He opens his mouth, but no words come out, just a strangled breath that makes his face contort in pain. He sighs and brushes invisible lint off of his pants.
“Nothing. Just sometimes, you say and do things and I think to myself that maybe there’s something I missed?”
“Oh, yeah, because you know mesowell.”
His face drops and an awkward silence coats my skin in itch powder.
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, embarrassment heating my cheeks. “I suppose it’s a little bit of a struggle to break old habits.”
He nods in understanding, but the hurt lingers in the brown of his eyes. We sit in silence for what feels like an eternity, each minute stretching longer and longer. Finn fiddles with the hem of his tee, a loose thread seeming so unbelievably interesting.
Eventually, the silence suffocates me too much and his name is ripping its way out of my mouth.
“Finley, I?—”
“What’s your favorite color?”
I blink at him. “I’m sorry, what?”
“I figure it might be easier for you if we started from the beginning.”
“And you thought ‘what’s your favorite color’ was the best place to start?”
“If it helps me at all, I am severely out of practice with this.” He chuckles wryly.
That does actually manage to drag a laugh out of me. “You don’t say.”
“Oh, so you think you got game?”
“Better game than you? Definitely.”
Finn’s eyebrow drags up. “Right now, that’s not particularly hard.”
“I’m just surprised and I have to admit, I’m slightly disappointed. I thought that you could get out of the best-friend’s-brother zone whenever you wanted?”
Finn’s gaze darkens and I find the walls of the barn move closer, and the space between us feel smaller.
Finn has a dark side and I don’t think it’s one that I’ll end up minding all that much. I’ve seen that little dark tinted animal show himself a few times ever since that kiss outside my house and so I know the effect that it has on me. It dulls my senses at the same time as it puts my nerves into overdrive. It has every skin cell sensitive to only his touch and responsive to only his words.
“I thought I’d already warned you about challenges?” he whispers.
I lean back and leisurely take a sip of my wine; the entire time I can feel Finn’s heated gaze on the side of my face. I wait until my wine glass is back down on the blanket before turning my head toward him. “That’s the thing about disappointment, Finley, it makes the person stop believing what you say.”
Finn’s tongue glides over his teeth as he grins down at his lap. I’m about to retort, but his smile slides off of his face as fast as it was created. His hand clenches beside him and he hesitates before grabbing his wine glass and downing the remainder of alcohol inside it. He swallows hard and bares his teeth in an animalistic way that, despite me being concerned for him, makes the summer heat be the secondary reason for my warm skin.
“Finn?”
No response. He scratches the back of his head and scrunches his eyes closed. His entire body curls in on itself, trying to protect him from something that I think is happening internally.
My hand on his arm jolts him. “Does anything in particular set it off?”
“That, um—” he shifts uncomfortably “—wasn’t a compulsion or anything.”
“Oh? Then what was it? Did I say something wrong?”
He shakes his head violently. “You could never say anything wrong, Cherry. I just…remembered something, is all.”
“Remembered what?”
