We were awoken the next morning by Sarah sticking her head into my room, and saying rather loudly,

“Laura, wake up, I can’t find S…oh.”

“Morning, Sarah,” I said.

“Don’t you two look cozy?” laughed Sarah. “Get up and help me with breakfast, will you?”

She glided back out of the room, and Sam and I exchanged amused glances before slipping out from under the sheet that was all I would put on my bed in the summertime. Sam was still clothed in the sweats and tee shirt he had gotten from his house before coming back over for the evening, and I had my tee shirt and pajama pants on, so neither of us was undressed. We stumbled out into the kitchen where Sarah was just putting the coffee pot on, and she looked at us with a bemused expression.

“Let me guess, middle of the night cuddle urges?”

I nodded sheepishly, and Sam ran his hand through his hair to cover his embarrassment. Sarah just grinned and went back to mixing the pancake mix that she made from scratch and which was almost as famous as her Alfredo sauce. Sam busied himself setting the table, and I cracked a half a dozen eggs and whisked them together with some milk to make scrambled eggs. Sarah deftly took the bowl when I was done with it and poured it onto a clean pan while she flipped another pancake onto a plate. I was out of my league and knew it, so retreated to the sink to do some dishes.

After breakfast, Sarah took her leave of us, heading down to Quincy for her grandmother’s birthday, and Sam and I quickly did the breakfast dishes and got dressed in some more outside clothing. I donned a pair of jean cut-offs and clean blouse, and came out to find Sam in jeans and a tee shirt that said, “I’d Rather Play with Ponies” with a picture of racehorses below it.

“Joke gift from my little brother,” he said. “I thought that you might find it amusing.”

“Your family has a weird sense of humor,” I said.

“You don’t know the half of it,” he groaned, “We have gotten and given some very off-color gifts in the past. Some of the videos make me blush!”

“Videos? Don’t tell me that its women having….no!”

“Yes,” he said, looking embarrassed. “Imagine putting that in the DVD player with a bunch of the family watching to see what kind of family film Dances with Horses might be. You know, you think maybe it is a clan-related video, a knock off of Dances with Wolves. Then it starts rolling and soon everyone is laughing or sending the children out of the room in a hurry and a lot of yelling at the offending party occurs.”

“I can only imagine,” I grinned.

“And before you ask, such things have been known to happen, but the clan’s view is that they are very kinky and somewhat perverted, and it is never talked about openly.”

Sam blushed furiously when he said that, and I wondered what went through his mind at that point. Admittedly, a brief run of thoughts went through my mind right then as well, purely out of a sense of the perverse, and I quashed them as soon as I registered their presence. The last thing that I needed was to be thought of as odd by anyone in Sam’s clan. Dealing with my own relatives was going to be difficult enough.

With little further discussion, we gathered up our things and went out to Sam’s car, leaving mine in the relative shade of the covering oak tree. Sam followed my directions and we soon found ourselves at the gate to the bird sanctuary, peering into the deep shade of the overgrown woodlands beyond the gate. The gate was flanked by two stone gatehouses, and the open gate itself was a wide wooden affair with wrought iron railing on the top and carved wooden birds decorating the woodwork. Sam got out of his car and grabbed his backpack from the backseat. I snagged my water bottle, and the two of us walked in a nervous silence through the ornate gate that led inside.

Once inside the shade of the woods, we relaxed minutely, and I led the way up the curving trail towards the inner gate. This gate was about eight feet tall and was of imposing wire chain link. Only the smaller footpath gate was open today, and the larger gate was closed and padlocked against vehicular intruders. We slipped through the small gate without comment and followed the path up to the crossroads. There, we took a sharp right into a seemingly impassible rhododendron bush, and eased up the narrow trail that led to a little-known clearing.

As a child, I had spent a lot of time in the sanctuary, wandering around the woods and through the brush. There were a number of little benches and clearings tucked into out-of-the-way places, and these last remnants of the cultivated woodlands were all that left as the others crumbled away. The old birdcages that had once housed pheasants and quail had fallen down or burned, and the water sluice from the upper dam had filled with silt except for where the water still flowed. In the twenty some-odd years that I had been walking the trails, the area around the water had changed the most, and the shores of the two man-made ponds had been piled up with stones more than once to thwart the insistent flow of water.

The clearing that we entered now was surrounded by mammoth bushes and trees, including the rhododendrons themselves that reached a good fifteen feet into the air. The hemlocks were even taller. In the center was a small, cemented ring of stones, and to one side of the clearing was a cement and stone bench that curved in an arch about the length of my Pontiac. A space in the cement was all that was left of the bronze plaque, long ago pried from the place by vandals, but the bench itself was relatively undisturbed. I thought of the long history of this glade, from the two Buddha statues that had appeared and been subsequently destroyed to the yearly appearance of six pansies around the center pool. This clearing was obviously regarded as both a place of magical portent and a hangout for the smoker kids in town, as was evidenced by the prolific cigarette butts littering the ground.

“Well,” said Sam, “let’s do this.”

His lightness of tone betrayed his nervousness, and he stripped quickly while I averted my eyes. I wondered how long it might be before neither of us cared about modesty anymore. The slight sound of wind on waves came again, a bare susurrus of sound, and I turned to see the horse nosing the pack for the halter and lead.

I reached the pack and pulled out the halter, dropping the lead to the ground as I untangled them from each other. Sam watched cautiously while I straightened out the halter, and then held it out towards him hesitantly. His eyes showed white around the edges, but he held still as I gingerly placed the noseband over his muzzle and then reached up to secure the head strap around behind his ears. I felt him tense as I eased the strap through the buckle, and I stopped for a moment so as to let him calm himself. When he relaxed again, I tightened the strap and slid the tongue of the buckle into a rather loose but firm hole. When I was done, I backed off and let Sam get used to the halter.

He shook his head almost at once, and then shook it again, harder. His ears went back against his head, and he snapped at the air before finally heaving a huge sigh and looking at me steadily. His ears were still back, but he managed to look resigned at the necessity of the halter.

“Are you ok?” I asked.

He nodded his head once, and then pawed at the lead rope where it lay on the ground. I picked it up, clipped the end onto the loop of the halter, and let it dangle loosely from one hand. Sam shook his head again and led me back through the brush to the main path.

“Who’s leading who?” I laughed.

Sam snorted and stopped once we got to the main path. I passed him and led the way down the hill, directly away from that gate. Sam followed, matching his pace to my own, and the sound of his hooves on the dirt path made me start again as I grappled with the reality of my situation.

But after a while, it began to seem normal. Sam walked docilely beside me, never taking up the slack in the rope between us, and the warm buzz of the insects was lulling; it was too early for deerflies, and only the mosquitoes were attacking. I made a mental note to bring a can of Deep Woods Off with me next time we went on a walk like this, and fell into a dozy walk beside my friend. After a while, I laid one hand on his shoulder, and we went on like that as the trail wove down past the little pond and headed back up into the woods among the bright orange and fuchsia colored azalea blooms.

We walked like this in contented silence for a long time. In the distance, a dog barked causing Sam to flick an ear towards the sound, but otherwise, all was peaceful. We walked on for a long while, making the circular loop around the sanctuary, past the clearing with the log cabin used for special events, and back into the woods. It was a long while later when we found ourselves back at the crossroads and made our way back into the little glade. I slipped the halter off of Sam’s head and politely turned my back once more. A few short minutes later, we were on our way back down the path towards the car.

“Not too bad,” said Sam as we walked. “I managed not to lose my mind while wearing a halter, and you lived to tell the tale.”

“I’m assuming that was not a real worry,” I said, looking over to see him grinning at me.

“It was not. Worst that would have happened is I would have broken away for a quick jog to settle my nerves and come back once I’d done so. I’m not used to wearing anything, so it is unnerving. I won’t attack anyone unless I am really being threatened. If I pull away, though, let me go. There will be a good reason.”

We walked amiably back to the entrance and got into the car. Sam seemed more relaxed than he had been in days, and I could only surmise that it was because he had been able to totally be himself.

It was close enough to lunchtime that we decided to go into town and grab some early lunch at the Lantern Brunch, a nice little restaurant in the center of town. It was crowded – always was on a Sunday – and we waited patiently for a table of elderly ladies to finish their breakfast before being seated. The waitress was one of Sam’s clients and they chatted about her Scottish terrier and his allergies for a few minutes before she disappeared to put in our order. Sam smiled at me lazily. It was a lovely feeling to be in on his secret and eating with him.

“So,” he said. “Back to work tomorrow, right?”

“Sadly,” I said. I had been having such a great time with him that I had not even thought of work all weekend.

“Me as well,” he said. “Will you be free tomorrow night?”

“Probably,” I said. “We don’t have any rush jobs and all of the other ads are on schedule. I suspect we’ll have a fairly normal work load this week.”

“Me as well,” said Sam.

There was silence for a few minutes as we absorbed the return to our normal routine.

“I think it is safe to say,” I said finally, “that we both are thinking along the same lines. We want to see each other a lot but are afraid of monopolizing each other’s time?”

“Yes,” said Sam. “That is pretty much the case. I do want to spend as much time with you as I can, but I don’t want you to feel smothered.”

“How about we each tell each other when we need time for other things and not worry too much about it after that?” I said.

“Fair enough,” said Sam.

The eggs, when they came, were delicious.