The Boy and His Ribbon (The Ribbon Duet, #1)(29)

She scowled a perfect imitation of my scowl. “Yeah, don’t do that again.”

I chuckled. “I promised I never would, didn’t I?”

“Huh. You might if I annoy you too much.”

I chuckled harder. “You annoy me all the time, and I’m still here.”

Her eyes widened with worry. “I do? I annoy you?”

“Yep.” I spread my arms to incorporate a huge amount. “This much. Constantly.”

Her lower lip wobbled. “But…you won’t leave me…right?”

The barb of her sadness caught me right in the heart, and my joke no longer seemed funny.

Crouching to her level, I pressed my palm against her rosy cheek. “Della Ribbon, don’t you get upset over something silly like that. You know I’m joking. I’d never—”

She shot off, squealing in laughter. “I win. You lied. I don’t annoy you. You loooove me!” She spun in the street before I grabbed her bicep and dragged her sharply back onto the pavement.

Wild little heathen.

I ought to have been stricter on the rules, but somehow, I’d failed at creating uncrossable boundaries. I did my best to yell and bluster, but for some reason, my temper seemed to amuse and soothe her rather than scare the living daylights out of her.

Keeping her glued to my side with tight fingers, I muttered, “When you act like this, I second-guess that promise.”

She blew raspberries at me, and for a second, two images slid over one another.

An image of a little girl with blonde hair and distraught eyes limping painfully from Mclary’s farmhouse and crying herself to sleep, and then Della with her vibrant soul and fearless confidence.

Mclary lived to tear children apart.

I lived purely to ensure Della became everything she ever wanted.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I’d figured out what Mclary was actually doing with his ‘special tasks.’ That form of education came from a tatty, well-read magazine I’d salvaged from a dumpster.

I’d never seen so much nakedness in one place before and never naked adults.

And the things they were doing?

It made me sick. At least…the first couple of times I sneaked a peek. The first time I’d cracked open the glossy sun-bleached pages, I’d slammed them shut again, disgusted.

The second time, I’d been curious and looked at every graphic image cover to cover.

The third…well, by the third time, my body felt different—tighter, harder, strange.

After that, the sickness turned into more of a sick fascination, and my body burned with heat and need, swelling uncomfortably between my legs.

Over the past few years, my voice had dropped, I had hair growing in places that embarrassed me, and now an undercurrent of hunger and searching for something I didn’t understand lived deep in my belly.

It didn’t happen overnight.

The familiarity of a boy’s body slowly faded into foreign lands of a man.

Even though it took a few years to fully understand what the heavy ache in my groin was or why my heart beat faster when a pretty girl came on TV, it didn’t mean I accepted it.

I hated not having control of my own body.

I hated having dreams of skin and touching and things that the magazine portrayed in explicit detail.

When I was younger, I’d woken to wet dreams with pleasure coursing through my body and not understood what happened. These days, I understood enough thanks to memories of helping Mclary breed his stock and watching bulls with cows and stallions with mares.

I’d come of age to reproduce, and I got the principal of why I hardened.

But I despised it.

I despised the complications it brought with it. I hated the random rage filling my blood and loathed the nasty demands, desperate for ways of releasing the pleasure lurking inside.

I didn’t like lying frozen beside Della as she slept unaware. I didn’t like having to hide my rapidly growing needs or lie to the one girl I promised never to lie to about why she wasn’t allowed on my lap at certain times.

The body I once knew was now hijacked with desires I didn’t.

For a couple of weeks, I’d watched Della to see if she felt different like me, but when I asked if parts of her were acting strange, she’d laughed and patted me on the head, saying if I was sick, she’d look after me.

But that was the thing…I wasn’t sick. Unless, I was mentally sick because looking at that dirty magazine did things to my body that I kept hidden from Della at all costs.

I started bathing on my own because I couldn’t control the hardness that sprang from nowhere. I started wearing underwear around her when before, we both didn’t care—especially in summer if we went for a swim in the farm’s pond or sun-baked on the porch.

That was another reason I wanted to do something different today.

I felt different, and it scared me. I didn’t want to change because I knew my body. I knew its strengths and weaknesses. Now, I didn’t trust it, and I was frustrated with the coursing newness and wants.

“Ren. Reeeeen. Ren!” Della planted hands on her narrow hips. She wore one of my sandstone coloured t-shirts as a dress with a piece of baling twine as a belt. She’d outgrown her clothes last year, and I’d yet to either make or steal new ones. “You’re not listening.”