You and Laura Ingalls had been best friends since you were children. You had been inseparable, as thick as thieves. You had no secrets back then. Now that you were both 18 years old, you and Laura were still best friends. You told each other everything. Well… almost everything.

The older she got, the more Laura began to have strange feelings for women. She realized that she liked women the way she was meant to like men, and no amount of praying could change that. And truly, she tried. She tried to take her sinful feelings away. Then, she just gave up. She didn’t tell anyone what was happening with her, but she gave up on trying to change it. This was who she was.

Eventually, Laura realized that she was beginning to have feelings for you. Her best friend. She knew she could never tell you how she truly felt, but she had to have you somehow, at least a little. One day, in her family’s barn, Laura asked you to ‘practice kissing’ with her. She told you that it wasn’t a sin, because it was just practice.

You were both sitting before each other, resting on your heels, your hands on your thighs. Your breathing was a bit heavy, shuddering. Laura’s heart hammered in her chest. You asked her if she was sure that this was okay. You had always been taught that homosexual tendencies were a sin, and in some places, such a thing was punishable by death. Laura smiled and gently placed her hand on your cheek, running her thumb along the soft skin there. “I’m sure, it’s okay. Nothing bad is going to happen. Come on, have I ever let anything bad happen to you before?”

She had never wanted anything more than this. Laura leaned in a little bit closer to you. “You know I’ll always take care of you.*