Chapter Ten

JUSTIN MATTHEWS IS in her bed, and despite being the one who invited him there, Sydney Warren has no idea what to do about it.

She was hoping for a yes and ready for a no when she asked him to stay. But she hasn’t fully thought out what would happen if he did say yes.

Sydney has never slept next to anyone other than Devo before.

She knows people do it all the time, but she doesn’t understand how they can act as though it doesn’t mean anything to share a bed at night with strangers they’ve only just met at a bar or a club, as if it’s anything other than a huge, terrifying show of trust.

Sydney never had sleepovers as a kid, not for lack of wanting but because it was too much of a risk. A risk she already understood too well at twelve years old when she made no complaints about her mom picking her up early from the few slumber parties she was invited to. Even staying in the same hotel room as Sky and Rex the first time the band went on tour, Sydney struggled to sleep on the rollaway bed. And the few times she’s hooked up with someone, they never got anywhere near sleep.

This is something more than unfamiliar territory.

Her phone has already lit up with messages from every other person in the house, ranging from cautious concern—her mother—to What the fuck are you doing? —Devo.

But Sydney wanted Matts to stay. She wanted him in her bed. And she’s allowed to want things.

But he’s here now, wearing her shirt and her headphones and smiling softly at her as she frantically tries to tidy the organized chaos that is her room.

“You don’t have to clean up for me,” he says.

“On the contrary. I refuse to be responsible for benching the Hell Hound’s star player because he tripped in the night while trying to get to the bathroom, and broke…I don’t know…one of the important hockey-playing bones.”

“All of my bones are important for hockey playing. Also, Alex is the star player. Rome is a close second now. I’m third, and only if we’re not counting goalies. And we should. In which case, I’m fourth. I don’t even make the podium.”

“Oh, go away. Neither Rome nor Rushy were selected for the Olympic team. You’re on the podium.”

Matts slides the headphones off his ears, sitting up. “How did you know I was selected for the Olympic team?”

She pauses, a pile of laundry in her arms. Shit. “You follow my tag,” she says, aiming for cavalier and probably missing by a mile. “I follow yours.”

“People don’t always say nice stuff about me.” Matts has the audacity to look concerned about it.

Sydney shoves the clothes into the hamper and looks at him for a minute, hands on her hips. “You see all the shit people say about me , and you’re concerned I’m going to…what, judge you? Based on the opinions of internet idiots? I understand better than most that social media commentary is a never-ending case study in the Dunning–Kruger effect.”

“But the stuff about you isn’t true. I am shit at interviews, and I do play too aggressively, and my hair does look dumb, and—”

“Stop talking.”

Matts stops talking.

Sydney abandons her cleaning vendetta and knee-walks across the bed until she can get in his face to ensure he’s listening. “You’re endearing as hell in your interviews because you’re not a robot regurgitating the same five PR-approved statements everyone else does. And yeah, you’re too aggressive, but it’s because you’re stupidly loyal, and other players have realized targeting Alex or Jeff is an easy way to get you into the penalty box. And your hair is not dumb; it’s charming. And if you like it, which I’m assuming you do, fuck what anyone else thinks.”

“Oh,” he says. “You think my hair is charming?”

All of him is charming. It’s terrible.

“I do, but that is literally the opposite of the point.”

Matts sets the headphones on her nightstand and then carefully nudges her with his elbow. “The path to the bathroom looks pretty clear to me.”

She must admit it does. “Right. I’m going to brush my teeth; you want to join me?”

A few minutes later, Sydney discovers there’s something shockingly domestic about brushing your teeth with someone. Matts stands next to her at the sink, hair mussed from the headphones, taking twice as long as he should because he keeps stopping to gesture with the spare toothbrush she gave him—a free pink plastic thing from her dentist. Sydney asked him his thoughts on the songs she assigned him that week as she handed over the toothbrush. Now, he’s talking about “Call Me Little Sunshine” and Ghost’s general lyrical prowess, with toothpaste foam in the corners of his mouth and adoration in his voice, and it’s almost unbearable.

In the mirror, their size difference is apparent, something Sydney typically forgets. She’s used to feeling too tall and gawky compared to other girls. She has a couple inches on MJ and Sky and is nearly as tall as Devo and Rex. But next to Matts, Sydney feels small. Delicate.

She slides off her rings and deposits them one at a time in the old paisley teacup she keeps for ring-holding purposes as Matts bends at the waist to spit and rinse his mouth. He goes quiet for a minute, sink running, watching her.

She takes the bracelet—his bracelet—off last and proffers it to him.

“My liege,” she says.

He turns off the faucet. “I think you should keep it.”

“Matts.”

“It’s good luck. It helped you win the race.”

“I won because I cheated. And don’t you need luck more than me right now? Playoffs are about to start.”

“I can make my own luck.”

He rubs the back of his wrist over his mouth and then crosses his arms to drive home the point that he has no intention of taking it from her.

On impulse, Sydney reaches for the teacup and dumps the contents back into her palm to find the least ostentatious ring she owns: a flat silver band with a small, raised heart as its only ornamentation.

When she holds it out to him, for once, she’s at a loss for words. So, she doesn’t say anything at all.

Matts uncrosses his arms, considering. “Luck exchange?” he asks quietly.

“Luck exchange,” she agrees.

As he takes the ring, it occurs to her it probably won’t even fit his smallest finger. He must have the same thought because he tries it on his pinky first. It takes a little wiggling to get it over his knuckle, but then it slides just fine. Matts holds his hand out, studying it, using his thumb to spin the band so the heart is centered.

A ring has different connotations than a bracelet. And it feels belatedly obvious, looking at his otherwise naked hands, that her offering him one of her rings means something.

His mouth is tucked into a pleased, crooked smile, though, as he studies his pinky. And when Matts finally stops looking at it, he directs his attention to her wrist, raising his eyebrows pointedly.

Sydney sets the cup and its remaining rings back on the counter. She slides the bracelet on and uses her teeth to tighten the cord. She doesn’t look away from him while she does it.

Matts nods approvingly. “Bed?” he says, flipping off the lights.

Bed.

Right.

She might not survive this.

Lit only by LED lights strung up behind her bed, Sydney watches as he pulls back the comforter and makes himself comfortable on the left-hand side, closest to the door.

Matts pauses halfway to depositing his phone on the nightstand, then swipes in to type a response to someone.

“Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Well. No. My dad broke his ankle this morning. Chemo’s made him pretty weak, and he fell down the stairs to the basement. He’ll be fine. Probably. But he’s…”

She pulls back the covers on the right side. “Not a good patient, I take it?”

“No.” Matts sets the phone aside. “My stepbrother is doing the best he can, but their dynamic is already awkward. And he’s basically running the ranch now on top of dealing with my dad’s health stuff.”

Sydney stacks two pillows so she can sit against the headboard and face him. “Tell me about the ranch?”

He has no difficulty fulfilling that request.

Matts tells her about his horse, the house, and the land and its history; crop rotations and boundary disputes; a tree that got struck by lightning; the reportedly haunted outhouse; and about growing up in the shadow of mountains and beneath sunsets like forest fires.

“You said you do an actual cattle drive twice a year?” she asks.

“Yeah, in the spring, we take them up to higher elevation land and then bring them back home again before winter sets in.”

Sydney glances at the spot on the wall behind Matts’s head that is currently empty but displayed a bookfair horse poster for an embarrassing number of years. “You know, I used to dream about going on a cattle drive. I was a weird music freak as a kid, but I was also a certified horse girl. I would have killed a man to go on a cattle drive.” She attempts to untangle two curls in her peripheral vision, considering. “Still might. Depending on the man.”

“You should come.”

She pauses, her fingers now also part of the tangle. “What?”

“If you’re not doing shows then, you could come with me. Just for a couple days. We’d appreciate the help.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why wouldn’t I be serious?” Matts beckons her forward and ducks down, squinting, to sort out the knot. “It’s typically two full days of riding. Half the herd one day, the other half the next. You don’t get much sleep the night between, but at least you’re in a bed. No camping required. And the route itself is easy. One river crossing, and from about mile marker eighteen to twenty-three, we’re on the road. Lots of folks driving up to Crested Butte stop and take pictures. It’s slow but nothing treacherous.”

“You gotta stop talking about this, or you’re going to get me all riled up, and I won’t sleep.”

He laughs softly, tucking her now-untangled hair behind her ear. He leans back against the headboard, arms crossed. “Well, just think about it.”

As if she’ll be doing anything else.

“So—” Sydney tries desperately to find a topic of conversation that doesn’t encourage her to revisit every romanticized teenage fantasy she had about falling in love with a cute cowhand on the open range. “How did you get into cooking? I felt like I was deadweight in the cobbler-making process earlier.”

He shrugs. “As a kid, I liked helping my mom in the kitchen whenever I was allowed. And now, I like helping Eli. It’s kinda like…the recipe is an equation. As long as you solve it correctly, you can’t go wrong.”

“Makes sense. Water plus flour equals bread.”

“You need a little more than that for bread.”

“Tell that to medieval peasants.”

“I know you’re trying to be witty, but you don’t want to go down this path with me,” he says seriously. “When Eli taught me to make bread last year, I spent a month researching bread-making techniques around the world, historical and present-day. So, if you want to talk about medieval breadmaking techniques with, you know, at minimum, salt and a variety of different rising agent methods in addition to flour and water, we can do that. But if not, you should probably take the L on this one.”

She doubles over laughing. “You’re good at trivia, huh?”

“I am.”

“Well, then”—Sydney scootches down into a more typical sleeping position, unstacking her pillows so she can hug one—“lay some cursed knowledge on me. As a bedtime treat.”

“Cursed knowledge?”

“You know. Something weird. Unsettling.”

Matts’s expression is hard to read in the dark, but she thinks it’s probably fond.

“One of the few natural predators of the moose is the orca whale,” he says finally.

“I…uh. Huh. Okay. How are whales eating moose? Do moose swim?”

“Pretty regularly, yeah. They can dive twenty feet and hold their breath for over a minute. And they swim between islands off the coast of Canada and Alaska, looking for food.”

“Except they become food. Because whales.”

“Yeah.”

“A-plus cursed knowledge, thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Matts yawns and then mimics her position, curled toward her like an oversized parenthetical. His arms are tucked to his chest, and Sydney’s attention catches on his right pinky finger, her ring glinting in the scant light.

The rain on the metal roof is a soft susurrus of background noise, the rolling thunder far enough away to be ambient and not frightening.

Matts is a study in contrasts, painted in sepia light. His eyes are dark, and his jaw is sharp, and she knows she either needs to stop looking or do something about the want in her chest that’s slowly threatening to choke her. Sydney wants to touch him. She wants to kiss him. But even more than that, she wants him to want her to touch him and to kiss him, and she’s not sure if he does. More than anything, she wants to be certain.

“Goodnight,” she says and searches for disappointment but doesn’t see any in his face.

“Goodnight,” he agrees and closes his eyes, just like that.

Sydney closes hers, too, knowing it won’t make much difference.

An hour later, well after Matts’s breathing has evened out, she eases back the duvet and slides as quietly as possible out of bed and into the hallway.

The under-counter lighting is on in the kitchen, and Devo sits at the breakfast bar with a beer and the cobbler tin in front of him. He’s eating directly out of the tin with a fork.

“Can’t sleep?” he asks.

“Nope.” She moves to sit beside him.

“Maybe it’s the professional hockey player in your bed.”

“Maybe you should mind your own business.”

Devo rolls his eyes but deposits his fork in the tin and shoves it toward her.

Sydney accepts the unspoken peace offering and takes a bite.

“So,” he says as if he’d rather be saying anything else. “Are you two…”

“No.”

“You planning to actually make a move at some point, or just keep doing less and less platonic shit until one of you caves and admits your feelings?”

She ignores him. “Matts invited me to his family’s spring cattle drive. I think I want to go.”

“Spring cattle drive,” Devo repeats, his tone suddenly flat.

“Yeah. His family has a ranch in Colorado. They move their herd up to better grazing land in the mountains every spring and back down in the fall. Two days of movement but no camping. Sounds amazing.”

“You sure that’s a good idea?” Devo is looking at his hands, picking at one of his nails.

Sydney pushes the dish back to him. “It’d probably be between the spring and summer tours, and I’d only need a week off, tops, with travel. It shouldn’t impact practice much.”

“But do you know anything about his family or this ranch?” Devo’s playing with the fork now, still not meeting her eyes.

“Why? What do you mean?”

“I’m just saying.”

“ What are you just saying? Jesus, Devo, this is only a childhood dream come true for me. Why are you being so fucking weird about it?”

“Because I can’t protect you there,” he says, and it’s a shock, the sudden, urgent volume, cutting through the soft blur of rain and thunder outside; the refrigerator humming in the corner.

“What?” she says.

“I can’t—” He presses his palms to the edge of the table, glancing at their parents’ closed bedroom door. He sucks in a breath, lowering his voice. “The bullies at school and the internet creeps and the weirdos at concerts I can handle for you, but this… I won’t be there. And even if I could be there, you’ll be surrounded by men we don’t know in a rural part of the country that isn’t known for being progressive. And maybe that’s a shitty assumption to make, but I’ll make it if it means keeping you safe.”

“Matts wouldn’t let anyone hurt me,” she says blankly.

“Matts might not have even considered it could be dangerous, Syd. He hasn’t spent his life watching the world do its level best to shit on you at every possible opportunity. He doesn’t understand. And even if he did, he’s only one person. It might not be in his power to promise you safety.”

Devo is right. She hates that he’s right, but… He’s right.

“I’ll talk to him.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you’re right. You guys let me forget, sometimes. That I have to be cautious.”

“I’m still sorry.”

She’s close to tears, and he can probably tell, which is why he stands and pulls her into a tight hug, one arm looped around her shoulders, the other hand cupped to the back of her head.

“You want me to talk to him about it?” he asks.

“No.” She cinches her arms around his waist so she can squeeze him back. “I’ll do it.”

They stand there for a while, through several rolling rounds of thunder, before Devo clears his throat. “You’ve still got his bracelet on. You planning to give it back at some point?”

“I tried. He didn’t want it back.”

“Shocking.”

She should stop there, but she doesn’t. “I gave him my heart ring in exchange.”

“You think maybe you should just kiss him at this point?”

She exhales into his chest. “Not sure I’m ready for what would happen after,” she admits. “Either way.”

“Fair enough.”

He rocks them back and forth.

She wonders if they’re both thinking about the same thing—about the summer between her sophomore and junior year of high school. About Bryce Shaw. Neither of them says his name.

“He seems decent,” Devo says finally. “He’d probably give you time to figure things out if you asked for it. And if he didn’t —”

“Matts could kill you with very little effort, don’t even.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

She pushes at him, and he pushes back as if it hadn’t been his idea to initiate the contact. After the ensuing slap fight knocks the fork leaning out of the tin onto the floor in a loud clatter of metal on tile, they both freeze, waiting to see if their parents’ bedroom door will open.

After several beats of silence, Devo retrieves the fork and retreats to his seat. They shove the pie plate back and forth until the cobbler is all gone, and Sydney is warm and tired and full and maybe, possibly, feels like she could sleep.

The rain has slackened, and the thunder has all but died off by the time she finishes brushing her teeth for a second time and tiptoes back to the bed.

“Syd?” Matts asks blearily as she pulls the comforter up.

“Hey,” she whispers. “Sorry. Go back to sleep.”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m good.”

But he’s rolling to face her, to reach for her. His hand lands on her shoulder and slides down to encircle her bicep.

“What’s wrong?”

She breathes. “I want to go. With you. On the drive.”

“Yeah?” His thumb moves in a lopsided circle on her skin. “Cool.”

“But will I be safe? If someone recognizes me. If your family or the people who work for them found out about me, I mean. Will I be safe?”

His thumb stops moving. “Of course.”

“Are you sure? Because I need you to be sure.”

A heavy silence stretches between them and settles in the space between their mouths, where they’re breathing each other’s secondhand air. His eyes are dark and liquid and serious when they meet hers.

“I can make sure,” he says. “I’ll talk to Aaron and see if we need to worry about any of the part-time guys. And Aaron or I, or both of us, will be with you at all times. I can make sure you’re safe. I promise.”

“Okay,” she says. “I trust you.”

And she does, she realizes. Wholly and without reservation. It is an uncomfortable thing to acknowledge.

“Okay,” he agrees.

His hand slips down to her elbow, her forearm, her wrist. He tucks two fingers between the bracelet and the meat of her palm, thumb against her wristbone. And then he leaves his hand there, not quite holding hers, but pretty damn close.

“Night,” he murmurs. And to all appearances, he goes back to sleep.

Unbelievable.

She does not sleep. She lies there with her hand under his hand, watching him breathe, and writing lyrics in her head that she commits to memory rather than dislodging him to reach for the journal on her nightstand. Lyrics about hands and fingers and full bottom lips. Lyrics about longing and hope and want tempered by fear.

If she isn’t a little in love with him already, she’s getting there.

*

SYDNEY MUST FALL asleep at some point because sleeping is the predecessor to waking up, which she does with a lurch to the sound of Rex’s motorcycle pulling into the yard.

She shoves her face into her pillow with a groan before remembering—

Matts.

Who is similarly trying to block out the noise by pulling the duvet over his head.

The engine cuts, and they can hear Sky and Rex talking indistinctly as they approach the front door.

Matts sighs, sitting up.

He has a glorious case of bed head and a sheet imprint on his cheek; his eyelids are puffy, and his lips are chapped, and he is still the most beautiful person she has ever seen.

“Morning, Goldilocks,” she says.

“What?”

“You’re sleeping in my bed. Seemed apropos.”

“If either of us is a bear, it’s me.” He blinks, then digs his knuckles, a little more vigorously than she would prefer, into his eye socket. “What time is it?”

“Almost eight-thirty.”

“Why are they here so early?”

“Practice. We’re supposed to start at nine, and they always come early to steal food.”

Matts exhales, long and slow and intentional. “Well, shit. I’ve got practice, too, so I should probably go anyway.”

“You have time for breakfast?”

He blinks a few more times, and she tries not to get a thrill from seeing him like this—rumpled and unguarded and striped with pale morning light coming in the blinds. His eyes look gold where the sun hits them.

“Yeah,” he says, “okay.”

He’s still wearing her shirt when they emerge from the bedroom a few minutes later, the worn fabric stretched thin and tight over his chest and around his arms.

He has nice shoulder blades, Sydney thinks absently as she follows him into the kitchen.

Her parents and Sky are at the dining table. Rex is in front of the open refrigerator. Devo is scrambling eggs and looking hungover about it.

“Good morning, family,” Sydney says. She nods formally to Sky and Rex. “Business associates.”

“Esteemed leader,” Sky responds, equally formal, with a bow.

“Commodore,” Rex salutes.

“Weirdo,” Devo says.

“Not your best,” Sydney murmurs to him, sotto voce, as she pulls her own pan out of the cabinet. “You wanna try again?”

“Oh, hey, Matts,” Devo says loudly. “I didn’t know you stayed last night. You sleep well?”

Matts, standing awkwardly in the doorway, somehow manages to look even more awkward without actually moving.

“Yes?” He sounds unsure.

“Ignore him,” Sydney advises. “You want some eggs? I’m sunny-side-upping mine.”

“Please.” Matts still looks like a deer in headlights.

“Sausage is on the counter and oatmeal is on the stove,” her mom adds.

“Toast?” Sydney asks, and then, before Matts can respond, “Wait, how do you eat your toast? Eli said it was a war crime.”

“With salt and pepper and hot sauce.”

“Hot sauce.”

“I like spice; it makes textures easier to deal with.”

“Yes!” Sky says. “Because if your mouth is numb, your tongue can’t have opinions about the way things feel. I keep telling people this.”

“Yeah, that’s it exactly.”

“I think we just became best friends,” Sky says. “Adjust your internal hierarchy accordingly.”

“My…internal friend hierarchy?”

“Obviously.”

“Ignore her too,” Sydney further advises.

“Pass on the toast,” Matts says. “But I can cut up some peppers to eat with the eggs?”

Sydney nods to the pile of cutting boards, and Matts looks pleased as he selects one and starts chopping, pausing occasionally to flip his knife and scrape the board over her frying pan. He keeps the peppers in a tidy pile away from the cooking eggs.

Conversation resumes, and Sydney basks in the domesticity of it all: the smell of breakfast and coffee, the soft murmur of her parents’ voices, Sky’s sarcasm, and Rex’s laughter. Matts gently hip-checks her as she pokes the half-cooked eggs with a flat-edged wooden spoon, the egg whites’ edges bubbled and popping in a thick puddle of olive oil.

“Breaking news,” Rex says, reading from his phone. “Red Right Hand is emblematic of the downfall of traditional values in America.”

“Are we really?”

“Gunna put that on my resume,” Sky murmurs, head lolled against the high back of her chair.

“Good parents,” Rex continues, using a broadcaster voice, “will keep their teens away from such pagan music lest it confuse their minds and lead them down a road of depravity .”

“What does that make us?” Tricia murmurs rhetorically to Ben.

Rex tosses his phone to Sydney, and she puts the wooden spoon in her mouth so she can use both hands to scroll through the article. “Sho ’nuff,” she drawls around it, “lookit us, corrupting the youth.”

Matts takes the spoon from between her teeth.

She keeps reading, making progressively more unattractive noises the further she gets into it. “Wow. Just going for the full discrimination bingo card, here, huh. Who writes this stuff?”

“What?” Matts says.

“They’re talking shit about Rex.”

“Mm,” Rex agrees. “Insulting the Asian man by calling him effeminate. Groundbreaking.”

“O God, that I were a man!” Sydney quotes, tossing the phone back. “I would eat his heart in the market-place.”

“Pretty sure a woman wrote that article,” Rex says. “But I agree with the sentiment.”

“Well, in that case, muskets at dawn or whatever.”

“She gets more intelligible the more time you spend with her,” Devo says to Matts, “unfortunately.”

Sydney kicks the back of Devo’s knee gently but with enough surprise force to cause a brief collapse. He catches himself on the countertop and throws a dish towel at her.

“I understood the muskets at dawn part,” Matts says, stepping between them, ostensibly to hand back her spoon, but more probably so he can prevent Sydney from retaliating.

“First bit was from Much Ado About Nothing, ” Rex says. “Shakespeare. This lady is saying she’d fight a guy who slandered her friend if she was able. I remember that one because of all the sexual innuendo.”

Matts turns to face Rex. “Shakespeare has sexual innuendo in it?”

“The US education system is in shambles,” Sydney says with a sigh.

Matts looks between them, arms crossed. “I thought Shakespeare was highbrow. Fancy.”

“Not even a little.” Sydney nudges him out of the way so she can transfer the eggs to two plates. “His work is full of dirty jokes; they’re just not as obvious to us now because language has changed.”

“Dirty jokes like what?”

Tricia sighs loudly.

“Like even the title of Much Ado ,” Sydney says. “Sure, it can mean ‘people freaking out about nothing,’ but ‘nothing’ was also Elizabethan slang for ‘vagina.’ So it’s possible he meant it to be interpreted as, ‘a whole lot of fuss about vagina.’”

“Can we please not say the word ‘vagina’ at the breakfast table?” Tricia asks.

“I’m not at the breakfast table,” Sydney says.

“Aw, but we’re talking about literature ,” Sky adds.

“And you’ve always said it’s important to use correct anatomical language,” Devo points out.

“Fine,” Tricia says. “Just don’t start on that Twelfth Night shit.”

“What’s in Twelfth Night ?” Matts asks quietly, one hand on Sydney’s lower back as he maneuvers around her.

It takes her a moment to respond because of that hand.

“Probably the dirtiest joke in any of Shakespeare’s plays,” she murmurs back. He ducks closer to hear her, and she does not get a thrill from it. Much. “I quoted the joke in a paper my junior year, and my English teacher took exception to the inclusion, even though I was quoting from the source text she’d given us.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Which is exactly what the administration decided when my parents objected to my failing grade. But I think my mom has Twelfth Night– related trauma now, considering she had to take part in a very serious meeting with school officials in which she defended her daughter’s right to use the word ‘cunt’ in a paper.”

Matts coughs on a laugh. “I’m going to need additional context for that at some point.”

“Later,” Sydney whispers, “or my mom will break out in hives.”

Matts finishes sliding past her, removes his hand, and tips the peppers onto their plates. She tries not to think about the warmth of his palm and the fan of his fingers, how his hand had spanned most of her lower back. That he’d absently pinched the fabric of her shirt between thumb and forefinger as though he’d wanted to linger before letting go.

“Anyway,” Rex says, moving into the kitchen to get a bowl. “No need for dramatics, Syd. We agreed to ignore the haters, right?”

“I guess. My musket needs cleaning anyway. Also, I’m not that dramatic.”

Devo pretends to choke on a sip of milk.

“I think we can all agree,” Sky says, “that of the life-forms present on this property, you are the most dramatic.”

“Aside from the horses, on occasion,” Tricia says.

“Aside from the horses, on occasion,” Sky allows.

“Et tu, Brute?” Sydney mutters.

“Oh,” Matts says. “I know that one.”