River:Go away
Rubi:No
Rubi:What are you doing?
River:Playing darts with a picture of your head
Rubi:Double rude
River:What do you want from me?
At this point, anything. Watching Ranger tame a fox as if he’d been raised by the Folkster was as cute as it was unexpected, but it wasn’t enough to soothe my tired soul. I needed more—I neededRiver, in any capacity, even if it meant pissing him off enough to call me a cunt.
Rubi:I miss you
River started typing. Stopped and started again, and I knew him well enough to figure he wasn’t lost for words. That he was distracted, byAxel, who was almost as hella hot as Oscar The Fisherman.
You love Oscar.
True story, but I’d spent years hating him when he’d been nicer and younger than me, and spent more time with River than I could even dream of.
That’s not what this is.Rational thoughts for a rational person. But I wasn’t feeling particularly rational. If Mats had road belly, then I had roadbrain, and it made me regret telling Nash to bring Axel back to Devon to work on the Crow Land project.
You’re a twat.
Yup. I didn’t need Riv to tell me that, but my phone buzzed in my hand all the same.
River:I miss you too. And if you must fucking know, I’m smoking some banging green and eating wedding cake at Axel’s sister’s house
Rubi:Wedding cake?
River:She’s getting married
Rubi:Lucky her
River:Don’t be a dick. You love weddings
Rubi:I love cake. The rest of it is unnecessary
River:Says who?
Rubi:All Mathersons. It’s why my ma died a Lowe, remember?
As if River could forget my dead mother’s name. Or that she’d never married my dad. I hadn’t been motherfucking jesting when I’d told Ranger we’d all grown up with two sets of parents, and Riv had loved my mum as much as I had.
Maybe that’s why he did the text equivalent of hanging up again and left me onread. Whatever. I was cold, hungry, and bored of watching Ranger be adorable.
I kicked his boot, agitation rolling through me as River’s silence got under my skin, melding with the creeping sensation that I’d fucked up somehow. “Come the fuck on. I need my bed before I burn the world down by accident.”
Ranger obliged without argument, which should’ve been my first clue that everything was about to go to shit, but in the tizzy I’d worked myself into, I missed it, and we trudged back to the truck park with him scoffing Wotsits and me drifting in a fists-clenched sulk for no reason whatsoever.
Later, I’d realise I’d been so caught up worrying about Ranger’s noggin I’d forgotten about my own. In the moment, I ploughed on, sinking further into the kind of hell I hadn’t contemplated since Nash had punched me in the face way back when. Lost in thoughts that went nowhere. Lost in?—
Fuck. I collided with a gammony wall of man. Stale sweat and beer. Cheap cigs and shattitude. Goddammit, it was the tattooed barrel of bigotry Ranger had bounced a copper off earlier.
I reared back. “Sorry,mate.”
Couldn’t say it with a straight face or a tone an alien from outer space wouldn’t have recognised as belligerent.