They are so very comfortable with each other. I start to feel like an outsider. 'Take care of her', indeed. I am a defender. I can manipulate matter, ... can rip heads off with my bare hands. I come back to the conversation only to discover the two men watching me with a certain pensiveness in their eyes."What?" I ask folding my arms over my chest and sit up straighter."I think someone needs to do some asking of her own." Saul says dryly."I think someone needs to respect his elders." I toss back. " He had wandered over and taken a double-barreled twelve gauge shotgun off the wall pegs. I grabbed it by the middle of the barrel and deflected it to the side just as it went off and barely missed his sister. As it was, a half dozen books got blown off the wall. His mother screamed as I wrestled the gun away from him and carried it to the kitchen. I was angry and breathing hard.Just as I broke the gun open and removed the other shell, Pa came blasting through the back door, almost knocking it. ’ Then he heard himself say: ‘Look at you though – successful something or another, all grown up.’ Phoebe pretended to blush and giggled a Geisha laugh, a quirk of hers since he knew her. ‘Same to you. Would you like to go get some coffee? Where are you going, incidentally?’ They caught up a bit at a shop with extremely mediocre cappuccinos. He ate a jelly doughnut, which she remembered he liked, and told him so. He was flattered, but countered with the way she shredded paper straw-covers. . She put her horse in the pen and her saddle in the tack room, and we went into her house.Honey’s Pa had left her a note that he was helping a neighbor harvest some early maturing corn and wouldn’t be home until later.“Come up stairs with me, I want to show you my room.” She grabbed my hand and we went up the stairs side by side.Her room was done in blue and white. She had a few posters of horses and some small statues of horses on a chest.Her bed had a thick quilt for a spread and she pulled it.