Twelve hours. I brush my teeth, fall into bed, and sleep for twelve damn hours.

When I wake up I’m on my stomach, diagonal across the giant king-sized bed, light filtering in from the curtain-covered window.

My first thought is, I’m not at the hospital!

My second thought is, Are these curtains bear-patterned?

I look around my room. Several things seem to be covered in bear-patterned fabric. When in Rome, I guess.

I get up. I pop a couple of ibuprofen, pull on shorts and a t-shirt, and find the coffee maker in my suite’s tiny kitchenette and poke it a couple times.

That doesn’t produce any damn coffee, so I slide my feet into flip-flops and head down to the lobby. The halls of this hotel, like pretty much every hotel in the world, have several huge mirrors in them. As I walk coffee-ward I can see my reflection even though I try not to look.

My hair’s an unholy fucking mess. My face is still banged up, my black eye starting to turn from purple to yellow, though it’s less swollen now. At least I can see out of it better.

God, even my boobs look weird, squashed beneath an ace bandage. I have no idea when I’ll be able to wear a bra again, but thank Christ my tits are insignificant enough that I can get away without one for a while.

I can’t fucking believe this. Two nights on tour, and I get lit on goddamn fire by accident. Now I’m out of commission for a couple of weeks. Everything’s on hold again. I swear to God, Dirtshine is cursed.

But I round the corner into the lobby of the hotel, and once I’m in there I can’t help but smile. One, there are three large tankards of coffee, ready and waiting for me.

Two, the whole place is straight out of Rustic Grandeur monthly. There’s even chandeliers made of antlers. Who does that?

I grab a mug of coffee, drain it in short order, refill it, and wander outside. I’m pretty much done with sitting around.

The lodge is beautiful, by the way. Tallwood, Washington is a pretty small town and the lodge is a couple miles outside of it, tucked away in the forest and surrounded by massive evergreen trees and miles of hiking trails.

It’s lovely. It’s peaceful and nature-filled, and I’m pretty sure Gavin picked it on purpose because no one else from Grizzly Fest is staying here. I know he’s nervous about staying clean on tour, because it would be easy to fall back into old patterns.

That, and I think he still hates doing this without Liam. Despite everything, Gavin still misses him. Fuck, we all miss him, but some messes are just too out of control to deal with.

I reach the woods and start down a wide, well-maintained path. I drink coffee, stroll slowly, and try not to think.

Because something’s been nagging at me for the past day, something that sends a bolt of anxiety straight through my core despite the gorgeous, peaceful setting. And thinking about Liam just makes it worse.

They don’t need me. I’m just the bass player, and we’re just on tour. Anyone could learn to play these songs, and then they wouldn’t have to cut a couple of weeks from the tour and do all this rescheduling.

Honestly, it’s kind of a good idea.

And I fucking hate it. I hate everything about it. The thought of Dirtshine playing shows without me makes my stomach feel like I’ve got poisonous snakes nesting there.

What if they realize that the new bass player is a better musician than me? What if they just like the new guy better, so once I’m recuperated, they tell me not to come back?

We replaced Liam, didn’t we? And he was there from the very beginning. He and Gavin were practically brothers, and we still booted him. I know it’s a completely different situation, but that doesn’t really make me feel better.

I breathe and stare at the bark on a pine tree, counting my breaths. In is one and out is two, three and four, until I’m a little calmer. It’s a meditation thing. Yeah, I fucking meditate, what about it?

You have to stop doing this, I tell myself. Freaking yourself out about something that you invented is totally worthless.

I started doing it as a kid. I don’t think I’m like this by nature, though fuck knows I’ve got nothing to compare myself to. But for as long as I can remember, shitty things have happened to me, again and again. My earliest memory is of a woman whose name I don’t remember packing my things into a black garbage bag and then driving me for ages across the snow-covered expanse of Wisconsin. It was probably a twenty-minute drive, but I remember it seeming endless.

I was freezing, so cold my fingers hurt, and I clenched them into fists. I didn’t tell her I was cold or ask her to turn the heat up. In my memory, I already knew better. I think I was three.

But I developed this habit, expecting the worst. Because when you expect the worst you can plan for it. It can’t take you by surprise. So when shit kept happening, my things shoved into garbage bags again and again for transport, kids at school surrounding me on the playground and giving me a bloody nose, or finally the sound of my foster father sneaking into our bedroom and whispering don’t be scared to my foster sister, the girl who had the bad luck to be on the bottom bunk, I had a fucking plan.

It wasn’t usually a good plan, but it was always a plan.

But I don’t need that now. It’s been fucking ages since the worst happened. For fuck’s sake, Gavin told me that they were putting the tour on hold. He and Trent — and Liam, it used to be, too — are my new family, and even if I haven’t got the firmest grasp on that concept, they deserve better than dumb suspicion from me.

Also Eddie. We like Eddie.

My coffee mug’s empty, so I turn around and stroll back down the path toward the lodge, wondering what time it is. I didn’t even check. Maybe I should text Trent and see where he is so he can change my damn bandages.

And my stomach ties itself into a knot right as I emerge from the woods, thinking about Trent in rubber gloves, applying bandages and ointment to my fucking gross burn wound. If I were looking for evidence that he’s not interested, there it is, because who volunteers to look repeatedly at weeping sores on someone they wanna fuck?

Christ, it’s not even noon yet — at least, I don’t think it’s noon, it’s still cool and foggy out — and I’d already like a drink. I cut by the pool on the way to the lobby, and there’s no one swimming, but there’s someone stretched out on a lounge chair, talking on the phone.

Wearing cargo shorts and flip flops. I wave, but Eddie’s not looking at me, totally absorbed in his phone conversation as I walk toward him.

“I dunno, man,” he’s saying. “There’s just like, so much punching? Like, come on, dude.”

I wonder if he finally saw Fight Club or something. Eddie’s a good drummer, but he’s also the kind of guy who’d watch a movie called Fight Club and complain about the punching.

“Yeah,” he says, as I pass behind his lounge chair on the way to the lobby. “I mean, I get it, I just feel really bad? But like, I can’t just...”

His voice fades as I walk past, back into the lobby, where I refill my mug again and sit on a huge, plush, overstuffed leather chair and pick up a copy of Modern Rustic Architecture, because it’s not like I’ve got somewhere to be right now.

And hot damn, this is the most soothing thing I’ve ever seen. It’s mostly pictures of sharply angled, sparsely-furnished wooden houses built atop mountains emerging from the fog.

Given that every house I lived in until a year and a half ago housed at least seven people and was a cramped hell-hole, this is a peek into heaven. I’m so absorbed in the empty hallways and big, light-filled windows that I don’t notice Eddie next to me until he says my name.

“Darce?”

I look up, blinking, because no one but Trent calls me that. Definitely not Eddie.

“What’s up?” I ask.

He squirms a little in his overstuffed chair, looking at the buffalo head instead of me, and I feel bad. Eddie was just getting properly acquainted with the three of us last year when Gavin up and fucking punched the poor kid in the face.

Eddie did give Marisol, Gavin’s girlfriend, pot-laced candy without telling her there was pot in it. And Marisol, who barely even drinks, did have a pretty awful time.

Still, there are a million goddamn ways to solve a problem without resorting to violence.

“You like,” he starts. He squirms. I watch his face patiently. “You like, know lots of drummers, right?”

I get the weird feeling that he’s trying to ask me something really strange and awkward. Like a kid who wants to know where babies come from but can’t even formulate the right question.

“I guess?” I say. “I probably know about as many as you do, maybe slightly less?”

He nods, rubbing his hands on his cargo shorts.

“Why?” I ask.

“Oh, just, nothing, just wondering,” he says, glancing nervously at the buffalo head. “I was thinking that I’m a drummer, and I know a lot of drummers, and then I was wondering if the rest of you also knew a lot of drummers, and...?”

I take a long sip of coffee, glancing around the lobby and wondering what the fuck Eddie is getting at right now.

Is he high? Is that why he wants to know how many drummers I know?

“I know lots of drummers,” I confirm, hoping that my response soothes him.

“Cool. Great. Okay, cool,” he says, standing. “Later?”

“Later!” I say, and he walks out of the lobby.

Musicians are a bunch of weirdo freaks, I think, and go back to looking at lovely, empty kitchens.

* * *

A while later, someone walks up behind me and puts his hands on the back of my chair. I’m curled up, drinking my fourth cup of coffee, carefully leaning back in a way that doesn’t make my back hurt too much.

“There you are,” Trent says.

“Was I hiding?” I ask, tilting my head back and looking at him.

Upside-down Trent lifts one eyebrow.

“Were you?” he asks. “You weren’t answering your phone, I thought maybe you’d gone back to the hospital to keep me from doing your bandages.”

“It did cross my mind,” I admit.

“You’re already an hour overdue.”

I wrinkle my nose, but he is being very nice to me and he definitely doesn’t have to be. I flop my magazine of soothing, peaceful interiors shut and toss it back on a coffee table fashioned from several logs.

“Your room or mine?” I ask.

“Supplies are in mine,” he says.

Back in Trent’s suite, I stand in the middle of his living room while he gathers the stuff he needs: size XL latex gloves, antiseptic burn spray, more giant bandages, tape, gauze, ointment, a whole medicine cabinet’s worth of stuff.

He organizes it very neatly on his table, frowning. It’s the careful organization of someone who’s not totally comfortable with the task at hand, and who doesn’t want to fuck it up.

“I don’t think the package of bandages is quite parallel with the box of gloves,” I point out.

“So fix it.”

“I wouldn’t wanna mess up your system.”

“You mean the system of trying to make sure I don’t put toothpaste on your burn by accident? Shirt off,” he says, not waiting for an answer.

“Close your eyes,” I say, looking over my shoulder at him. A slight smile lights up his face as he holds his hands away from his body, trying not to touch anything with the gloves on.

“You know I’ve seen you naked.”

“We were drunk.”

“You were drunk.”

I make a face, because he’s right. Trent doesn’t really drink, aside from a single beer now and then. I don’t blame him. If I’d grown up with his father I doubt I’d drink either.

“And high,” I say. “Are you thinking of the time I tore off all my clothes because I thought they were turning into pancake batter, or the time I made you come skinny dipping because I was convinced that the ocean would give us super powers?”

I can’t help but picture it again: moonlight, waves, everything silver and black. Trent calmly telling me not to try breathing underwater, and then when we finally went back to shore, the crisscrossed scars on his huge, muscled back. It was before I knew. I remember thinking they weren’t real, but they are.

“I was thinking of the time we were in St. Louis and one of the girls from Candyboots dared you to go in the Mississippi River, so you tore off all your clothes and went in right then and there just to prove you’d do it.”

Fuck, I’d totally forgotten about that. It was not a good decision. That part of the Mississippi isn’t for swimming.

“You still have to close your eyes,” I say.

Trent dutifully closes his eyes, still smirking. My heart’s going about two hundred beats a minute and there’s a tiny voice in the back of my head saying so Trent wants to see you topless, isn’t that interesting? I ignore it.

I pull my shirt over my head, leaving my arms in the sleeves so my back is exposed but my boobs are covered. I’m still pretty fucking naked, though, and it makes the squirming in my stomach start all over again.

“Okay,” I say, my face hot and my eyes closed, arms clamped tightly over my boobs.

He doesn’t say anything, but he steps in close behind me, his fingers on my side. You wouldn’t think a guy who looks like Trent or who’s got Trent’s life story would be as gentle as he is, but I barely feel it as he releases the Ace bandage from around my back.

“Hold your arms out,” he says. I hesitate for a split second, because my boobs, but just do it.

He circles his arms around me, handing the bandage to himself as he unwraps it from my body, and his chest brushes lightly against my back.

“Sorry,” he murmurs.

“It’s fine,” I say, eyes squeezed shut, because here’s another good reason that I should have just gone back to the hospital: having some nurse change my bandage wouldn’t go directly into my spank bank, or whatever the fuck chicks are supposed to call it.

But I’m practically naked with my very hot best friend who’s being very sweet right now, and in this moment, it doesn’t matter that I fucking know better. It barely matters that he’s about to witness me at my grossest, because rational thought has left the building.

Fuck, I want Trent to touch me. Grab my tits, kiss my neck, bite my earlobe, but he just keeps unwinding the bandage from around my body, brushing his thick arms against my torso, tattoos dancing and flexing in the low light.

And he’s being a total fucking gentleman about it, because he always is. To me, anyway. God knows I’ve seen Trent do some ungentlemanly shit. For fuck’s sake, right now he’s got a split lip and won’t tell me why.

Trent places the wrap bandage on the table next to him, and I hug my arms to my chest again. He brushes my hair away from my neck, his fingertips tickling me, then picks lightly at the tape holding the second bandage around the burn.

“This might hurt when I take it off,” he says, his voice soft and low and quiet. I focus on an easy chair, patterned with a black bear and a couple of frolicking cubs.

“It’s fine,” I say.

He’s right. It does hurt, and my eyes water, but I don’t say anything as he gets it off crumples it up, and tosses it into the trash. The air is cool against my back, slightly damp from being covered and probably from gross burn blister leakage.

We don’t say anything while he does the rest. I just stand there, head down to keep my hair off my back, half-naked. As much as I wish he weren’t looking at blisters on my back, something about Trent’s hands on me feels right, like he already knows his way around my body.

Quit it, I tell myself.

Once all the antiseptics and ointments and whatnot are on, he tapes a new bandage on, his fingers pressing carefully along the skin of my shoulder, the back of my neck, the side of my hip, and I shiver lightly at every single touch. Finally, I hold the ace bandage while he wraps it around me again, still without saying anything.

I pull my shirt back on, shake my hair out, and turn.

“Thanks,” I say.

Trent just smiles as he pulls his gloves off.