Page 31 of Wild, Wild Cowboy

I turned the page. And there he was, baby Zack, wearing a pink onesie embroidered with rainbows and ruffled pink socks on his tiny feet. It was just about the sweetest thing I’d ever seen. My ovaries ached.

“Oh, my gosh,” I breathed. “You wereadorable.”

Zack grinned. “I’ve always thought so. Mom did, too, and I promise, there wasn’t a single moment I felt unloved. But the day I came out of her womb a boy, it crushed her. She saw the writing on the wall and had no intention of being a mom to five rowdy boys. She put a stop to it right then and there. Skipped C and went straight to Z.”

“And that’s how Zack got his name,” Ted said with aplomb.

I smiled and kept turning the pages, watching the boys grow from toddlers to big kids. The pink onesies disappeared after the first three months and Zack wore regular boy clothes. And then, when Zack was about seven, there was a picture of him and his mom on the couch, a blanket over their laps, fuzzy pink bunny slippers on their feet.

Fuzzy pink bunny slippers.

Next to me, Zack drew in a sharp breath, then let it out on a quick laugh. “That’s the year Adam and Brax found the old photos of me as a baby and realized I was supposed to be a girl. So for Christmas they got me pink bunny slippers. The card said,to our sister, Charlotte.”

Adam and Brax grinned at each other.

“Charlotte was so sweet,” Brax said. “I miss her.”

Zack rolled his eyes. “Anyway, joke was on them, because I fu—” With a quick glance at Ben, he cleared his throat. “I freaking loved them. When Mom got sick the first time, I used my allowance to buy her a matching pair. We would wear them while we watched movies together when she felt bad from chemo.” He ran his thumb over the photograph like he was stroking his mother’s hair. “She always complained her feet were cold.”

The room fell silent for a moment.

And then Zack’s warm laugh permeated the sudden sadness that hung over his family at the memory of Jenny’s cancer, scattering the dark clouds with his sunshine. “Dang, I was cute.”

His shield was back up.

No, not a shield. It was more like a force field. Because it wasn’t about protecting only himself. It was about protecting his family, too. He laughed to make them feel better. And it worked.

“We love you no matter what, Zack, but anytime Charlotte wants to pay us a visit, we’d be happy to have her.” Adam grinned. “And take pictures.”

The slippers were a Christmas present. That’s what he’d told me, the morning I’d found him naked and eating ramen. But there was no way they were the same pair his brothers had given him. The slippers he’d worn as an adolescent wouldn’t fit his feet now.

His mother had given him those slippers.

I shifted the photo album so it lay across both our laps, half on him and half on me. Underneath the spine, in the narrow valley between our thighs, I found his hand and squeezed.

Because I knew he didn’t find anything funny about those slippers.

11

ZACK

Hannah did not spend the night at Lodestar Ranch. She fed me some line about needing to be up early to get to the library on time, and she’d rather do the hard part now instead of getting up even earlier tomorrow. It made sense, and I should have been relieved because it had been a long day.

But I wasn’t.

Mom used to say I had a brain like a two-year-old. I thrived on physical movement, but it was easy for me to become overstimulated by too much emotion, regardless of whether that emotion came from myself or others, and when that happened, my brain threw a tantrum. Like an overtired toddler, it refused to do the one thing it needed and shut the fuck down.

So I wasn’t relieved when Hannah didn’t spend the night, because all I wanted was to roll her sweet body beneath me and fuck her until I couldn’t feel a damn thing anymore. Instead, I lay there wide awake, my body itching like a molting snake, my brain replaying the events of the past forty-eight hours like a movie.

I was married at fourteen.

Are you sure?

Grappling with my brothers.

Pink bunny slippers.

Hannah squeezing my hand.

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