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He touched a gray horse on the nose, and she was beside him immediately.
“Horses, Layne?” he said.
“Isn’t that what rich little girls do?” she said, her voice vaguely mocking. “Ride horses?”
The girl in the photo wore a helmet, so he couldn’t be sure who it was. “Is that you?”
“Yeah. Last year.” She hesitated, and something about it felt personal.
He withdrew his hand and made his own voice vaguely mocking. “I didn’t mean to make you talk about it.”
She bit at her lip. “No one knows I do it anymore.” Then she blushed and rubbed the gray horse on the nose where he’d touched it. “I mean, my parents know. They pay the bills and all. Just . . . no one at school.”
“What a crazy thing to keep secret.” He leaned closer to the picture. The horse was clearing a jump, with Layne crouched close to the animal’s neck. “That’s a big jump.”
“Nah. Only three and a half feet.”
He glanced back at her. “Aren’t you afraid you’ll fall?”
A little shrug. “Sometimes. I think that’s why I like it. No matter how good you are, you’re never completely in control.
The horse has a mind of its own. You can’t force it.”
“So how good are you?”
She met his eyes, and he liked the spark of challenge he found there. “Good enough.” She paused. “When I was younger, I used to compete all the time. We went to New York, Devon, Washington, all the big ones. My mother loved it. She couldn’t wait to have another blue ribbon to hang on the wall, to brag about at the next benefit. Her perfect daughter.”
Like flipping a switch, Layne’s voice went from tentative to furious. “I hated the competition, I hated the pressure, I hated how something I loved had turned into something else my mother could use against me.”
She reminded him of the fire in the woods, under control one minute, then blazing.
“But still you do it,” he said.
“I don’t compete,” she said. “I just ride. Horses don’t care that I have ” Her voice broke off suddenly, and he studied her, waiting. But she didn’t say anything else, and she was staring at that picture, her shoulders tense.
The horses didn’t care that she had what?
She didn’t want him to ask that much was clear from her posture. “You ride after school?”
She shook her head. “In the mornings. If I cut through the woods, I can walk to the farm in ten minutes.”
They had to be at school by seven forty-five. “You must get up early.”
She shrugged. “I like being the first one up. I can forget everyone else exists, and it’s just me and the elements.”
Gabriel smiled. “I know what you mean.”
She gave him a wry glance. “Please. I bet your alarm goes off at seven-forty.”
“You’d lose that bet.” He looked at the horses again, touching the next one in the row. It wasn’t his first time in a girl’s bedroom, but usually, the only talking they did was to shut him up before a parent heard. Here, alone with Layne, simply talking suddenly felt more intimate than anything he’d ever done with any random girl.
“I wouldn’t figure you for a morning person,” she said.
He brought his eyes back to hers. “I usually go for a run before the sun comes up.”
He liked running in the dark, before sunrise, when the sun couldn’t feed him energy. That always felt like cheating. It was one of the few things he did without Nick.
She tucked a strand of hair behind one ear. He wanted to reach out and undo the elastic at the end of her braid, to let her hair come loose, to see what she looked like when she wasn’t hiding behind this wall of I don’t care.
