Spin (6 page)

~ Finn ~

I KEPT OUR fingers entwined as I led her inside,
partly because I didn’t want her to fall over and partly because I
was afraid she might bolt.

She was doing “beautiful and a little crazy”
perfect right now, but I knew Janey Mac, and along with her
dirty-sexy smile came a furrowed brow and a red-hot tension that
used to emanate off her like waves of heat.

So if today was simply some cosmic spin-off,
some solar flare of Janey Mac, a celestial fuck to off-gas some
energy, then three orgasms in almost as many minutes might be
enough to bring her back to earth. Reinject some sanity. Make her
stop being reckless.

I had no intention of letting that happen.
Because while she might be calming down, I felt as if I was zeroing
in. Turning on.

I led her into the house. It glowed with new
wood and polished old wood and sunlight. “Can I have something to
drink?” she asked.

I detoured smoothly to the kitchen. Our
fingers stayed entwined. I grabbed a beer from the fridge and held
it out, but she shook her head.

“I think I’m intoxicated enough,” she said
in a soft way that wasn’t familiar. But her eyes were bright, and
she was smiling at me, so that was good.

Very good.

I filled two pint glasses full of water and
ice and handed one over. Glistening drops of water spilled over her
slim fingers. Everything inside me shouted,
Fucking take her
now, now, now,
and it didn’t really matter if it in was the
bedroom or the kitchen table. Or on the floor.

But she was looking around the kitchen, then
she wandered into my living area, so I pulled out one of the huge
oak chairs beside the table and sat, waiting for her, holding my
urges in check.

For now.

“Want some food?” I asked. It was
dinnertime, and the last thing I needed was Janey getting
faint.

She stopped dead halfway through the room,
her back to me, staring into the living room, where God knew what
lurked.

“You still play,” she said.

Ah. Right. The instruments. “I still
play.”

I couldn’t decipher her reaction to this bit
of news. I couldn’t see her face. Just her body, motionless, her
hair swinging lightly against the small of her back.

Back in the day, music had been part of the
scene, where a lot of bad shit had gone down, although at the time,
it felt like good shit. Having a chip the size of California on
your shoulder made that happen. Music had been my way out of Dodge
before I could actually leave. Afterward, college didn’t work out,
but the military did, for eight years. I came out with a lot of
dangerous skills and the chip on my shoulder firmly in place. I
started building and smashing things for a good bit of money, and
playing music for almost none.

Because, through it all, the disappointments
and the anger and the fights and the trips to Dodge Run’s two-cell
county jail, and then through the sand and the sweat and the death
and destruction and falling bombs and dying friends, had been the
music.

Then my Ranger buddy, Nick Murphy, launched
out of the military six months behind me and hauled my ass into his
business plans. They were big plans, starting with a pawnshop, my
specialty. Now, almost three years later, we owned a high-end pawn
business worth a lot of money.

I eyed Jane’s curving back and decided now
wasn’t the time to tell her about the pawn business.

She’d set her glass on the windowsill and
was staring down at my favorite acoustic plug-in guitar.

To a lot of people who grew up in towns like
mine and Janey’s, music was where the trouble started. To people
like the Dantes, that was good. To people like the MacInnees, it
was bad. Real bad.

So this moment was a crapshoot. She could
care or not care.

So could I.

She crouched and ran her fingers across the
Gibson’s rosewood fretboard, then across the strings. A ghostly
chord entered the room. She looked over her shoulder at me. She
smiled.

I blew out a silent breath that I didn’t
realize I’d been holding.

Maybe Janey had grown up too, figured out
that all those lessons we’d learned growing up, about who we were
and who we were capable of becoming, were nothing but soul murders,
one by one, of the children of Dodge Run.

~ Jane ~

I COULD NOT remove the goofy smile from my face. The
wall of instruments in front of me felt like some kind
of…
celebration
. A carnival of music. Two guitars, a banjo,
an electric bass on a stand, two bright shiny harmonicas beaming
down at me from a shelf, a sturdy, scuffed violin, and one shy, tan
dulcimer. And drumsticks.

It was a jubilee of music.

A ripply feeling curled weightlessly through
my body.

When I was ten, my mom had taken a day off
from being insane and organized and brought me to the beach. I’d
waded out into the ocean and got swooped up on a wave. There I was,
on top, riding it by accident. For a second, I was terrified. Then
I realized I could see everything.
Everything
. The beach,
the tanned bodies and bright bikinis and hot sand. And on the other
side of me, nothing but sea. Me and that wave and the blue, blue
sea. My belly
whooshed
with excitement and fear. I was above
it all. Untouchable.

Then that damned thing rolled me into shore
so fast and furious I got pitched head over heels and skidded
face-first through the sand. I crawled out choking, spitting
seawater, with bloody scratches across my face, broken seashells in
my hair, and sand in my eyeballs.

But I never forgot that for one glorious
second, I’d been weightless and flying.

I had that same feeling now, looking at
Finn’s instruments.

I have no idea why. But the smile started
inside me, in that weightless place, and I couldn’t have stopped it
if Pop been standing there with a strap in his hand.

“Drums too?” I asked. That’s what he used to
play, in the background, thrumming out the beat everyone else moved
to.

He nodded. “All of them.”

“Some things don’t change,” I said
softly.

“Oh, I’ve changed.”

I straightened and rested my bottom against
the sill of the huge window that overlooked a green meadow.
“How?”

“Well, I’m taller.”

“Hmmm.” I examined him critically. “You’ve
also shaved off almost all the hair on your head but left a lot on
your face, and you’re as quiet as ever.”

He laughed. “I can talk. You want me to
talk?”

“No,” I said quickly. “Don’t.”

He lifted his eyebrows.

“I mean, don’t change anything. For me. Just
be you.” I really, really wanted him to be himself. I really,
really wanted to be with the cyclone center of him.

He nodded, his gaze roaming over my face. I
set my glass on the table, sat on the couch, and dragged the guitar
onto my lap.

He smiled. “You play?”

I started playing “Born Under a Bad Sign,”
the one song I can manage on the guitar. Not quite weightless and
ripply, but it’s only three chords and I sometimes play only two of
them. Kind of hard to mess up. I sang Finn a verse and a chorus
while I played my two-to-three chords.

He watched, his long, lean body kicked back
in the chair, one boot out, his elbow on the table beside him so I
could see the circle of sweat under his arm darkening his light
blue shirt. To me, he looked perfect.

I strummed the last note with a faint
flourish. “Ta-da.”

He gave me the slow, lazy smile. “Careful,
Janey Mac. You might find yourself some trouble, singing like
that.”

I leaned back and tapped the guitar
thoughtfully. “How come we never ran into each other more,
Finn?”

“Ran into?” His smile was almost mocking.
“We moved in different worlds, Jane.”

“Yeah, different.”

His blue eyes watched me. “Would you have
noticed me?”

“Finn, I kissed you.”

“Right.” But he said it like that didn’t
count. I squinted at him.

He looked at me for a long time, then said,
“You were pretty busy.” He reached across the table for his glass.
Drops of water slid down from the frosty rim in wet trails.

“Yeah,” I said glumly. “Busy.”

“All those events. Saving the world.”

I nodded, feeling oddly validated. I didn’t
expect Finn to get it.

“Being perfect,” he went on. “Pissing people
off.”

My jaw dropped. “Wh— I—” It was too shocking
a statement to be angry about.

“Was that rude?” he asked. He didn’t sound
too worried about the answer.

“Sort of,” I said, half doubtful, half
curious. “I think you’re supposed to say things like, ‘finishing
high school’ and ‘hanging out with friends.’”

“Do you want me to say things like high
school and friends?”

Did I want him to lie? That was the
question. Should he be like everyone else, move his mouth and mean
nothing?

I looked out the back window and saw a
grassy meadow that sloped gently down to a grove of trees. “No,” I
said. “I do not want that.” I reached for my glass. Beads of water
were sweating down the side, cold little rivulets. “Was I really
like that?”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” He nodded. “Yes.”

I let out a breath. “I guess you’re right. I
used to spend a lot of time trying to be perfect. Now, I don’t
know.” The glass was cold against my fingers. “I guess I’m still
wound kind of tight a lot of the time.” I was quiet a second. “I
didn’t think I could go out with you back then,” I said, talking
more to myself now. “I mean, I didn’t think it was
possible
.
Physically.”

It sounded crazy, but there it was.
Everything with Finn had been a bright, burning flash, like a
falling star. Fast kisses, panted breaths, sliding zippers.
Anything more was out of the question. You just didn’t do that sort
of thing. You didn’t cross the tracks—or the river. You didn’t mix
with pawnshop people like the Dantes. You didn’t go after what you
wanted. You just…didn’t.

Or at least, the mayor’s daughter didn’t.
Not with the wild Dante brood, who were always being hauled into
jail, sobered up, and kicked back out again like cats.

“
Wildcats,”
my father used to growl.
“Fucking lawless. Earl lets them run wild, and Dilly’s no more
use than a wet broom. Not a fit mother. Not right in the
head.”

As if we didn’t have enough of that at
home.

“
It’s having those four devil spawn as
sons,”
Pop would finish, locking me in his gaze, as if he was
prescient and could see my invisible desire for Finn.
“They all
but killed her. That g.d. music and drugging and too much drinking.
Nothing but trouble.”

As if we didn’t have enough of that at
home.

Finn’s eyes met mine across the room. He
said, “Anything’s possible,” and I said, “I’m glad you still play.”
Screw you, Pop.

“Glad to hear it.” Sunset flowed into the
room, across the bottom of his jeans. “What about now, Jane? What’s
up with the Sandlers?”

I blinked. “Who?”

“The Sandler-Rosses? Your clients?”

“Oh, right.” I nodded, unsure how my biggest
clients had slipped my mind. “They’re my ticket.”

“Where you going?”

“Onto maps.” I watched a wobbly wet rim of
water form around the base of my ice water.

Finn watched me a second, then tipped his
chair backward, front legs off the floor, and leaned against the
wall, his hands laced behind his head. “Just any old map?”

I shook my head. “Nope. Ones you can’t get
to from Dodge.”

“And yet, there you go.”

I suspected he was making fun of me. “Are
you making fun of me?

He shook his head. “You got out. One of the
few. It’s an accomplishment.”

“So did you,” I said, returning the
compliment. Finn had been to college. He’d always been the
cleverest Dante and not just with his hands. He’d been offered
scholarships to six different colleges for nothing but his
grades.

He shrugged. “I dropped out of college.
Joined the military.”

This was a shocking statement from start to
finish. He’d left college? Left his scholarships? Joined the
military?

I felt a little cold and little excited. I
wanted to ask a hundred questions, but something about the look in
his eyes made me not. So all I said was, “Why?”

His fingers, thick and tanned, skimmed
across a drop of water on the table. “Why what? College or the
military?”

“Both. Either. Anything.”
Tell me
anything about you.
I hugged the guitar a little tighter. “You
don’t want to talk about the military, do you?”

“Rather not right now.”

I nodded. “So tell me something about
college.”

He gave a small shake of his head, lifted
and dropped one shoulder. “I just knew it wasn’t right for me.”