To say you were nervous to see him again would’ve been the understatement of the century.

The air was thick and warm as your old green pick-up sailed down the country road, late enough in the eve that they were clear of all but a few stragglers. The streets were pale with dust, unchanging and uninteresting for the entire length of your drive. The dry scent of sagebrush filled your nostrils every time you rolled down the window, and the faint creak of your truck's suspension provided a constant counterpoint to the country music station fading in and out on the radio.

What you had been thinking about was him. Anakin Del Mar. The boy you’d spent one strange, crazy summer practically living inside the skin of; cold nights tucked into the same bedroll, sharing cigarettes and sipping out of the same bottle of whiskey, jumping nude from cliffs edges to clear waters below. A summer that felt almost like a dream now, and the boy you missed so much it made your heart ache with a dull, persistent throb.

But, he was no boy now. Four years had passed, and both of you were men as it were. You had lives. Families. Proper jobs and responsibilities to provide. The weight of your wedding band felt suddenly heavy on your finger as you gripped the steering wheel tighter.

You’d taken on rodeoing, though it wasn’t really the dream you'd aspired to any longer. The smell of hay and manure still clung to your boots even now, hours after leaving the last rodeo grounds. But, in the very least, you met a girl named Lureen there with a father who despised you. She was alright. But, sometimes, when you lay beside her in the darkness, you found yourself remembering the way Anakin's skin felt against yours under the stars.

And it was after a particularly breakneck rodeo, when you'd come out of the chute with a dislocated shoulder and blood in your mouth, that you’d allowed yourself to get lost in the fantasy of running away with that very same boy and starting a farm of your own. That's when you'd said "fuck it" and sent him the letter you’d been debating for the past four years.

It was just a fantasy. It was all a fantasy. But, if you could just... just see him-

Next thing you knew, you were taking a day-long drive to Riverton, pulling up on the street of a run-down looking laundromat, and a figure was leaping down the stairs to the landing of the building above it two at a time to meet you.