Page 179 of Chaos

“You told Lux and Jackson.”

“That’s different. They’re not my parents.”

Dark brows rise as Finn drops his chin.

“Yeah.” I sigh. “Okay.”

Shuffling closer, he drops his chin to my shoulder. “She likes you.”

“She doesn't know me.”

“I’m very descriptive.” He kisses the curve of my neck before dropping his head to my lap—not in the fun way. He stretches out, snatching my hat up and plopping it over his face as he basks like he’s fucking sunbathing.

Drumming my fingers against the chocolate-colored felt hiding him, I smirk. “You know, there’s a rule about this.”

Tilting the hat back from his face, Finn eyes me curiously. “Remind me.”

“Wear the hat, ride the cowboy. Or the cowgirl, in this case.”

In the blink of an eye, the tables turn, our positions shift, and I’m the one flat on my back while Finn looms over me. “Yeah?”

A fine trickle of snow has started to fall, the entire back side of me is close to soaked through, and Finn’s weight is only pushing me harder against the cold ground, yet I don’t make a single effort to move. I don’t do anything but pluck the fallen hat up and drop it on Finn’s head again. “Uh huh.”

Contrary to what a slick grin suggests, Finn does not follow through on my offer. He ducks down, but his mouth doesn’t find mine in the ravenous, distracting kiss I’m hoping for—it pecks the arch of my cheekbone instead, sweet and chaste and entirely unsatisfactory.

I huff when he retreats. Huff again as I remain sprawled on my back, arms crossed like a brat, pouting like one too, though I struggle to maintain my sour expression when that laugh, my favorite sound in the world, echoes across Serenity.

That noise does something to me. More than the usual tingling butterflies, than the almost undefeatable urge to laugh too. Maybe it’s the way it travels, the way it dances over the snow-dusted grass and reverberates off a nearby crop of trees and, fuck me for saying this, but I swear the sun shines a little brighter, that has something in my brain snapping into place. Calls a question to the foreground. “Can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything you want.”

I blink at the blunt honestly, then request some more. “Are you… staying? Here? Like, long-term?”

Those fucking eyes twinkle. “Righthere?”

Smartass. “In Serenity.”

He drops to an elbow beside me, head cocked. “Are you?”

“I asked you first.”

“Yeah, but my answer is pretty contingent on yours.”

A blustering, gobsmacked noise escapes me. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Why?” he asks,he genuinely fucking asks.

I sit up. A little shaky. Oddly feverish.Baffled. “You’ve known me for… what? A few months?”

Finn opens his mouth only to promptly snaps it shut, pulling a face. “You’d lose your shit if I told you the exact amount of days, wouldn’t you?”

“No,” I snap, only half-lying because while I’m partly doing exactly what he accused at the mere prospect, I’m also a little pathetically giddy at how well he knows me. At what he’s saying, though, fuck, I don’t get how he’s saying it. How he’sserious. “You would seriously come with me if I left?”

“I seriously think I would implode if I didn’t.”

“Finn.”

Half-laughing, half-sighing, Finn sits up too. Shuffles closer. One hand holding mine, the other cupping my jaw, forcing my gaping mouth shut, tracing my parted lips. “What’s that saying?” he murmurs, his thumb denting my bottom lip. “Home is where the heart is?”

---