Page 26 of Property of Legend

“And I don’t know how to do this.The Derby.The farm.James breathing down my neck.Everyone wants a piece of Paradise Falls and I’m trying to hold it together with duct tape and hope.I’m not you.I’m not strong like you.”

I kiss his temple, whispering a goodbye I can’t bring myself to say aloud.Then I stand, legs heavy, and walk back to my room.

I don’t turn on the lights.

I just collapse on the edge of my bed, dress still clinging to my skin, heels abandoned on the floor.I cry, not in sobs but in slow, silent drips, like something inside me is leaking.

Eventually, I drift off.

When I wake, the moon’s high above the horizon, silver spilling through the gauzy curtains.I wipe my eyes and cross to the window.

And there he is.

Legend.

Sitting on the back porch, elbows on his knees, cigarette burning between his fingers, the red ember glowing in the dark like a warning, or a promise.

He’s not looking at the house.

But somehow, I know he feels me watching.

And maybe that’s the closest either of us knows how to get.

I remember the first time I spent time any real time with him.We watchedThe Princess Bride.

I was nine.He was ten.His mama had just disappeared, ran off in the middle of the night without so much as a note, and his daddy, one of the hired hands at Paradise Falls, wasn’t exactly the nurturing type.My mama insisted he stay with us for a while.Said no child should feel that kind of empty all alone.

I didn’t like it at first.I thought he was loud, rude, and he always smelled like the barn.

But that night, we curled up on the old velvet couch in the parlor, bowl of popcorn between us, the TV’s glow painting shadows across the wallpaper.I was in my flannel horse pajamas.He wore one of James’s old hand-me-down shirts from my dad that hung off him like a scarecrow.And when the farm boy on screen said,“As you wish,”his little mouth twisted into the saddest damn smile I’d ever seen.

“Why do you like this movie?”I asked him.

“Because Wesley never leaves,” he said.“He comes back for her.Always.”

That stuck with me.

Later, when we were teens and hormones ruined everything, I started calling himStable Boyto get his attention.To tease him because I wanted his attention more than anything.It worked, too.He’d scowl and snap back with,Horse Princess, and add something rude about how I had teeth like a thoroughbred.

We’d pretend to hate it, but we never stopped.Never corrected each other.

Even now, all these years later, when I hear him mutterHorse Princessunder his breath, like a prayer or a curse, I feel nine again.Like I’m sitting on that couch, watching a farm boy fight giants and fire swamps just to make it back to the girl he loved.

And God help me, I wonder if my Stable Boy ever will.

Chapter 14

Legend

I sit on the back porch of Sophie’s big-ass house, a place that don’t feel safe even though my crew’s scattered across the lawn like loyal guard dogs.The mansion looms behind me, too clean, too perfect.Like it’s tryin’ to pretend the world ain’t rotten underneath.Sophie’s somewhere inside, tucked in all that quiet grief, and I’m out here on the edge of it all, like always.

Funny thing about memories, they don’t knock.They just barge in.

And this one kicks the damn door off the hinges.

We were kids.Hell, I couldn’t have been older than fifteen.Sophie was younger by almost a year, wild as a stray, already tasting rebellion like it was her birthright.I was workin’ the stables, muckin’ stalls and sweatin’ my weight in the Kentucky sun while my old man barked orders and smelled like cheap whiskey and worse.

She showed up one night like moonlight with a death wish.Boots unlaced, curls wild, freckles dancing across her cheeks like sin and sugar, and a smirk that could gut a man.

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