Page 13

He watches her shrink into a version of her that doesn’t match the one he thought he knew, and he starts to wonder if he really knows anything at all.

Whiplash-incurringly quick, I fall into a shockingly familiar routine.

Two days. That’s all it takes. Forty-eight hours of waking up, working myself to the bone, dropping half-dead, and repeating, and then in the forty-ninth hour, habitual instinct kicks in.

I don’t just wake up before the sun—I beat my alarm too.

Grouch sleeps in my bed, she follows me to the bathroom a floor down, she whines like she hasn’t eaten in a millennia as I get ready for the day.

I see my roommates, my coworkers, my vestigial fucking limbs that I would hack off if I didn’t think they’d grow back with a vengeance. I see my brother. I see Eliza.

I don’t see Lux. I don’t see my nephews.

I don’t see the mother of one of them either, and I wonder if that’s by design.

I wonder if me and Luna Evans, my brother’s girlfriend—another example of how the role of the snarky bitch is beloved when played by anyone but me—are purposely being kept apart lest some kind of nuclear explosion occurs when our frighteningly similar dispositions inevitably collide.

What a break from the monotony that would be.

One routine day after another, the week passes quickly. I wish it wouldn’t because after the week comes the weekend. The weekend includes Sunday. Sunday is my least favorite day of the week.

Sunday, I go to a meeting.

My first meeting that isn’t a mandatory session enforced by a rehabilitation program. Although, really, one could call Serenity that. It kind of feels like one. It would be a good one, I think, for someone who really needed it.

Today, though, is not Sunday. Today is a much better day because today, I’m alone. No siblings. No Yasmin clucking my ear off, trying to be best fucking friends. No Finn, lurking in my peripheral, dominating my attention for reasons I don’t understand or like or tolerate very well.

We have guests arriving, a bunch of city folk gagging to cosplay the country life for a weekend by vacationing in the tastefully rustic deluxe cabins my grandparents spent a pretty penny constructing, and my sister spends even more maintaining.

Because nothing says working ranch like Egyptian cotton sheets and air conditioning.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not allowed to interact with our guests. I am relegated to the grunt work while the other hands show a gaggle of inappropriately dressed middle-aged women to their oh-so-humble abodes.

They like Finn. Even from inside the barn, I hear them ooh ’ing and aah ’ing over every male body on this ranch—my brother included, unfortunately—but naturally, they have a favourite.

Naturally, they like his smile. They like his tight jeans.

They like the hat on his head, and one of them whispers grand plans of snatching it for herself, giggling about the rule .

They like, fuck my life, the cropped muscle tee that falls an inch above indecent on a sculpted stomach.

They wax poetic about bared shoulders and veined forearms and a chiselled ravine of abdominal muscles until I’m tempted to lie down in the freshly mucked stall of a certain tempestuous stallion and scream in the hopes he might trample me out of my misery.

When an engine starts and the voices finally recede, I breathe a sigh of relief. I can hear myself think—I can think about something else besides wearing the hat and riding the cowboy.

Curling my fingers around the edge of Ruin’s stall door, I drop my chin to the wood between them, eyeing the horse I’ve been strictly forbidden from turning out on my own.

As tempted as I am to try anyway—honestly, Jackson should’ve known that commanding me to wait for one of the guys would rub me the wrong way—I won’t.

I do, actually, believe or not, have a few working brain cells kicking around up there.

I can begrudgingly acknowledge it’s not a task to be taken on solo.

Letting my head loll to one side so my knuckles dig into my cheek, I sigh again. “Not a big fan of being cooped up, are ya, buddy?”

Tossing his mane, Ruin snorts. A snippy, equine duh .

I snort back. A snippy, human okay, smartass.

A handsome smartass, I note as my gaze tracks the length of him, all long, graceful limbs and sinewed muscles and a sleek, black coat—and marks along his flank that I didn’t notice before.

Brow furrowed, I lean in to get a better look only to immediately wish I hadn’t, to inhale with a sharp hiss because I’ve been around enough rescued horses to recognize fucking whip marks when I see them. “What’d they do to you, pretty boy?”

His upper lip curls, exposing blunt teeth. Nothing good.

A sour sensation curdles my gut, fingertips smarting with how hard they clutch the stall. Fucking Webers.

“Well.” I huff hard enough to displace the hair that two French braids and a pair of low loose buns can’t contain. “No one here is gonna hurt you.”

If horses had eyebrows, I reckon Ruin’s would be halfway up that wide forehead, distrustfully tickling the base of two twitching ears.

“I promise.” I shift, propping my chin in my palm as I lean on one elbow, letting the other arm flop casually over the edge of the door. “Us Jacksons are a lot of things, but violent isn’t one of them. Dysfunctional and codependent, sure, but never violent.”

Ruin scuffs at the ground, bobbing his head, and I know he’s not actually nodding, but shit, it looks like he is.

It certainly fucking seems like he agrees with what I’m saying when he takes one hoofstep towards me, another soon to follow.

That strong, lithe body sidles closer until, if my dangling fingers so much as twitched, they would brush his muzzle.

“I don’t think you’re violent either,” I muse as Ruin sniffs my fingers, vaguely aware that he could bite them clean off if he felt so inclined. “Just a little aggressive, hey?”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

I startle with a curse. Head swinging towards the teenager strutting into the barn, barking dogs dancing around her feet, I start to correct her only to swear again instead.

“Fuck.” I glare at the stallion who just sank his fucking teeth into my wrist, already back in his beloved corner. “What the hell, my guy?”

“ See .” Eliza pulls a face. “ Violent .”

Muttering for her to shut up, I whistle for the dogs excitedly scratching at my shins to do the same thing.

Naturally, only Grouch obeys, because the only words her yapping brother knows are good and boy —the exact words my little sister summons her dog back to her side with, affectionately patting right above the eyepatch of brown fur that earned the pup his name.

Me, on the other hand, Eliza admonishes with a tut. “You’re not supposed to get so close. That horse is a headcase.”

“No, he’s not,” I defend with a whole of conviction for someone wearing the imprint of his teeth.

Like she’s thinking the same thing, Eliza squints at my hand. “He just bit you.”

“Because you startled him.” Shaking out my wrist, I show off nothing but a red mark, no broken skin. “The dogs did more damage than that when they were puppies. You never called them violent.”

“If by dogs ,” Eliza drawls, “you mean your little demon, then I sure as hell did. Pirate wouldn’t hurt a fly, would you, my good boy?”

Her good boy once left a dead rabbit on our doorstep, but God forbid I bring that up.

Instead, I push off the stall and get back to work, heading outside to grab the hose and fill up the water troughs. “What do you want, pipsqueak?”

Eliza kisses her teeth at the nickname, but she still holds out a aluminum-foil-wrapped cylinder. “Brought you breakfast,” she grumbles, a terrible attempt at sullenness considering the smile curling her mouth. “Since you keep skipping it.”

Hooking the hose over my shoulder, I peel back the tinfoil and groan at the sight of a loaded breakfast burrito. “You know you’re my favorite sister, right?”

She smiles, somehow haughty and sweet at the same time. “I’m everyone’s favorite sister.”

I snort, but I can’t argue.

“Thanks, little one,” I mumble around a mouthful of tortilla, eggs and avocado, knocking my shoulder against hers on my way back inside the barn.

She makes another huffy noise because she doesn’t like that nickname either, but it’s not enough to deter her. She still follows me inside, stealing the hose so she can refill the troughs herself and leaving me with both hands free to scoff my breakfast.

We finish our tasks quickly, and I take the hose back so I can rinse off my hands, mid-drying them off on my jeans when arms wrap around me from the side.

If Eliza feels me stiffen, she doesn’t acknowledge it. If anything, her grip tightens as she practically suffocates me with an impromptu, unwanted fucking snuggle . “Feel like I’ve barely seen you, Lot. I thought you being back would mean you actually being around, y’know.”

Chewing on my bottom lip, I awkwardly reach up to pat my little sister on the shoulder. “I’m always around.”

Eliza pulls away, eyes narrowed—espresso brown eyes she inherited from our mother, the same as Lux and Jackson, darker than mine and Grace’s. “You’re avoiding me.”

“I’m not avoiding you.”

“You're avoiding Lux which means you're avoiding me by default.”

Again, I can’t argue. But I can counter, “ She’s avoiding me .”

Eliza scoffs, one hand dropping to her hip while the other dismisses my claim with a wave. “She doesn’t have the time or the energy to avoid you. She’s just busy.”

A fresh wave of discomfort washes over me, my body so stiff it’s like there’s a steel rod where my spine should be. “Is she still…”

“Raising a child, running two businesses, and spitting in the face of any real, meaningful help?” Eliza finishes for me with a sigh and an eye roll. “Of course. What else would she be doing?”