Page 103 of Coiled Tight
Now, you’d think a normal person would have taken that to mean maybe he was a bit too much. What I got for my trouble was him being more on my ass than he’d been before. Now I literally asked around for him when I didn’t see him in one of my rides to check in on the animals.
One of those times, he’d actually been sick, and I’d made what I now considered the mistake of cooking him chili to get better. The next day, he’d been beside me and talking with everyone who would listen about how I was his savior and also the best cook the sanctuary had ever had. It was now a whole thing, no matter how many threats Daddy wanted to give the hands for treating me like a private chef with all their requests.
I secretly didn’t hate it, but that wasn’t the point.
“Um. You do know I’m going somewhere, right?”
At this point, it was part of our thing. I pointed out I was going somewhere, but he dismissed it with a chuckle and went off to say whatever it was that he wanted to share. Usually, it was just random small talk about his day. Other times, he wanted to go on random trips down memory lane. I suspected he felt lonely and maybe wasn’t as close with the other hands as he made it out to be. When I told Daddy, he didn’t think that was it, though.
Maybe once I’d mastered the stuff with Daddy’s parents, Dwight could be my next mission.
“Well, of course. Saúl kept saying that you’re going riding today.” As the guy who didn’t have an understanding of what personal boundaries are, the next thing I knew, he had his arm wrapped around my shoulder. “Any idea what that’s all about? Because he’s been snapping at us more than usual all day.”
Huh?
I frowned. “Um. I don’t know.”
Had something happened? Not that I was aware of. And it wouldn’t be anything positive, either, right? There were no important dates I was forgetting about or anything else, so if Daddy was snappy, something was going on, andoh fuck, I thought we were just going on a ride because he insisted that I kept getting used to Mercury, but what if it was something else?
And why couldn’t Dwight have kept his mouth shut?
Maybe his mood had nothing to do with me. Maybe it just happened that the rest of the hands had been slacking off—Daddy complained a lot about it every time there was a new influx of workers—and it had been justified.
… I was definitely not ready to graduate from therapy.
This was not a fun realization to have.
Dwight better be exaggerating about Daddy’s mood because the last thing I needed was to have him be all grumpy. Swiftheart didn’t, either. All horses were responsive to their rider’s mood, but I’d never met one as perceptive and terrifyingly attuned to them as Daddy’s mare. I was so glad we didn’t sell horses, or it would be one hell of a struggle to keep Swiftheart with us.
“Hey, I’m sure you’re good,” Dwight said. “Saúl never snaps at you.”
I scoffed. Of course he didn’t. He never really snappedat Dwight either. He just huffed and puffed more than usual, and we all pretended he was acting very mature and didn’t point out that Dwight wasn’t his annoying little brother. Sometimes they acted more like siblings than Saúl and Sofía.
Speaking of which, Sofía had asked me to check in on Blondie. She had already checked her over in the morning before she left for a congress she was speaking at. Sofía didn’t think it was anything too serious, but we had her on antibiotics without a proper diagnosis yet, and I was the last person who had the right to say anything about getting anxious around the well-being of animals.
“You really are the one person out there without a clue of how anxiety works, aren’t you?” There was no cynicism in my voice.
It wasn’t an attack. I was just flabbergasted that he really didn’t, that he meant it when he said he was sure I wasgoodand that would fix everything.
I wish it did, that something was as easy for once.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” he grumbled, “but I mean it. Why would you think he was going to be mad with you? You could tell him to eat horse shit, and he would.”
That was not an image I needed anywhere near my head.
Yuck.
Seriously.
Why did I have to visualizethat, of all things?
“Anyway.” I cleared my throat. “Did you just want to gossip about your boss, or…?”
“He hates when you call him my boss. Just so you know.”
I harrumphed. Of course I knew Daddy hated it. It was why I kept doing it, but it was also not the point. I was trying to be friendly, dammit. Everyone said I had to be.
Well, it wasn’t a total hardship. I liked most of the people working at the sanctuary. They were good with the animalsand cared about them, and they didn’t hold any conservative viewpoints because that got them the boot right away. Daddy ran a tight ship. He didn’t get a say on who his dad hired behind his back, but he sure got a say on who got fired.
