Free Love, Like Water by Rowan Speedwell

his face, leaving it softer and him looking younger than he had before, closer to his twenty-eight years. His face looked thin, rather than gaunt. A few days of rest, fresh air, and Sarafina’s cooking had taken the sickly yellow cast out of his skin, though it would be a while before he gained back the missing weight. But that was all right—it would happen, and right now, it was probably more important that Josh start to feel comfortable where he was.
    He couldn’t think of him as “Joshua,” though Tuck had said he preferred it—it was pretty clear, even to someone as unsophisticated as himself, that insisting on his full name was just Josh putting up another barrier. That calling him “Josh” might lead to things like, oh, conversation. Shared jokes. The occasional smile. And maybe something horrible like friendship. Not for the first time, Eli wondered what exactly had been done to this poor damaged creature to make him so wary.
    Horses were easy. If they’d been beaten, they showed scars, they shied away from the touch of a hand or the sight of a crop. He’d even known one that went berserk when they tried to sweep the stable. Those cues were easy to read. The problems weren’t easy to fix, but once they had an idea of what they were dealing with, they knew what they had to do. People, now? People were funny. They were smart, and peculiar. So knowing what would set someone off wasn’t easy to pinpoint.
    Take his old man, God rest his soul, because someone had to. He was usually pretty levelheaded, unless something triggered one of his rare drunks. He hadn’t been a mean drunk, but Eli hated it when he drank anyway. And he never could figure out what the triggers were. Maybe if he had, the old man would be alive today, instead of getting smeared across five hundred yards of Wyoming highway in the dead of winter.
    The horse nudged the crate and the cat woke up, stretching. The movement pushed Joshua’s hand against the wire, and Joshua woke up. Eli watched it, watched the way he blinked in the stray sunbeam that had settled on his face, watched how he looked up at the grazing horse and smiled.
    God, that smile—slow, a little uncertain as if he’d forgotten how to do it. It put a dimple in one cheek that Eli suspected would still be there when he got the weight back, and showed teeth even and white against the tan of his skin. Eli had thought that the boy might be passable-looking once he was recovered, but that smile made him realize that face was made to break hearts. He thought maybe his might be the first….
    He must have moved or made a sound, because Josh’s head whipped around to stare at him, the smile vanished and all the tension flared back in his body. He could have wept to see it return. “Just me,” he said quietly. “Checking to see if you got et. Horses’ll eat meat if they’re hungry enough.”
    Joshua’s eyes widened. “They will?”
    Eli laughed. “Nah, I’m fooling with you. Sara says you don’t sleep so good—didja have a nice nap?”
    “Pretty good,” Josh said distantly. He turned to look at the cat, which was standing up and doing that cat stretching thing with the arched back.
    “How’s the cat doing?”
    Joshua shrugged. “Bored and hates being in the cage.”
    “Lucky you didn’t get bit. Cats are poisonous. Friend of mine nearly lost his arm from a cat bite.”
    That startled a laugh out of Joshua. “They aren’t poisonous. They just have a lot of bacteria in their mouths. Some cats more than others. This one, given the way he’s been living, probably more.” He reached in and scratched the cat’s head. “But you’re not a biter, are you?”
    “Good thing for you. So what do you think of Rory?”
    “Rory?”
    “The horse.” Eli gestured at the horse—an easy, nonthreatening wave of his fingers so the horse wouldn’t startle. It looked up in interest. “That’s his name. Tuck says it’s an old Gaelic name meaning ‘red’. Though he could tell