The Boy and His Ribbon (The Ribbon Duet, #1)(26)

I don’t know if I recall them from my own experiences or if Ren was such a master storyteller, he manufactured the history to suit his own ends. Either way, they’re some of my favourite, and this tale wouldn’t be complete without them.

I suppose I’ll begin with the very first one made at Polcart Farm where we lived for over three years. There were so many memories created there: antidotes Ren would tell me, jokes he’d spin from things I’d done, and lessons he’d remind me of from prior mistakes.

I knew Ren was happier in the forest away from society, but he put that need aside for me. He watched cartoons with me as we learned to read side by side. We cowered together when a hurricane threatened to tear the roof off, and celebrated when we cooked our first meal entirely self-sufficient.

So many things.

Too many things to mention in this assignment, so I’ll only mention the three that totally stand out.

The first was when he finally called me something other than Della Mclary. I didn’t have the words at the time to tell him how much I hated that name. That whenever he called me that, it was if he reminded himself that we weren’t meant to be together and did his best to create distance.

But that night, when he finally called me Della Ribbon as we watched educational cartoons, he never once called me Mclary again. From then on, every time he called me Ribbon, my insides turned gooey, and I’d do anything he said—even if I didn’t want to.

Amazing what love can make someone do, right?

In my toddler brain, I associated him calling me Ribbon with his admittance of loving me. He’d accepted me as his own. He no longer needed to remind himself that I wasn’t born to be his.

The power of that nickname could stop my tears, cease my anger, soothe my fears, and to this day, he doesn’t know how much it still affects me. How the gooeyness inside has morphed from child infatuation to adult intoxication. How gradually, over the years, my love has turned less pure, and I’ve kept that secret for years.

Anyway, moving on…

The second thing that meant the world to me was once we’d mastered the alphabet together, Ren left me at home one mid-spring afternoon and returned with his arms full of books.

Picture books.

Baby books.

Bibles.

Encyclopaedias.

And literary classics.

I’d spent the night curled around the musty delicious pages, stroking their pretty covers, gawking at the words I desperately wanted to know.

When he’d finally dragged me to bed, I’d clutched at a picture book about a lost little puppy trying to find his parents. Instead of a bedtime story made from truth and fact, I wanted Ren to read fiction to me.

I wanted the luxury of listening to his husky, throaty tone. Even before his voice dropped, I’d been addicted to it, and now that he sounded like a man and not a boy, I was obsessed.

Sometimes, and don’t judge me for this, but sometimes, I would do something naughty just to have him yell at me. I know it was wrong, but when Ren yelled, he drenched it with passion.

He vibrated with the need to scold, and it thrilled and terrified me.

He’d bring that same passion to the tales he told while snuggled in bed. He’d regale how he’d helped birth baby lambs and how he’d once seen a foal being born. He was fluid and crisp and told a mean story that kept my attention for hours.

That wasn’t the case when he cracked open the picture book and bit his bottom lip in panic. There was no husky voice. No story about a puppy finding his parents. Instead, there was a stutter and a pause and an attempt at sewing together the letters we’d learned into words we hadn’t.

It’d been the first time I felt sorry for him. The first time my juvenile heart had the ability to think of him as hurting or helpless and not the invincible, magical Ren I adored.

It made me love him even more.

That night was the first night of many when we stayed up late and slowly learned how to read and not just parrot what the kid programs tried to teach.

And as we learned to read, we took turns stumbling over simple sentences until one of us would smooth it out and repeat it again and again until it was as effortless as speaking.

And finally, the third memory is a strange one. You’ll think me mad for even mentioning it, but something about that night firmly fixed Ren as not just my father-figure and brother, but also my idol.

An invincible, immortal idol who I never ever wanted to be away from.

That first winter at Polcart Farm was bad. The icy freeze taught us that we might be able to live in the wild in summer but when the snow hit…unless we were able to grow fur and hibernate, we would die. That became even more apparent when I’d fallen sick with a simple cold the night we’d found the farm.

Due to the icy temperatures and my young age, it took weeks for me to come right, even with medicine Ren stole from the local pharmacy. He couldn’t read the label so who knew if what he poured down my throat was the right dosage or the even correct drug, but he did his best, and I survived.

For days, he fed me stolen soup and cuddled me close so I could benefit from his body heat. Whenever I woke, he was ready with warm milk, medicine, and a story or two about life on a farm with sixteen children.

He didn’t leave my side for longer than a few minutes, and when my fever finally broke and my chest no longer rattled with cough, he bundled me up in every clothing I had then carried me outside wrapped in the sleeping bag.