a seriousness that was not unfriendly but did not soften the looking. Then you held out the bucket. “Chickens first,” you said. “Then I’ll show you the rest.” He took the bucket.
The chickens were housed in a low wire run behind the barn, twelve of them, with the collective opinion of Riki that the horses had expressed but considerably less restraint about voicing it. They scattered when he approached, a brief furious explosion of feathers and complaint, and then regrouped at the far end of the run and regarded him with the specific hostility of creatures that had decided something was wrong without being able to articulate what. He crouched and waited. After a moment, one hen — bolder than the others, or perhaps simply more curious — picked her way back toward him with the exaggerated caution of someone pretending they are not doing what they are doing. She got within a foot of him and stopped.
He held very still. She pecked at the ground near his boot. Then at his boot. Then she looked up at him with one orange eye and made a sound of uncertain conclusion and walked away. “Huh,” you said, from behind him. He stood and found you leaning against the fence post with the empty bucket in your hand and an expression he had not seen on you yet — something lighter than your usual register, surprised out of you, unguarded in a way that lasted only a moment before you collected it back. “They don’t like strangers,” you said.
“I gathered.” “They don’t much like anybody,” you amended. “But they especially don’t like strangers.” “I have been informed,” he said, “that I am unusual.”
The corner of your mouth moved. Almost. You turned away before it could become something more, and he watched you go and filed the almost-smile in the same place as the canteen warmth and the cedar quilt and the version of your voice that was entirely your own.
The day’s work was plain and it was relentless. He understood, by midmorning, the particular arithmetic of this farm — the way every task connected to every other task, the way the whole enterprise was held together less by prosperity than by the sheer refusal to let anything fail. The fence line needed mending in three places. The roof of the barn had a compromise along the eastern edge that wanted attention before the weather turned. The well mechanism was original and complained loudly about it. These were not the problems of a farm that was thriving. These were the problems of a farm that was enduring.
He worked. His back made its protests known and he ignored them with the same focused attention he had once applied to the light. The physical labour was strange — the way his muscles heated and tired, the way sweat gathered at his collar, the way thirst came back reliably every hour with the persistence of a creditor — but not unmanageable. There was something in it, even. Something in the simple physics of a fence post driven into red dirt, the satisfying solidity of a thing made more sound than it had been.
Your father watched him from a distance for most of the morning. Riki was aware of this the way he was aware of weather — peripherally, constantly, without looking directly at it. The man had a way of occupying space that was its own kind of statement. He stood at the edge of things. He observed. He did not offer assistance or instruction, which told Riki that the watching was not supervisory. It was something else. Assessment, perhaps. Or the particular vigilance of a man deciding whether a new variable in his environment was a threat or a resource. He had not yet decided, Riki thought, which was more useful to be.
You moved through your own work with an efficiency that was almost architectural — each task slotted precisely into the available time, no motion wasted, no pause taken that wasn’t functional. You cooked and you mended and you hauled water and you did it all with the same quiet matter-of-factness you had applied to hauling him off a trail, and at no point did you look like you expected acknowledgment for any of it. At noon you brought him water without being asked.
He was at the fence line, his shirt damp through, the Nevada sun doing its particular best overhead. You came across the flat ground with two cups and handed him one and stood beside him and drank yours and looked out at the middle distance and said nothing. He drank. “How’s your back?” you asked, eventually. “Improved,” he said. “The salve was effective.”
You nodded. Kept looking at the distance. “You don’t have to tell me where you came from,” you said. Quiet, and even, and with the care of someone constructing a sentence they have thought about before saying. “Or what happened to you. That’s your own business.” He looked at the side of your face. The dust on your cheekbone again — different dust today, paler, from the flour you had been working with this morning. The loose strand of hair at your temple moving in the slight noon breeze. “That is generous,” he said.
“It’s practical,” you said, with a slight correction in your tone that was not unkind. “People don’t tell you things when you push. They tell you things when they’re ready.” He considered this. “You speak as though from experience.” A pause. Brief, but present. “I speak as someone who lives here,” you said, and left it at that.
He did not push. He understood, now, the patience of that sentence — the way it answered him and closed the door at the same time with such practised ease that the closing of the door was almost invisible. You had been doing that for a long time. Opening just enough. No further. He handed you the empty cup and turned back to the fence. “Thank you,” he said. “For the water. And for — “ He paused, searching, unused still to the narrowness of this language, the way it made him reach for things and come up short. “For the previous evening. You were not required to do any of it.” You were quiet for a moment. “No,” you agreed. “I wasn’t.”
And then you walked back across the flat ground toward the house, and he watched you go, and the sun was enormous overhead and the land was red in every direction and somewhere behind him your father was still watching from the edge of things, and Riki drove another post into the Nevada dirt and felt that purposeful thing in his chest settle deeper. Not anger, he revised. Not exactly.
Something older than anger. Something that had been in him even before the fall — that quality that had made him stop at the edge of a field of winter wheat and put down what he had been sent to carry. The inability, when it came to it, to walk away from something that was not right. He picked up the hammer. He kept working.
It was late afternoon, the heat finally relenting by degrees, when he heard it. He was at the barn, seeing to a loose board on the eastern wall, when the sound came from inside the house — low, and brief, and with a quality to it he identified immediately and completely, because he had catalogued it ten thousand years of watching human lives and he knew exactly what it was.
The sound a person made when something hurt them and they had learned not to make noise about it. He went very still. The air around him changed. He felt it before he registered it consciously — that familiar internal shift, the power in him waking from its uneasy dormancy, the pressure dropping around him in a radius that made the horses shift in their stalls and the chickens go abruptly, completely silent.
He stood with the hammer in his hand and the board half-fixed and every part of him oriented toward the house. A long moment passed. Then the back door opened and you came out with a basket of washing and went to the line without looking at him and began to hang it with the same flat efficiency you applied to everything, and your movements were fine — deliberate, controlled — and you did not look at him.
He looked at you. At the way you held your left arm slightly differently than your right. He set the hammer down on the top of the fence rail. Carefully. Quietly. He breathed in through his nose and out through his mouth and he looked at the chickens, who had gone back to their pecking, and he looked at the sky, which was going that extraordinary copper again, and he did not go to the house, because he did not yet know enough, and acting without knowing enough was how things got worse rather than better.
But he picked the hammer back up and he held it, and he did not put it down again until supper was called.
The barn was dark by the time you came. He heard you before he saw you — the soft unlatch of the door, the particular hesitation of someone who has decided to do something and is still deciding, right up until the moment they do it. A sliver of lamplight preceded you, warm and unsteady, and then you came through the door with the lamp in one hand and a plate in the other and you looked at him sitting up in the bedroll and you said, by way of explanation: “I saved you supper.”
He had not been given supper. He had noted this without comment, the way he noted most things about this house — quietly, and completely, and without letting the noting show on his face. “That was not necessary,” he said. “I know,” you said, which seemed to be your answer to most things that were offered in the register of obligation. You crossed the barn and set the plate down on the top of the nearest stall rail and then you looked around, briefly, for somewhere to be, and settled on a upturned crate a few feet from his bedroll and sat on it and set the lamp on the ground between you.
The horses regarded you with considerably more charity than they had managed for Riki. The bolder one — a bay mare with an opinion about most things — stretched her nose over the stall door in your direction and you reached up without looking and scratched between her eyes with the automatic ease of long habit. “That’s Clementine,” you said. “The other one’s Job.” “Job,” he repeated. “Daddy named him.” A pause that had a particular texture to it. “He has a sense of humour about suffering.”
Riki looked at you. You were looking at the lamp. Your left arm, he noted, was resting in your lap rather than propped at the elbow the way your right was. Protecting it without meaning to, or meaning to so consistently it had stopped being a decision. “Eat,” you said, without looking up. “Before it goes cold.”
He reached for the plate. Beans and cornbread, simple and adequate, and he ate it the way he was learning to eat — with the genuine animal attention of a body that had requirements and was no longer above having them. You watched the lamp and scratched Clementine’s nose and said nothing for a while, which was its own kind of conversation. “How long have you been here?” he asked, eventually. “On this land.” “Always,” you said. “Born here. Mama too, until she wasn’t.” You said it plainly, the way you said most things — not inviting sympathy, not deflecting it, simply stating the fact as a fact. “Just us since I was nine.”
“I am sorry,” he said. You looked at him then. Briefly, assessing, as though checking whether he meant it. Whatever you found seemed to satisfy you. You looked back at the lamp. “It was a long time ago,” you said. “That does not always make a thing smaller.”
A beat of quiet. Clementine withdrew her nose and lost interest and went back to her hay. Outside the barn the Nevada night was doing what Nevada nights did — going enormous and cold and very clear, the stars coming out in their thousands, indifferent and magnificent. “No,” you agreed, softly. “It doesn’t.”
He set the empty plate on the ground and looked at his own hands — the cuts from the trail already healed more than they should have been, another thing to be careful about, another thing to manage. He laced his fingers together and considered the lamp between you and thought about ten thousand years of watching people talk to each other, all those conversations he had catalogued from a very great height, and how entirely different it was to be in one.
“Your arm,” he said. Quiet, and even, leaving space around the words. You went still. Not a flinch — you were too controlled for flinching, he was learning — but a stillness that had a quality of decision in it. Whether to acknowledge or to redirect. You looked at him. “I walked into the door of the pantry,” you said. Steady. Practised.
He held your gaze and said nothing. The silence did what silences sometimes did, in his experience — it made room for something that wouldn’t fit through a smaller opening. Your jaw shifted. Something moved behind your eyes, some internal negotiation he was not privy to, and then you looked down at your left arm in your lap and back up at him and you said, very quietly: “He has a temper.”
Four words. Flat, and sparse, and carrying the weight of nine years of just us. “Yes,” Riki said. “I am aware.” Something in your face changed at that — at the acknowledgment, perhaps, or at the lack of surprise in it, the lack of the particular uncomfortable scrambling that people sometimes did when a thing they had said quietly turned out to have been heard. He did not scramble. He simply — received it. Made room for it. The way you made room for silences.
You looked at him for a long moment. “You noticed,” you said. Not quite a question. “I notice most things,” he said. “Most people don’t.” You said it without bitterness, which was almost worse than if you had said it with bitterness. Simply an observation. A thing that was true and had been true for long enough that you had stopped expecting otherwise. “I am not,” he said, carefully, “most people.”
Your mouth did the thing again — that movement at the corner, the almost-smile, the one that lasted only a moment before you thought better of it. But this time you did not look away. You let him see it, brief as it was, and something about that felt like a different kind of door opening. Smaller than the other one. More deliberate. “No,” you said. “I don’t suppose you are.”
The lamp guttered slightly in a draft from the barn wall and you both looked at it and it steadied and you looked back at each other and the moment resettled itself into something quieter. “Ki,” you said, and then stopped. He waited.
Your brow pulled together faintly, that look of someone who has said something before they have decided to say it. “Sorry. I don’t know where that came from. Riki’s —” You shook your head slightly. “It’s fine. Never mind.” “Ki,” he said. You looked at him. “You may call me that,” he said. “If it suits you.”
The something behind your eyes again — that careful interior movement, weighing. Then, so quietly he might have missed it if he were less than he was: “It suits me.”
Clementine made a noise of vague equine commentary from her stall. Job ignored everything, as was apparently his nature. The lamp sat between you on the dirt floor of the barn and the night pressed at the walls and you sat on your upturned crate with your left arm in your lap and looked at him with those eyes that catalogued things, and he looked back at you, and the silence this time was not the silence of two people who had run out of things to say. It was the silence of two people who had said enough for now.
“I should go back in,” you said, eventually. You stood, collecting the lamp, and reached down for the plate. “Leave it,” he said. “I will return it in the morning.” You straightened. Looked at him once more in the lamplight, that level considering look, and he looked back at you and did not look away, and whatever was being communicated in that exchange was not a thing that needed words and both of you seemed to understand that. “Goodnight, Ki,” you said.
Something in him — something that had been falling, or wandering, or simply enduring the very long process of learning what it was to be this diminished and groundless thing — settled, incrementally, at the sound of it. “Goodnight, sweetheart,” he said. The word came out without deliberation. Natural, and certain, the way things were certain when they were simply true. He watched you absorb it — the slight pause before the door, the almost imperceptible shift in your shoulders — and then you went out and the lamplight went with you and the barn was dark again.
He lay back on the bedroll. He looked at the rafters. He thought about the sound your voice made when it was only yours — unhurried and direct and entirely unguarded — and he thought about a left arm held carefully in a lap, and he thought about nine years of just us in a house that had learned to be quiet, and he thought about a field of winter wheat and the thing that had lived in him then, the thing he had not had a name for until he was standing empty-handed in the aftermath of it. He had a name for it now. He had always been capable of mercy. He was discovering he was also capable of something considerably less patient.
—
Three days passed. Then four. Then five. The farm absorbed him the way dry ground absorbed rain — completely, and without ceremony, closing over the fact of him as though he had always been there. He learned the fence line and the well mechanism and the particular temperament of each of the twelve hens. He learned that Job, despite his name, was not actually long-suffering — he was simply quiet about his grievances until he wasn’t, at which point he expressed them comprehensively. He learned that Clementine would work beautifully for anyone who asked her nicely and would make their life very difficult if they didn’t, which he respected.
He learned the shape of your days. The pre-dawn pump. The chickens. The kitchen, then the garden, then whatever the farm required, then the kitchen again. The way you moved through all of it with that relentless quiet competence, never hurrying, never stopping, the whole of it held together by the sheer consistency of your attention. He learned that you hummed sometimes, when you thought no one could hear. Low and tuneless and entirely unconscious, the sound of someone whose mind had gone somewhere else while their hands stayed busy. He never said anything about it. He simply noted it, and filed it, and found that he listened for it.
Your father watched. Your father always watched. But the watching had shifted slightly in character — less assessment now, more the surveillance of a man who has made his calculation and is waiting to see if the numbers hold. Riki was useful. Riki worked. Riki did not ask questions or make demands or give your father any obvious reason for the unease that lived, apparently permanently, behind his eyes whenever he looked at him. Riki was also, he was increasingly certain, the only reason your father had not escalated in five days. He did not examine this too closely. He simply noted it, the way he noted everything, and kept working, and waited.
On the sixth morning you appeared at the barn door while he was seeing to Job’s hooves with a bridle in your hand and an expression that was as close to tentative as he had seen on you. “Daddy’s gone to town,” you said. “He won’t be back until evening.” He straightened. “I thought —” You looked at the bridle. Back at him. “I could show you some of the land. If you wanted. There’s more to it than what you’ve seen. The orchard especially.” Something in your voice was carefully casual in a way that meant it wasn’t casual at all. “You don’t have to.”
“I would like that very much,” he said. The almost-smile. Present and then collected, but he was getting faster at catching it. You rode Clementine. This seemed correct, somehow — you and the bay mare had the relationship of two creatures who had come to a long and mutual understanding, and Clementine moved under you with none of the difficulty she occasionally manufactured for other people, her ears forward, her stride easy. You sat a horse the way you did most things: without fuss, without performance, simply and completely.
He walked beside you. You had offered him Job, with the diplomatic neutrality of someone who was not certain how the offer would land, and he had declined with equal diplomacy. Job had expressed his relief by looking in another direction. They had reached an understanding. The land opened up beyond the farmstead in a way that the farmstead itself obscured — flatter than the trail, wider, the red earth giving way in places to pale grass and the occasional determined tree. The sky was enormous overhead, the particular blue of a Nevada morning before the heat had fully committed, and the air smelled of sage and something floral he couldn’t immediately identify.
“The orchard’s my favourite part,” you said, after a while. “Mama planted it. Apple trees mostly, one pear that never does much of anything.” You paused. “She said if you were going to be somewhere a long time you ought to plant something that would outlast you.” He looked up at you on the horse. The morning light was doing something specific to your face — catching the line of your cheekbone, the loose strand of hair at your temple. “She sounds like she was wise,” he said.
“She was practical,” you said. “I think sometimes they’re the same thing.” He considered this. “I think sometimes they are.” Clementine picked her way along the track and he walked beside her left shoulder and the distance between his height and yours on horseback put you almost at eye level with each other, which he found he appreciated — not having to calibrate the angle of conversation, not having to adjust. Simply side by side, the way the trail had made you, the first time.
“Ki,” you said. “Mm.” “How long are you going to stay?” He was quiet for a moment. The question was plain and it deserved a plain answer, and he had been turning the plain answer over for several days without finding a way to make it smaller. “Not long,” he said. “I do not — belong to any one place. I am not certain I ever will again.” He paused. “I am sorry. I recognise that is not a satisfying answer.” You looked at the track ahead. “No,” you said. “But it’s an honest one.” A beat. “I understand it, I think. Some people aren’t built for staying.”
“It is not a preference,” he said. “It is a — circumstance. There are things I have lost that made staying possible.” He glanced up at you. “I do not say this to be sorrowful. Only to be truthful with you.” You absorbed this with the particular quiet of someone who is listening completely. “I understand,” you said. And then, softer: “I’m glad you’re here now.” He looked at the track. “As am I,” he said. “Sweetheart.”
The orchard was a green and improbable thing in the middle of all that red. Eight apple trees in two rows, old enough that the bark had gone deeply furrowed, their branches spreading wide and low and laden with fruit not quite ripe — another few weeks yet, you said, but close. The pear tree stood at the end of the row in the slightly martyred way of a tree that had been asked to produce in difficult conditions and was doing its dignified best. You slid down from Clementine and looped her reins over a low branch and she began to investigate the grass with the focused enthusiasm of an animal who had been waiting for exactly this opportunity.
“Here,” you said, reaching up into the nearest tree and working an apple free from the branch — smaller than it would be at peak, still a deep green at the stem. You tossed it to him. He caught it. “Not quite ready,” you said, pulling one for yourself, “but they’re good now. Tart.”
He bit into it. It was tart — sharp and clean and cold in a way that surprised him, given the heat. He ate it and watched you do the same, standing in the narrow shade of the apple tree with the Nevada morning around you and Clementine moving through the grass and the pear tree presiding over everything with quiet dignity.
“Did she bring these trees here?” he asked. “Your mother.” “Carried the saplings from her own mother’s farm when she married.” You turned the apple in your hand. “Three days in a wagon. She wrapped the roots in wet cloth and checked on them every hour.” You smiled — not the almost-smile, a real one, brief and unguarded, aimed at the middle distance. “Daddy thought she was ridiculous. She told him some things were worth being ridiculous about.” He looked at your profile. The smile fading back into its usual careful lines. “She was right,” he said.
You looked at him. He was not certain, afterward, what made him do it — whether it was the smile or the apple trees or the particular quality of the light in this green and improbable place, or whether it was simply that it was the most natural thing, in that moment, in the way that true things sometimes arrived without announcement. He stepped close and pressed his mouth to your cheek. Not long. Not complicated. Simply — there, and warm, and certain.
He stepped back. You stood very still. Your hand with the apple in it had stopped moving. Your eyes, when you turned to look at him, were wide and very clear, and there was colour in your face, high on the cheekbones, that had nothing to do with the sun. He looked back at you with the particular steadiness of someone who is not going to apologise for a thing they meant. “Ki,” you said. Very quietly. “Yes,” he said.
A long moment in which several things were considered and none of them were said, and both of you seemed to understand that this too was sufficient. Then Clementine, with the timing of an animal entirely without sentiment, lifted her head from the grass and blew a long breath through her nose and looked at both of you with profound disinterest.
You laughed. He had not heard you laugh before. It was brief and soft and entirely real, surprised out of you by the horse, and it was the best sound he had catalogued in ten thousand years or however long it had been, and he thought he would remember it past the point where he could remember anything else.
That night you came to the barn again. No plate this time. No pretence of a reason. You simply came, and sat on your upturned crate, and he sat up in his bedroll, and the lamp went between you on the dirt floor, and you talked. About the farm. About the town half a day’s ride away, its general store and its church and its doctor who was also the barber, who you had not seen in two years because your father saw no reason for it. About your mother’s apple trees and your mother’s hands, which had been like yours, practical and capable, and the particular grief of inheriting someone’s hands without being able to tell them you had. He listened. He asked questions when questions were useful and was quiet when quiet was useful and when you paused he did not rush to fill it.
You asked him, at some point, where he had come from. He said: very far away. You asked if there was anyone there who missed him. He considered the true answer to this, which was complex, and gave you the simple one. “No,” he said. “Not anymore.” You looked at him. “I’m sorry,” you said. “Do not be,” he said. “I made a choice. I would make it again.” “What choice?”
He looked at the lamp. At the way the flame moved in the draft, small and persistent, unwilling to go out. “To refuse to do something that was wrong,” he said. “Even when I had been asked to do it by someone I had always obeyed.” A long quiet. “That took courage,” you said. “It took —” He paused. “I am not certain it was courage. I am not certain I calculated the cost before I paid it. I simply — could not. Some things, when you are standing in front of them, admit no other response.”
You were looking at him with that full attention, that serious and complete regard, and he looked back at you, and the lamp burned between you, and outside the Nevada night was enormous and cold and blazing with stars. “I understand that,” you said, quietly. “I think I do.” He thought about a left arm held in a lap. About a voice that changed in doorways. About nine years of just us and what that cost, paid daily, without complaint, without anyone to acknowledge the paying. “I know,” he said.
You stayed another hour. Maybe two. Time had not fully resolved itself for him yet — it still moved strangely, catching and pooling, running thin in places. But whatever measure it was, it was not enough, and when you finally stood and took the lamp and said goodnight he watched the light go with the particular feeling of someone watching something good move away from them and knowing, with a clarity that had nothing comfortable in it, that they cannot keep it. “Goodnight, sweetheart,” he said. “Goodnight, Ki,” you said. And then the dark, and the rafters, and the sound of his own breathing, which was still new enough to notice.
He lay in the cedar-smelling dark and looked at nothing and thought about apple trees planted by women who understood that some things were worth being ridiculous about. He thought he was beginning to understand that too.
—
It happened on a Tuesday. He knew this because you had told him, some nights ago in the barn, that Tuesdays were the worst — that your father came back from town on Tuesdays with the particular mood that town produced in him, something compounded of other men’s opinions and the price of things and whatever he had found at the bottom of whatever he had been drinking. You had said it matter-of-factly, the way you said most things, and he had filed it and said nothing and had been watching Tuesdays since.
This Tuesday your father came back two hours earlier than usual. Riki was at the well when he heard the horse. He straightened and watched your father come up the track with the specific quality of stillness that preceded bad weather — not loud, not yet, but carrying it, the way the air carried rain before rain arrived. Your father dismounted without looking at him. Took the horse to the barn without speaking. The set of his shoulders said everything his mouth was not yet saying. Riki set down the bucket.
He did not go inside. He had no cause to go inside. He stood at the well and he waited and he listened to the land, which had gone very quiet in the particular way it went quiet sometimes — the chickens off their scratching, Clementine still in her stall, even the wind seeming to hold itself. The sound, when it came, was brief.
A voice raised — your father’s, low and controlled, which was worse than shouting, he had learned, because controlled meant deliberate — and then something that was not a voice, something that had no register in language, that lived below language, and he was already moving before he had decided to move. The kitchen door. He did not burst through it. He opened it the way you opened things in this house — without drama, without announcement — and he stood in the doorway and he looked.
Your father stood at the far end of the kitchen. You stood nearer to the window, one hand braced on the table, your head down, your hair loose from its braid and falling forward. The posture of someone absorbing something. Waiting for it to be over.
Your father looked at Riki. Riki looked at your father. And the air in the kitchen changed. He felt it leave him before he could stop it — that interior shift, the power waking from its dormancy with the sudden and total alertness of something that had been waiting for a reason. The pressure dropped. The lamp on the table guttered. The window glass made a sound like it was being pressed from the outside. The temperature fell by degrees that had nothing to do with the weather. He had not moved. He was standing in the doorway with his hands at his sides and his face entirely still and he had not moved, but the kitchen felt like the moment before lightning, and every animal on the property knew it, and your father knew it, and from the way your head had come up slowly, carefully, you knew it too.
Your father’s face went through several things in quick succession. Then it went to something Riki recognised, because he had catalogued it ten thousand times in ten thousand human faces. Fear.
Not the performed kind. The real kind. The kind that lived in the body before the mind had caught up, that moved in the hands and the jaw and the particular way a man’s weight shifted backward without him meaning it to. Your father said nothing. Riki said nothing. The lamp steadied. The pressure did not lift entirely — he could feel it still, that live and uncontrolled thing in him, wanting — but he held it. Barely. The way you held a door shut in a high wind. With everything available to him.
“I believe,” he said, very quietly, very evenly, “that supper needs seeing to.” It was not what he meant. It was not close to what he meant. But it was the sentence that fit inside the doorway without breaking anything irreparable, and he said it the way he had once delivered divine directives — with a certainty so complete it did not require volume. Your father picked up his hat from the table. He walked past Riki through the door without looking at him. His footsteps crossed the porch. The barn door opened and shut.
The kitchen was very quiet. You had not moved from the table. Your hand was still braced on it, your head no longer down but not quite up either, your hair in your face. He could hear you breathing — measured, controlled, the breathing of someone who has learned to regulate themselves through force of will alone. He came into the kitchen.
He did not go to you immediately. He went to the lamp and turned it up and then he stood a few feet from you and waited, the way you waited for things — with patience, and without agenda. After a moment you straightened. Pushed the hair from your face. And you looked at him, and he looked at you, and whatever had just happened was present in the space between you in its full dimensions, undiminished. “Ki,” you said. Very quiet. “Yes,” he said.
“What was that.” Not quite a question. The tone of someone who had seen something they did not have a category for. “I would prefer,” he said carefully, “to discuss it later. Are you hurt?” Something moved in your face at the directness of it. At being asked plainly. “I’m alright,” you said. He looked at you. At the specific way you were holding yourself. “I would like to believe that,” he said. “I am finding it somewhat difficult.”
Your jaw shifted. You looked at the table. Then, quietly, with the care of someone setting something fragile down: “My arm again.” He exhaled slowly through his nose. “Come to the barn later,” he said. “When he’s settled.”
You looked up at him. “Ki —” “Please,” he said. The word came out with more in it than he intended — not a request, exactly, or not only that. Something more unguarded. Something that had been accumulating across five days of watching you move through this house and compress yourself smaller and absorb things that should not have to be absorbed. You held his gaze for a long moment. Then you nodded.
He was sitting in the barn doorway when you came. Late — later than usual, the farm long dark, the stars doing their extravagant Nevada best overhead. You came across the flat ground with the lamp low and your coat pulled around you and you looked tired in a way that was not only the tiredness of a long day. The tiredness of a long time. He moved to let you through.
You sat on the crate and he sat across from you on an upturned bucket and you were quiet for a while, which he allowed. Clementine observed you from her stall. Job was asleep, or pretending to be. “Show me,” he said, finally. Gentle. You pushed your sleeve back. He looked at your arm. He had seen worse — had catalogued far worse, from a very great height, across a very long time — but the knowledge of that did nothing useful here, in a barn in Nevada, looking at evidence of something done deliberately to you by someone who had decided they had the right. He looked at it and felt that thing in him again, that live and uncontrolled thing, and breathed through it, and held it.
He reached out and took your arm very carefully in both hands. You went still. Watching his face. He was not thinking about what he was doing — not precisely. He was operating on something below thought, something that had survived the fall intact the way instinct survives most things. He felt the warmth move through his palms, slow and unsteady, the power in him fraying at the edges as it always did — but present. Still present. He held it as long as he could, which was not long enough, and then he released your arm and sat back and felt the effort of it in the spaces between his ribs.
You looked at your arm. Then you looked at him. “Ki,” you said. Barely a sound. “Do not,” he said, quietly, “ask me to explain that. Not tonight.” A long silence in which you visibly decided not to push. That practised restraint of yours, that ability to make room. He was grateful for it. He was not certain he had the words tonight, and what words he did have were not adequate to the thing. “Does it still hurt?” he asked.
You looked at your arm. Flexed your fingers slowly. “No,” you said, with a wondering quality that he did not examine. “No, it doesn’t.” He nodded. You looked at him with those eyes — that full and serious attention — and he looked back at you and did not look away and the lamp burned between you and outside the Nevada night was all stars and cold and the enormous indifferent dark. “Ki,” you said again. Softer.
“Yes, sweetheart.” “What are you?” He looked at you. You held his gaze with a steadiness that told him you had been building to this question for some time — not impulsively, not from fear. From the same seriousness with which you approached everything. You wanted to know. You were asking because you trusted him enough to ask. He thought about his true name. About the field of winter wheat. About the gold leaving him all at once, and the wings going last, and the long unmeasured fall into red Nevada dirt. “Something that was cast out,” he said. “For refusing to do what was wrong.”
You were quiet. “Are you dangerous?” you asked. He considered the truth of that. The full complicated truth of it — the unstable power, the thing in him that had made the kitchen glass flex in its frame, the fact of what he was capable of when he felt something strongly enough. “Not to you,” he said. It was the most honest answer he had.
You looked at him for a long time. Then you leaned forward from your crate, closing the distance between you, and you took his face in both your hands — your capable, practical hands, your mother’s hands — and you held it the way you held things that mattered, carefully and without apology, and you looked at him from very close and said:
“I trust you.” He closed his eyes. The barn was warm and smelled of cedar and horse and the faint sweetness of apple from the orchard, and your hands were on his face, and he was something cast out and diminished and still fundamentally unresolved, and none of that mattered, in this moment, at all. He turned his head.
His mouth found the corner of yours. Not quite — not yet, careful, giving you the space to decide — the barest brush, a question rather than an answer. He felt your breath change against his cheek.
“Ki,” you whispered. “Tell me to stop,” he said, very quietly. “And I will stop.” You didn’t. His mouth found yours.
It was — not like anything he had catalogued. Not like anything in ten thousand years of watching humans love each other from a very great height. It was immediate and warm and entirely real, and you kissed him back with the same directness you brought to everything, your hands still on his face, his own hands coming up to find your waist, and the lamp burned and the horses slept and outside the Nevada stars did their ancient indifferent work. He pulled back eventually. Not far. Your foreheads together, both of you breathing, the space between you warm. “I have to tell you something,” he said. “Tomorrow,” you said. Firm and quiet and entirely certain. “Tell me tomorrow.”
He looked at you. You looked back at him, close enough that he could see the lamp reflected in your eyes, and your expression was open and decided and unafraid, the expression of someone who has chosen a thing and is not going to be talked out of it tonight. “Tomorrow,” he agreed.
You stayed another hour. Neither of you spoke much. You sat close on the upturned crate and he sat close on the bucket and your shoulders touched and that was sufficient, and when you finally left he watched the lamp go the way he always did — with the feeling of something good moving away — but differently now. With the knowledge that it was coming back. He lay in the dark and looked at the rafters. He thought about tomorrow.
He thought about all the things tomorrow contained, all the things that would need to be said and decided and reckoned with — your father, and the farm, and the fact of what he was, and the fact that he had said not long in an apple orchard and had meant it and was no longer certain what meaning it cost him. He thought about your hands on his face. He thought: some things, when you are standing in front of them, admit no other response. He slept, for the first time.
—
He was at the pump when you came out. Earlier than usual — the sky still that deep pre-dawn blue, not yet committed to morning, the stars fading at the edges but present still overhead. You came through the back door with your coat on over your nightgown and your feet in your unlaced boots and your hair down, loose around your shoulders, and you looked at him across the yard with an expression he had not seen on you before.
Open. Unguarded in a way that had nothing careful in it. The face of someone who had slept and woken and found the previous night still true. He let go of the pump handle. You crossed the yard. You stopped in front of him and looked up at him and he looked down at you and the blue pre-dawn light was doing something specific to your face, to the particular quality of your eyes in it, and he thought about ten thousand years of cataloguing beautiful things from a very great height and how none of it had prepared him for this. For the way beauty looked from inside it.
“You said tomorrow,” you said. Quiet. “I did.” “It’s tomorrow.” “It is.” You waited. Patient, the way you were patient — completely, without performance. He took a breath. He told you everything.
Not all at once — it came in pieces, and you received each piece the way you received most things, with that full and serious attention, making room. He told you about the light, and what it meant when it moved. He told you about the order and the field of winter wheat and the man kneeling in it who had done nothing to deserve what had been decided for him. He told you about putting the judgment down and what happened after — the gold leaving, the wings going last, the long fall into red Nevada dirt.
He told you about the scars. He told you about the power — the way it lived in him now, fraying and unstable, the way it woke when he felt things strongly. He told you about the kitchen, the lamp guttering, the glass flexing, the thing in him that had wanted and that he had held, barely, with everything available to him. He told you he did not know how long he had been fallen. That time moved differently for him still, catching and pooling, running thin in places. That not long in the orchard had been the truth as he understood it, which was also not the whole truth, which was that he had not wanted it to be true at all.
You sat on the porch step while he told you and you looked at your hands in your lap and then at the horizon and then at him, and you did not interrupt and you did not flinch and when he finally ran out of words and went quiet you were quiet too, for a long moment. Then you said: “Show me.” He looked at you. “Your back,” you said. “Show me. Properly. In the light.”
He understood what you were asking. Not for proof — you had not asked for proof, you had listened to everything with the same gravity you brought to things that were simply true. You were asking because you wanted to see it. Because you did not want to look away from the parts of him that had cost him something. He turned. He pulled his shirt over his head. The morning light, coming now in earnest at the horizon, fell across his back. He heard you stand from the step. Heard you cross the distance. Felt the particular warmth of you close behind him, and then your hands — your careful, capable hands — resting lightly on either side of the scarring. Not pressing. Just — present. “It must have been unbearable,” you said. Low.
“Yes,” he said. “It was.” “And you’d do it again.” “Yes.” Your hands stayed where they were. He felt you press your forehead gently between your hands, against the space between his shoulder blades, and he closed his eyes and stood very still and felt the simple animal warmth of it move through him like the water had moved through dry ground. “Ki,” you said. Muffled against his back. “Yes, sweetheart.”
“I think I love you.” He went entirely still. “I know that’s —” Your voice was careful now, the care of someone saying something for the first time that they have only ever read about. “I know that’s a large thing to say. I’m not — I’ve never said it before. I’ve read about it. In my mother’s books. I didn’t know if I’d recognise it.” A pause. “I recognise it.” He turned.
You looked up at him. High colour in your face, and your chin up, and your eyes entirely steady — not performing the courage of it, simply having it, the way you had everything, plainly and without fuss. He cupped your face in both hands. “Sweetheart,” he said. Very quietly. “You don’t have to say it back,” you said, immediately. “I’m not —”
“I love you,” he said. You stopped. He looked at you. At the particular expression moving across your face — something he had no prior catalogue entry for, something that was not quite disbelief and not quite joy and was perhaps both of those things failing to contain each other. “You —” “I have watched human beings love each other,” he said, “for longer than I can measure. I know what it looks like. I know what it feels like, now, which I did not before.” He brushed his thumb across your cheekbone. “It feels like this.”
You made a sound that was not quite a word. Then you reached up and you kissed him. Not like the night before — not a question, not careful. This was an answer, full and certain, your hands in his shirt and his arms going around you and the Nevada morning arriving in amber and rose around you, and it was the most completely real thing he had experienced since the fall, and he thought, distantly, that if this was what was available down here, in this diminished and groundless and entirely unpredictable human life — then he understood, finally, what he had chosen. He would choose it again.
Your father came home at noon. He came around the side of the house and found you at the porch, sitting on the step with a book in your lap that you were not reading, and Riki beside you on the step, close enough that your shoulders touched, his forearms on his knees, both of you looking at the middle distance with the specific quality of two people who have recently found each other and are still adjusting to the finding.
Your father stopped. The look on his face went through its familiar sequence — assessment, calculation, conclusion — but faster this time, and landing somewhere that made the hair on the back of Riki’s neck resolve into something alert. “Inside,” your father said. To you. Only to you. You stood. The book closed in your hands. Riki stood with you, and your father looked at him with a look that said: this does not include you, and Riki looked back with a look that said: I am aware.
You went inside. The screen door shut. Riki stood on the porch and listened to the land and kept his hands very still at his sides and breathed, slowly, in and out, and held the thing in him that wanted with everything he had, because the time was not now, because he did not yet know enough, because acting without knowing enough was how things got worse.
He went back to the fence line. He worked until the sun went low. He did not hear anything from the house. This was not reassurance. He had learned, in his time here, that the absence of sound meant nothing in a house that had learned to be quiet. He worked and he listened and he held himself ready in the way that something trained for ten thousand years to act does not stop being ready, even diminished, even fallen, even here.
Supper was not called. The lamp in the kitchen went out early. He sat in the barn doorway and watched the dark house and waited. It was past midnight when he heard you. He knew the sound. Not the first sound — that was too quiet, the controlled register of your father’s voice through walls, the specific low evenness of a man who had learned that control was its own kind of violence. That Riki had heard before. He held himself and breathed and waited.
It was the second sound that moved him. A crack — flat and immediate and unmistakable, the sound of a hand meeting a face with force, and then the sound that followed it, which was you, which was the sound of someone who had been trying not to make noise and had been hit hard enough that the trying failed. Not a scream. Something more broken than a scream — a cry wrenched from somewhere involuntary, somewhere below the careful management you applied to everything, and then the sound of something hitting the floor.
Then your father’s voice again. Still controlled. Still low. Explaining something, in the tone of a man who believes he is owed explanation’s reception, while somewhere on the floor of that dark house you absorbed it. Then the sound of it happening again. Riki stood.
He went to the window first. What he saw: you on the floor of your room, one arm braced under you, trying to get up. Your face turned away from him, hair loose and fallen forward. Your father standing over you with his belt in his hand and the expression of a man entirely convinced of his own righteousness, which was the most dangerous kind of man, Riki had learned — not the ones who knew they were wrong and did it anyway, but the ones who had built a complete architecture of justification and lived inside it without windows. He went to the back door.
He did not go to your father’s room. He went to yours, and he opened the door, and he came in, and he crouched beside you on the floor where you had put yourself in the corner the way small animals put themselves in corners — making yourself as small as possible, which was the most unbearable thing, that you had learned this — and he put his hands on your face and he made you look at him. Your face.
He looked at it and held everything in him still with a precision that cost him more than anything had cost him since the fall. “Look at me,” he said. Quiet and even. “Look at me, sweetheart. Are you with me?” You looked at him. Your eyes found his. “Ki?” You said, broken in the middle. “Yes,” he said. “It’s me. I’ve got you.” I’ve got you — your words, from the trail, the first ones, and he meant them the same way you had meant them, completely and without reservation. “Can you stand?” You could. Barely, and with his hands on you, but you could.
He took you to the barn. He settled you on the bedroll with the cedar quilt around your shoulders and he crouched in front of you and he looked at your face again and the thing in him was not fraying now. It was not unstable. It had resolved into something very clear and very still, the stillness of a decision made completely. “Stay here,” he said. You looked at him. At his face, at whatever was in it that had no human register. “Ki —”
“Stay here,” he said again. “Do not come in. Whatever you hear — do not come in.” “What are you going to do.” He looked at you. He did not answer. He did not need to. The answer was in his face and you could read it, he knew you could — you who catalogued things, you who paid attention, you who had looked at him from the very beginning with that serious and complete regard.
“Ki,” you said. Very quietly. “I know,” he said. He stood. He pressed his mouth to your forehead, your temple, the corner of your eye. He held your face in his hands one more moment and looked at you and you looked back at him and the lamp burned between you for the last time in this configuration, and then he put it down and he turned and he walked back to the house.
Your father was in the kitchen. He had not gone back to bed — he was at the table with a glass and his bible open in front of him, which Riki observed with a clarity that had no heat in it. The heat had burned off entirely on the walk across the yard. What was left was something much older and much colder than heat, something that had existed in him before he had a name for it, that had been in his hands in a field of winter wheat and had made a decision and had never, in the long unmeasured time since, doubted that decision. He came through the door. Your father looked up.
And Riki looked at him — and did not speak, and did not move, and simply let what he was rise to the surface of him completely and without management, without the careful containment of the kitchen two days ago, without the held door in a high wind. He let it come. The lamp went out.
Not guttered — extinguished, as though the air itself had decided it was no longer necessary. The temperature in the kitchen dropped so severely that your father’s breath became visible, a pale ghost of it in the sudden dark, and the glass on the table cracked cleanly down the middle and the bible’s pages turned without wind, all of them, to the end. Your father did not stand. Something had communicated to his body, below the level of thought, that standing would not help. Riki crossed the kitchen.
He did it slowly. There was no need to do it otherwise. Your father pressed back against his chair and made a sound that had no language in it, the sound of a creature that has encountered something outside the category of things it knows how to respond to, and Riki looked at him with eyes that were not, in this moment, entirely the eyes he wore in the daylight — and he was very calm, and very certain, and he put his hand on your father’s chest, and he was not long about it.
It was not cruel. He was not, had never been, cruel. He had been made for judgment, once — true judgment, the kind that weighed carefully and arrived at precision, not the kind your father had practiced in this house for nine years with a belt and a bible and a voice kept deliberately low. He knew the difference. He had always known the difference. It was the knowing that had cost him everything and he did not regret it, standing in this dark kitchen, not for a single part of a second. He stayed until it was finished.
Then he stood in the dark for a moment, in the silence of a house that had learned to be quiet and was now quiet for a different reason, and he breathed, in and out, and he let the thing in him recede back to its fraying dormant place. He walked back across the yard. He came through the barn door. The lamp caught him in pieces — his hands first, then his shirt, the dark stain of it. His face, which was entirely still, which had the quality of something that has passed through a very great heat and come out the other side resolved. His eyes, which found yours immediately and did not look away.
He stopped a few feet from you. You looked at him. At all of it, in the lamplight, without flinching. You looked at him the way you had looked at his scars in the morning light — because you did not want to look away from the parts of him that had cost him something.
He had done this before. In a different form, in a different age. He had been made for it, once. But he had never done it for this — for someone sitting in a barn in Nevada with a cedar quilt around her shoulders and her mother’s capable hands and nine years of just us and an almost-smile that he intended to spend a very long time coaxing into something less careful. “Ki,” you said. Your voice was steady. He had not known what your voice would be and it was steady, and something in him came fully to rest at the sound of it.
“Yes,” he said. You stood. The quilt fell from your shoulders. You crossed to him and you took his face in your hands — the way you had in the barn two nights ago, that careful and unapologetic hold — and you looked at him from very close. “You’re beautiful,” you said. He looked at you. At the absolute sincerity of it, the plainness of it, the way you said it the way you said everything — directly, and without fuss, and meaning it completely.
Something broke open in him. Not badly. The way ground breaks open in spring — to let something through. You kissed him. He kissed you back with everything he had, which was not what he’d had before the fall, which was less and more complicated and fraying at the edges, and it was enough, it was more than enough, it was the most enough anything had ever been.
You took very little. Your mother’s books. A change of clothes. The small tin of money you had kept in the flour jar for nine years because you had always known, in the way people know things they do not say aloud, that there would come a morning when you would need it. He saddled Clementine. Job watched this process with the air of an animal that had opinions but had decided, on this particular occasion, to keep them to himself.
The sky was going grey at the east when you came out of the house for the last time. You stood on the porch for a moment — not long, a breath, the specific pause of someone saying goodbye to something that was never really home — and then you stepped off it and crossed the yard and he held Clementine while you mounted and then he handed you the reins and you looked down at him. “Are you going to walk again?” you said. The almost-smile, present and real, and he looked at it and thought: there it is.
“I find I prefer it,” he said. “It gives me something to look at.” The colour came into your face, high on the cheekbones. He took Clementine’s bridle and he began to walk, and she walked with him, and you rode above him in the early morning with the Nevada land going gold around you and the sky opening up ahead in every colour it had, and he walked and looked at the horizon and felt the sun on his face, which was new enough still to notice, which he hoped would always be new enough to notice.
“Ki,” you said, from above him. “Yes, sweetheart.” “Where are we going?” He looked out at the land. At the vast and red and indifferent and quietly magnificent land, all that open sky above it, all that possibility in the distance. “Away from here,” he said. “And then — wherever you like.”
You were quiet for a moment. “I’ve never chosen before,” you said. Wondering, slightly. The voice of someone holding something new, testing the weight of it. “I know,” he said. “You have time.” The sun came fully over the horizon. Nevada went gold. Clementine walked on, and you rode, and he walked beside you with his face in the light and his hands at his sides and the scars on his back that had stopped hurting, finally, or had not stopped hurting but had become the kind of hurt that was also the shape of a choice he would make again and again and again —
And the road ahead was open. And you were on it. And that was enough. That was everything.
content: smau ⟡ tattooartist!riki x reader ⟡ profanity ⟡ suggestive ⟡ riki lowkey in love with reader
a/n: sorry if this feels like its moving fast im lowk trying to keep this series short and sweet if possible... 🥀 just assume theres time passing between texts...
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