Page 22 of The Rancher’s One and Only

“Oh. Well, that’s really interesting. What’s your medium?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but then Jax came back into the room. “Are you interrogating them?”

“Sort of,” Dakota said.

Ernestine felt her face get hot. “I’m sorry. I do that sometimes. But I’m just very interested in things. All kinds of things.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Dakota said gently. “I get it. Being an artist, you have to be interested in things. The way people see them, the way a certain scene makes them feel. It pays to be curious.”

“It doesn’t pay for me to be curious, but I do think that science is all about building a story. And if you’re going to build the story you have to ask why. At every stage. It’s one of the most important questions you can ask. And so many people don’t like to ask it because they don’t like to seem ignorant. But honestly, pretending that you understand something when you don’t leads to actual moments of ignorance. I would much rather be perceived as dumb than actually be dumb.”

Jax looked at her. “Somehow, I imagine that no one has ever accused you of being dumb.”

“Well. No.” She frowned, feeling her whole brow lower. “Many other things. But not dumb.”

“Did you ask Jax what he did before he got here?”

“No,” she said. She realized that they had gotten trapped in the story of his youth. Because of that, they hadn’t had an actual discussion about him.

“It’s not a big deal,” Jax grumbled.

“It’s a big deal,” Jessica said. “Jax is a champion mixed martial arts fighter. All the big games. Pay-per-view and all that.”

“Really?”

“I think more importantly I’m a black belt in Kenpo and Tang Soo Do.”

“Well, that’s not how the world knows you.”

“Maybe not. But it’s the thing I’m prouder of.”

“You’re a martial artist. And a fighter. So, you are physical.”

She felt everyone look at them. “Just because I said that he was physical earlier, because of the work that he does on the ranch and he was trying to explain to me how a lot of that work is very cerebral—which I believe—but then he was saying that my digging is physical and—”

“Yeah. That’s what happened.”

She felt a little bit silly. Her explanation had obviously been a little over the top. But they all dug into their pizza, and Ernestine was about to go hunting for a glass so that she could have her lemonade when Jax got up and opened the fridge, took out the bottle. “Do you want this?”

She felt relief. “I do.”

He poured her a glass, and she sighed. Now her dinner felt right. It was decent pizza. Though at this point it had been sitting for quite a while, but she was so hungry the texture didn’t even bother her that much. She listened to the three men talk all about their plans for opening the ranch, and listened to Jessica putting her two cents in since she was born and raised here. She had a lot of opinions about the inner workings of the place.

When they finished eating, she got up and went to the fridge, retrieving her lemonade and her other refrigerated items. “I should probably get back. I have to start digging really early tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” Jax said. “I’ll drive you back to your car.”

She had forgotten that she’d left her car in a weird place.

“Oh. Thanks.”

“It was nice to meet you,” she said to Jessica.

“Yeah. Same,” she said warmly.

What must it be like to be that pretty, and that effortless? Ernestine would never know. Sometimes she felt sad about that. That there was no way to really understand and inhabit somebody else’s experience. That she just had the existence she had.

But, she did a pretty good job working with herself, she thought.