Page 88 of Virago

She nodded. “I know this is hard, Uncle. I’m really grateful. Please don’t be mad.”

Show softened at once. “I’m not, firecracker. I don’t like it, and I wish you rode horses in the circus like you wanted when you were six, but I’m not mad.”

Shannon picked up his hand and pressed her lips to his knuckles, made red and knobby by age and injury. “Good. Let’s have a good time tonight. It’s a day to celebrate. We love you, Gia. You know that.”

Gia smiled. “I do. And I love you both more than I could say.”

~oOo~

Well, her mellow not-party birthday dinner turned into a party after all. There had to be close to fifty people milling about the yard.

It was a beautiful early-July evening—still quite warm but not oppressively humid. A light breeze kept the air fresh, and the dusk lifted the voices of summer wildlife. One of Gia’s all-time favorite sounds was the susurrating drone of crickets and cicadas, and it served as the bassline for the sparkling melodies of laughter and conversation around her. There had been music earlier, but the playlist had ended and no one had started another. Gia was glad; she enjoyed the natural sounds of nature and family.

She sat on a padded chaise lounge under the big oak tree and enjoyed herself watching everyone enjoy themselves. Right now, she was on her own, but that had been a rare occurrence. For the most part, she’d felt like an ancient queen reposing on a litter, holding court as people gathered around her. She took the moment she had and relaxed into the peace of a summer night at home.

Clusters of grownups and teens stood around talking and laughing. Children ran and squealed and giggled, chasing each other, chasing lightning bugs, chasing the various dogs that had joined the party. The dogs chased each other. Cheese and Crackers had found somewhere to tuck in and avoid all that canine exuberance.

Gia was happy.

Dinner was over, and what was left of the cake looked like it had been attacked by a deranged axe-murderer. Under the chaise was a shiny-red paper gift bag that had held a black t-shirt with the text DOCTOR BADASS across the chest (from Lexi). The t-shirt was in the living room with her other presents, and the gift bag had been repurposed to hold the cash patches kept handing to her.

The men of the Night Horde were simple creatures, really. Where gifts were concerned, they were basically hopeless. They either shoved money at the giftee, or they shoved money at an old lady who bought an actual gift. As the current giftee, Gia honestly preferred money, if only because nobody expected a gift-opening show when the gift was a rumpled wad of twenties.

Zaxx hadn’t given her a gift at all, and that was fine with her. It was probably too early for romantic gifts, and she wouldn’t have known how to take it if he’d handed her a wad of bills.

She lay back and watched him talking to Darwin and Thumper, each with a bottle of Stella. He’d spent most of the evening at her side, but when he’d come out of the house after carrying in a load of dirty dishes, he’d gotten roped into that convo happening now. They looked a little serious, but not in the ‘trouble’s brewing’ way. She wondered if they were talking about the mess from last week.

As she studied them, hoping to catch his eye and lure him back to her, a swirl of color at her periphery caught her attention, and she turned to smile at her new visitor.

“Hey, Lex. Having fun?”

“I am. Are you? I feel bad you have to just sit here when it’s your own party. Do you need anything? A drink?”

Lexi Elstad, Bart’s eldest child and only daughter, was twenty-one and about to start her senior year at Purdue. With only four years between them, they should have been close, but they’d never really clicked. Maybe it was that Bart had moved back to Signal Bend with his kids when Gia was already a teenager, so she and Lexi hadn’t bonded during those formative young years. Maybe it was that Lexi had still been grieving the fresh loss of her mom when she’d arrived here and had been in a quiet little shell for months. Maybe they were too different to find something they could really bond over. They both loved horses, but everybody around these parts loved horses.

Or maybe—a thought Gia had had frequently in her life—she simply wasn’t built to bond with many people.

There wasn’t any animosity between them; Gia liked Lexi a lot, and she thought Lexi felt the same about her. But they really were very different people. Lexi was delicate, in temperament and in physicality. A willowy pale girl who loved willowy pale things.

She did have that eldest-child, in-charge thing, but it was a different version from Gia’s. Where Gia wanted to do things her damn self, Lexi wanted to delegate. She liked a little cluster of satellites around her, people who paid attention to her and did what she asked. She wasn’t a mean girl, it wasn’t that; she simply liked people to look up to her.

Gia would rather people look up to her than down on her, but really, she didn’t care what other people thought. Lexi cared a lot.

For most of the time Gia had known her, Lexi’s primary satellite had been Loki, Nolan’s younger brother. Lexi and Loki were almost the same age, and they’d been best friends since shortly after Lexi’s arrival in Signal Bend. They’d been stepsiblings as well since Cory and Bart married. But that bond had cooled somewhat after they went to different colleges in different states. Loki was about to start his senior year at Oklahoma State. More than the distance between Indiana and Oklahoma had come between them, it seemed.

“I am extremely good right here, right now,” Gia told her. “It’s nice to just chill.” Finally, she caught Zaxx’s eye. He smiled. She smiled back.

He’d been struggling this past week, in the aftermath of all that chaos. Worried for his sister, grieving for his dog, worried for Gia, trying to make sense of the what and how and why of it all. A lot of their conversation this week had been Zaxx trying to navigate his feelings and get himself back on steady ground. It meant something that she was the one he wanted to talk it through with.

“Zaxx is really handsome,” Lexi said. “And look at how he looks at you.” Her tone was full of wistful dreaming. “It’s like a movie.”

Gia was looking. His eyes, his whole body, were still and steady on her. Even from dozens of feet away, she sensed his quiet intensity, his swelling emotion, and felt its answer in her own heart and mind. Yep, she was falling. They were both falling.

She laughed softly. “No, not a movie. Real life.”

Lexi didn’t respond, but Gia sensed a change in the weather between them. She looked up and saw something like irritation on Lexi’s face. Apparently, Gia’s comment had popped her dreamy bubble.

See? Shit like that. Their lenses on the world were not the same.

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