Page 24 of Chaos

“Just making conversation, Lottie.”

“I really strike you as a big conversationalist?”

“You—”

“Oh, darling,” I interrupt with a sardonic chuckle. “That was a rhetorical question.”

Silence persists for a long moment. “That attitude really doesn’t have an off-button, does it?”

“Not one any man has ever been able to find.”

“Sounds like you’re hanging out with the wrong men.”

“Are you the right man, Finn?”

The palpable weight of that drawled innuendo thickens the night air, makes it sticky and stifling despite the season slowly creeping towards winter.

Finn doesn’t respond. Not a peep, not a cough, not a single sound comes from below me, and I start to assume he went back inside, scared off by the mere notion of me in any sexual capacity. I don’t check though, and I blame that reluctance on vertigo. Not the teeny, tiny part of me that kind of, maybe, almost wants him to still be there. Hopes he’ll pipe up again. Likes, in this moment, sparring with him because it’s so very easy. It’s normal. It takes my mind off… well, everything else. Anything but him.

He’s the human equivalent of a bottle of wine, and fuck knows I could use one of them right now.

But would I call what I feel when his voice does eventually disturb the hum of cicadasrelief?Definitely not. I’m merely surprised that he’s still lingering, intrigued as to why, and then I’m half reconsidering those aforementioned wants and hopes and likes when his proclaimed words actually sink in.

“I wasn’t bullshitting earlier,” Finn says, quiet and sincere. One downward glance reveals him standing in the same place, his hands in his pockets, his eyes locked on mine despite the distance between us, despite the shadows I’m surely swathed in. “Alex really was sick.”

It’s my turn for silence, no response other than the sound of my heels hitting the A-frame as I let my legs swing.

“Lux really wanted to come get you.”

“I’m sure.”

“She did,” he insists, and he just has one of those voices, y’know. The kind you want to believe. Just bleeding pure honesty, like he doesn’t know how to lie, isn’t capable of it, wouldn’t know one if it slapped him in the face.

I don’t like it. Despite its very nature, I don’t trust it. And yet still, for some reason, I trust him to give me the truth when I ask, “Why was it you?”

And yet still, for some reason, I trust itisthe truth when he replies, “I offered.”

“And Eliza ruined your grand plans of leaving me in a ditch?”

“The boss thought you’d appreciate the familiar face.”

I’m glad for the darkness, for my vantage point, because it means Finn doesn’t see my grimace.

The boss.

God, we’ve called Lux that for as long as I can remember. Since way before she started running the ranch in any official capacity, since before she was unofficially running it too. Since she was the one who woke us, the youngest three Jacksons, up in the mornings. Who packed our lunches, who brushed our hair and ironed our uniforms and was always late to school because she was too busy making sure the rest of us were on time. Even Jackson, older by barely a year, but still the oldest, used to defer to her.

Ask the boss. Up to the boss. She’s the boss.

I used to think it was funny. Sweet. And then I got older and I stopped seeing my big sister as being quite sobig. I started seeing her as a girl only a couple of years older than me, a child who never got to be one, and I found it infuriating instead. I added it to the list of things that made me mad, or maybe thatwas where the list started. Maybe the very first thing was my sister shouldering that burden.

Beingthe burden.

It’s funny how that anger has morphed over the years and flipped on the very thing that started it. I bet a therapist would have something real interesting to say about that.

I bet Finn would too. Except Finn isn’t entitled to the inner workings of my twisted, tangled mind.

Finn, I don’t have to tell a damn thing.

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