Chapter Ten
“We’ve got tents coming.”
“Cool,” said Dakota. “It’s been a while since I pitched a tent.”
Rowdy laughed. “It is a desert experience out here, I’ll tell you that.”
Jax didn’t say anything, because what could he say? It had not been a long time since he’d pitched a tent, so to speak, nor had it been a long time since he’d gotten satisfaction from it. But he didn’t think he ought to bring that up.
Dakota and Rowdy were both looking at him; he could feel it. “Well, are we going to work on the tents today or not?” he asked.
“We certainly can,” Rowdy said.
He and Ernestine had slept together three days earlier.
She had been digging exhaustively since then, and he hadn’t wanted to push the idea of coming over.
It was weird to have any space from her, because he’d barely had any at all since she had first come to the ranch, and it was even weirder to give her space after sex, but he was very conscious of the fact that it was her first time.
Also, Ernestine was bold. If she wanted something to be different, she would probably show up on his doorstep and say so.
“Yeah,” Dakota said. “But I think you’re withholding information.”
“All information is not edifying for you to possess,” he said.
“You got laid,” Rowdy said.
“I did, Rowdy, but a gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.” At this point, being cagey about it wasn’t going to help anything.
He felt hard eyes on the side of his head. “What?” he asked, turning to look at Rowdy.
“You would tell me if it was…”
“Who?”
All he could think of was Ernestine.
“Jessica is my best friend,” he said. “With the exception of you two idiots. And considering you’re brothers, I feel like I don’t actually have to put you in the same category.”
“You honestly think that I would sleep with Jessica? No. That’s ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous? She’s beautiful.”
“She is beautiful,” he said. “But she’s your friend. She’s—”
He didn’t want to say it, but the truth of the matter was they were so close, so tangled around each other’s lives that it was often difficult for him to believe that they were platonic. Even though they gave every indication of being. And Rowdy had said so, several times.
“I’m not crass enough to do that,” Jax said.
“All right. I’m not saying you can’t. Obviously she can do whatever she wants, and things have been difficult for her since the accident. Her self-esteem really took a hit. That’s the thing.”
“Oh, that’s the thing,” Dakota said. Rowdy shot him a deadly glare. “Am I allowed to sleep with her?” Dakota asked.
“Not you,” he said.
“Excuse me, what the hell?”
“Jax is nice.”
Jax felt offended. In fact, if he’d had a set of pearls, he might’ve clutched them. “I’m nice?”
“You are,” Dakota and Rowdy said together.
“I’m a motherfucking MMA fighter!”
“Yeah. You are. You get paid to fight, which is why you never do it in the streets. And you always treat people with respect.”
“I…” He realized it was a weird thing to protest. “I like to think that I do.”
“You are decent. You’re the kind of guy it would be hard to be mad at even if you were like…sleeping with my sister or something. Not that I have a sister.”
None of them were unburdened by loss.
“So now that we’ve established you didn’t sleep with my friend,” Rowdy said. “Are you gatekeeping hot women?”
“I’m not gatekeeping anything.”
“Oh shit,” Dakota said. “You slept with the little scientist. The little bone scientist.”
“Don’t call her that. And don’t…don’t say that. She… It would embarrass her.”
“Why? Was it bad?”
“It was not bad.”
“This is the kind of thing that gives me trust issues,” Dakota said. “Because this is exactly what you aren’t supposed to do with guests. And she’s the only guest we’ve had and you’re already knocking boots with her.”
“She’s technically not a guest. She’s not in our reservation system.”
“She’s paying to be here.”
“Kind of. We didn’t even give her an official rate or anything. I just took all that grant money she was offering. And anyway, she asked me to sleep with her.”
“Well, that’s not new for you,” Rowdy said. “You’re going to have to be fortified for when our guests ask you to sleep with them. And it will happen.”
“We did agree,” Dakota said. “That if they’re really hot we can.”
“I don’t think that’s what we agreed on,” Jax said.
“Close enough,” said Rowdy.
“Not close enough,” he said.
He shook his head. “You guys are ridiculous. Let’s go do the tents. You can quit worrying about where I’ve had my penis.”
They all grimaced and growled. “Well, that’s what we’re doing. We’re standing here talking about my dick. And you’re the ones who brought it up. So if you don’t like it, maybe don’t ask questions like that.”
“I don’t like it,” Dakota said. “I don’t like it at all.”
“Then mind your own business.”
They piled into the truck, and went over to the Oregon Trail campground, where all of the materials had been dropped off for the tents. They got out of the truck, and surveyed the scaffolding, canvas and other construction items. “Y’all are just mad because I got to her before you did,” he said.
“Hardly,” Dakota said.
“Why not? She’s pretty?”
“She is pretty,” Dakota said. “But I don’t know if I have it in me to pillow talk about pterodactyls.”
“She prefers primordial possums.”
“Oh, that changes everything.”
They let that discussion fall by the wayside, and they began to set out a game plan for getting the tents erected. They had large cots for each one, and they were going to put in some nice rugs, and other things to make them feel a little bit more plush. But first things first.
“You know what would be good?” Rowdy asked when they were halfway through the first tent, sweat dripping down their faces. “Doing a dry run of the trail.”
“Yeah,” he said slowly. “That would be good.”
“So we should definitely do that. Jessica would want to come. And I bet your little bone scientist would like to come too.”
“My little bone scientist,” he said, his tone dry.
“Call it what you want, but that about sums it up.”
“Yeah, yeah. You’re oversimplifying a very complicated job.”
“I’m sure. I’m sure.”
He hadn’t exactly meant to walk himself into this conversation, but it wasn’t a big deal that they knew. Though, Ernestine might feel differently about it. They were midway through the second tent when he decided he couldn’t just sit on that worry. “Don’t say anything to her.”
“Excuse me?” Rowdy asked.
“Don’t tell her that you know. She’ll be embarrassed.”
“We’re not going to say anything to her,” Dakota said. “Razzing you is one thing.”
They were both feral, as was he. They understood each other. Had context for each other. But nobody else really did.
Ernestine seemed to understand better than anyone he’d ever met, though.
It was kind of amazing. She was so much more interested—rather than horrified—than anyone else ever had been.
Not that he really had relationships. He’d fallen hard into the casual sex scene when he’d been fighting.
It was just so easy. And after a fight the testosterone rolled off of him in waves, and it felt like the thing to do.
It really did.
And so he’d gotten right in there. Fucked around and had existed in a really shallow space with all of the women that he slept with.
Because there was no point getting into all that.
No point to relationships. There was no point to one with Ernestine either, and yet he found himself in the position where she knew more about him than Dakota and Rowdy.
Yeah, they knew his whole biography, but they didn’t know what he looked like naked, so that was where he calculated that math.
“You really like her?” Dakota asked.
“I really do. But if you’re asking me if it’s relationship stuff, the answer is no. You know how that goes. I don’t have any room for that.”
“You don’t have any room for that, or you’re too filled up with trauma to have room for that, because that is a slightly different sentence.”
He lifted a brow. “You’re really not one to talk.”
“Yeah, I didn’t say that I was better.”
“That would be nice, though,” Rowdy said. “Getting married. Having a house, a family.”
That word was such a strange and loaded one.
The image of a house with a husband, a wife and children was one that he knew unnerved all of them for a variety of reasons.
Dakota had lived through hellish neglect, his sister dying because of it.
With Rowdy, it was his parents’ mutual destruction.
And for Jax it was a toxic, abusive, murderous father.
None of them had intended to carry a bloodline on.
What Rowdy was saying now was that it would be nice in a world where any of them could believe that fantasy existed.
But they knew better. They knew how bad things could be.
They knew that falling in love, having kids, didn’t save you from darkness, and oftentimes the kids became victims of that darkness.
The testament to the fact that what didn’t kill you changed you in ways that sometimes couldn’t be repaired.
Life just wasn’t that simple. It would be nice if it were.
“She’s interesting. She’s smart. She loves fossils. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone like her. And in some ways, she’s more like us than you think. Obsessive, determined and driven. But she’s a really nice woman. She deserves to go on to a nice life, with a nice man.”
“We’ve established that you’re nice.”
“On the surface. But there’s other shit. I mean come on, can you imagine? You take someone who’s not traumatized and bring them into all of this?”
“I don’t even think it’s better to bring in someone who’s traumatized,” Dakota said. “Then you just sort of feed off of each other’s tragedy.”
“And there you go. That’s why we agreed. We are doing this. We’re each other’s family. The rest… There’s no fixing it. There is no figuring it out. There’s none of that.”
“None of that happiness in healing,” Dakota said, smiling. “Live, laugh, be fucking broken forever.”
“Great. Let’s finish setting these up. And then, we can plan our dry run.”