Page 12 of Chaos (The Serenity Ranch #2)
I know, but I pretend I don’t. I pretend that I cling to my anger because I want to, not because I have to, because it’s a coping mechanism so deeply ingrained within me, I don’t know how to cut it out. Just like I pretend I haven’t done anything, another thing, wrong.
“Okay,” I say to my sister, lifting the hand not crushing a long-forgotten sandwich like I crush the concept of an apology in a farewell salute. “Then I guess we have nothing to talk about.”
Grouch follows me home.
She follows me into Finn’s truck, she follows me back out, she follows me inside the A-frame, and I’m about to follow her upstairs when a masculine voice stops me.
“You’re a Jackson?”
Eyeing the meager few steps between me and the staircase to the first floor, I sigh. As I slowly turn around, I sigh again at the four people peering at me inquisitively from the other side of the room. “Am I?”
“I knew it.” Yasmin slaps Theo gently. “Didn’t I tell you?”
“What, you’re like a cousin or something?”
“No,” Adam answers for me, and now he’s looking at me like that , like Yasmin was looking at me earlier, all knowing and suspicious and unsettling. “You’re the other sister, right?”
Yeah, I’m not doing this. Not only do I not want to answer a barrage of questions about my personal life, I can’t.
I’m familiar enough with the growing itch beneath my skin, making it feel like it’s stretched too tight over my bones, to know it’s a warning sign.
Detonation imminent. Clear the area, establish a perimeter, get the fuck away.
So I do just that. Without another word, I toe off my boots and head upstairs, finding Grouch waiting impatiently at the base of the ladder that leads to the attic.
Somehow managing to scale it with her tucked under my arm and my ankle threatening to give out with each climbed rung, I shoulder my way through the trapdoor and haul both of us onto solid ground.
Despite the bone-deep fatigue weighing down my every limb, as I watch Grouch curl up amongst the pillows messily strewn across my unmade bed, my stomach turns at the thought of joining her.
And it turns again as I push to my feet and let my gaze wander around the small attic, with its low, sloping ceilings and an entire, exposing wall made of windows that flood the room with the orange light of a setting sun, and not enough floor to adequately pace.
I need to pace. I need space . I need air and privacy and a fucking drink—I need them, that , bad enough to make my hands fucking shake.
The first two, I find when I spot the latch on one of the window panels, and I realize that the sturdy beam outside, running from one side of the roof to the other, creates a little alcove in the structure that’s just wide enough for a body.
The latter, there’s fuck all I can do about except rifle through my unpacked bags until I find the lighter I use sparingly, the half-empty carton of cigarettes I ration even more, and indulge a different craving.
It’s counter-productive, I know, to curb one addiction by feeding another, but fuck, I’m only human.
Something has to give. I need some kind of mindless distraction to numb my whirling thoughts, and since I’m pretty sure no one in this house would be willing to fuck the anxiety out of me, I’m shit out of options.
There’s nothing to do but clamber out the window, settle on my precarious perch, and suck in alternating lungfuls of smoke and fresh, Serenity air until the ache behind my eyeballs recedes.
It takes a while. So long that darkness sets in, the room behind me becoming pitch black. The never-ending land stretching out before me is much the same, except for the patch of grass illuminated by the light spilling out of the back of the A-frame.
The back door must be open because voices bleed out into the night.
My roommates. Their laughter and chatter, and clanging dishes.
Eyes closing, I rest my temple against the window frame, and I imagine them down there.
Moving in familiar synchronicity as they cook dinner together.
Debriefing their day, maybe. Calculating who mucked out the greatest quantity of horse shit.
Talking about me.
My gut rolls at the thought of that. But aloud, because even in private I’m too proud to show any weakness, I huff, “Who the fuck cares?”
“You’re not gonna jump, are you?”
I almost fucking do.
I almost slip right off the damn ledge with how hard I jolt as that familiar, deep voice scares the shit out of me—luckily for the man directly beneath me, it’s only my lighter that falls to the ground.
I curse as it drops, and again when I lean forward as much as I dare and realize how high up I actually am, and three times is the damn charm when Finn emerges from the shadows he’s been lurking in for who knows how long.
Cast in artificial light, he drops to his haunches and picks up the lighter.
Flipping it between his fingers as he straightens, I hear the exact moment he reads the block letters printed on one side.
I hear the splutter of choked laughter, and I quip, “Hope I haven’t offended your delicate sensibilities. ”
Tucking my lighter in his back pocket, Finn tilts his face up towards me. “Are you gonna be that charming when I catch you next?”
No. I imagine, if I suffered the same fate, I would probably spout something a hell of a lot fouler than the single word decorating the lighter my twin bought me years ago, long before I ever started smoking, simply because she thought it was funny.
Because Grace saw the bright pinkish-red cylinder labelled CUNT and thought of me.
“You didn’t catch it,” I point out, pushing away the thought of the only sister I’ve yet to reunite with. “And I don’t remember asking you to catch me.”
“I’m heroic like that.”
A dull laugh leaves me as I take another drag of my quickly dwindling cigarette.
“That’ll kill you, y’know.”
“ What ?” I gasp, daring to peer downwards once more. “Since when?”
Shaking his head at my sarcasm, Finn changes the subject.
Slumping against the window again, I blow out a mouthful of smoke. “Why do you care?
“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 cicadas relief?
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 it is the 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 so big .
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 that was where the list started.
Maybe the very first thing was my sister shouldering that burden.
Being the 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.
Finn, I can escape, at least temporarily, by slipping back through the attic window and letting it shut with a loud clang in lieu of bidding him goodnight.
Finn, I think of as I fall asleep, hearing his voice offering to pick up the girl he doesn’t know, but already doesn’t like, and being oh-so-very disappointed when he gets exactly what he expected.