The half-asleep Jonah spun around so fast I thought whiplash was a possibility. He missed the open doorway and walked smartly into the doorframe.

“Ouch! Holy shit. Sorry!” he sputtered, holding his face.

“Get out, Jonah!” Bowie growled, lowering me gently to the floor.

I yanked the sheet off the bed and wrapped myself mummy-style while Bowie pulled his underwear back into place and stood between me and his brother’s view.

My body was in full-on overdrive. The adrenaline from the flying vampire rat and the almost sex had my heart thumping in my head. Almost. Almost. Almost.

“You might want to—I don’t know—close the damn door next time?” Jonah offered.

“There was a bat! We weren’t—”

“We were about to,” Bowie interrupted.

“Hey,” Jonah said, holding up his hands. “Whatever you’re into. None of my business.”

I threw a shoe at him. “Hilarious. Get out.”

My gym bag shivered on the floor.

“What the hell?” Jonah stared at the bag like it was possessed.

“It’s the damn bat!”

My work phone rang on the nightstand. Shit. It was after midnight. I was no longer on call.

Bowie and Jonah were still yelling at each other.

“Would y’all shut the hell up for a minute?” I screeched. “Lo?”

“Cassidy.” For a shitty communicator, my dad’s voice sent a clear message. He needed a favor.

“What do you need, Dad?”

Bowie and Jonah shut up.

“I hate to bother you this late but I have a little situation and I could use your help,” he told me.

“I have a little situation of my own,” I said, eyeing Bowie’s still hard dick through his underwear. He and Jonah were taking turns looking at me and the gym bag.

“Ya see, it’s your grandmother.”

It was a short list, the things that scared my father. Losing me and Juney, Black Friday shopping, my mom’s mad face, and Gram-Gram. Gram-Gram was my mom’s mother. Most of us found her to be a hoot and a half. The woman packed a hell of a lot of energy and attitude into a four-foot ten-inch body.

“What did she do now?” I asked, moving around the bed to my closet and grabbing my uniform shirt. I pointed at the bag and the door. Bowie and Jonah stared at me like I was insane.

Covering the phone, I mouthed “get out” to them both. When Bowie hesitated, I pointed at the door. Our beautiful, shining moment of uncontrolled lust had been ruined by his brother, my father, and now my damn grandmother. I wanted to cry and kick something. George wandered in and curled up on my pillow. Apparently my cats weren’t bat hunters.

“She’s in a little scuffle at The Lookout.”

“Damn it,” I muttered. Bowie and Jonah carried my gym bag out of the room like it was an explosive. Bowie’s eyes met mine on the way out, and I could already see him rebuilding those walls that had always existed between us. Damn it.

“I hate to ask you, Cass. But you know I can’t arrest her again,” Dad said. The Christmas after Dad arrested his mother-in-law for vandalizing the church’s nativity scene would go down in Tucker family history. Gram-Gram had refused to speak to him and then handed him a gift bag with an “I’m a narc” t-shirt in it.

I ducked into the bathroom clutching my uniform to my chest. “I’ll go. Let me get dressed.”

“Just go as you are,” Dad suggested. “It sounds like it’s gettin’ a little out of hand.”

Me showing up in a sheet toga with almost-fucked hair wouldn’t settle any situation.

“I’ll be there in five. But I’m definitely callin’ in a favor on this,” I warned him.

“Name it and it’s yours,” he said, breathing a sigh of relief.

I dressed quickly and was scraping my hair back in a bun as I jogged down the stairs. Jonah and Bowie were coming in the back door. Bowie was still wearing only underwear. I had to turn my back on him so I wouldn’t weep with unrealized lust. So close. So damn close.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Fight at The Lookout,” I said, grabbing my coat and keys.

“You aren’t on call,” Bowie pointed out. I didn’t want to know how he was so intimately acquainted with my schedule. There wasn’t time to ask.

“It’s Gram-Gram,” I told him.

“Oh.” He got it. Of course he did. Bowie knew everything there was to know about me. Including the fact that my crazy little grandmother scared the shit out of my father and terrorized other senior citizens when the moonshine flowed a little too freely.

“Is your grandma okay?” Jonah asked, looking confused.

“I’ll fill him in,” Bowie promised.

“Great.” I pushed past them both and headed out into the cold night air. “Thanks for taking care of the bat,” I called over my shoulder.

I jumped into my car and was dialing Scarlett before I even got it in reverse.

“‘Lo?” she said sleepily through the car speakers.

“I don’t know if I just had sex with your brother,” I announced, steering the car in the direction of the bar and flooring it.

“WHAT?”

Scarlett was now wide awake.

“Which brother? How do you not know if you had sex? Are you drunk? Is he drunk? Which brother is it?”

She fired off questions like bullets. Pew. Pew. Pew.

“Bowie and it’s a long story. But I need to know if I need to update my list of sexual partners.” If that was my one and only sexual experience with Bowie…well, hell. I didn’t know what I’d do. All those years of closing off and keeping my distance had just imploded, resulting in one or two inches of the most intense sexual experience of my life.

“Bowie! Bowie Bodine? Good guy? Next-door neighbor Bowie? ‘Never ask me about Bowie again’ Bowie?”

“That’s the one,” I said accelerating up the steep hill to The Lookout.

While the rest of town was asleep on this frosty winter night, The Lookout’s lights were blazing, and the parking lot was half-full.

“How do you not know if you had sex with Bowie?” Scarlett demanded. “I’m coming over. This is a face-to-face discussion. Ouch! Jedediah! Stop clawing the shit out of me!”

“It’s a technical Tab A Slot B question,” I told her. “And I’m just pulling into The Lookout for a disturbance.”

“If you don’t call me tomorrow I will hunt you down and—ouch! Stop biting!”

“George and Eddie never bite me,” I teased, throwing the car into park and climbing out. At least the fight hadn’t spilled out into the parking lot.

“That was Dev biting me, not the cat,” Scarlett said smugly.

A barstool exploded through The Lookout’s plate glass window and landed with a metallic thunk on the sidewalk. It rolled back and forth over crystals of glass.

“Shit. I gotta go.”

“Tell Gram-Gram I said hi.”