Like hash marks for each year they had known each other. A marker of the time, the hardships and the triumphs.

She had known him since he couldn’t grow a beard. And now he needed to shave badly by the end of every day.

Ryder was part of her soul.

The fabric of who she was.

And she really hoped that he couldn’t catalog the wrinkles and years on her face quite the same way as she could his.

She moisturized. So she liked to think that she hadn’t crossed the border into rugged. It worked for a cowboy. Not so much for her.

“Sorry,” she said. “Is there something a little bit more stately we can call it?”

“I don’t know. Is there a way to make this...stately in any way?”

“Please take me out?” She gave him her best wide smile.

“Fine,” he said. “I have to shower, though.”

“Do you?”

In her opinion, dirt looked good on him.

“Hang out for a minute.”

Trailing irritation and dust in his wake, he walked past her and she followed him into the house. Then into his bedroom.

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing. I just figured I would wait in here.” She sat on the edge of his bed.

He had moved into the master bedroom of the house out of some necessity. She knew it had made him feel weird, but the other rooms were full, and there was no reason for him not to take this one. She felt comfortable in his room.

Back when she’d been a teenager and her dad had been in a fury, she had snuck out sometimes. The first time she’d done it...she’d been sure that Ryder would send her away. She had climbed through his bedroom window and got beneath the covers with him. And he had known exactly what she wanted. To be held. To be protected. To have some strength around her that made her feel safe, rather than battered and bruised and afraid for her life.

“Fine,” he said, stripping his shirt off and taking his hat along with it, leaving both on the floor.

The wall suddenly felt slightly closer, and she didn’t know why. There was something about the way he’d been looking at her the past couple of days that made her feel...unsettled, and no doubt it was responsible for the whole thing with the walls.

He went into the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind him, and she got off the bed slowly. She could hear the water turn on. She bent down and picked his hat up off the floor. The band of it was damp from his sweat. And when she picked the T-shirt up, she could feel that it was damp, too.

She held on to both for a moment, contemplating that.

And then she went quickly to the peg by the door and hung his hat up, before dropping the T-shirt into the hamper.

Touching his sweat should disgust her.

It didn’t. She wasn’t sure why. But maybe it was that whole thing about him being part of her. Now, why she had wanted to—for one moment—put her face in the T-shirt and smell it, she didn’t know.