Xavier

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I am absolutely out of my element.

I’m sitting in the saloon of a stunning 35’ yacht in Ketchikan harbor beside a beautiful young woman who might as well be one of Homer’s sirens. And, to be fair to myself, I’m pretty sure any guy would be tongue-tied right now. Less than an hour ago I helped this young woman after she twisted her ankle.

The fact that I’m out of my element is no surprise, given the fact that the only time I am ever truly comfortable is when my nose is stuck in a book, and my hands are assembling little robots. The rest of the time, I’m uncomfortable being around people, especially people I have never met. Being around people makes my skin feel too tight, makes my head feel too full of thoughts and sensory stimulation. When there’s a lot of chaos in my surroundings, my thoughts tend to run even faster, which makes it feel like I have a fire hose of mental activity on full blast inside my head.

Women, especially, confuse and overwhelm me. Learning to be—or at least appear to be—comfortable around my sisters-in-law Dru, and then Mara, and now Eva, Claire, Tate, Aerie, and Joss… has required constant effort on my part. I never know how to act around them. My brothers are all funny, charismatic, interesting, outgoing—with the exception of Lucian, but now that he has Joss, he’s learning to open up and loosen up, and in doing so we are finding his true personality is much less reserved than even he once assumed. I share none of those characteristics with my brothers. I don’t know how to crack a well-timed joke. Or make some pithy commentary. Or put in some kind of wise, worldly, tidbit. Or turn someone else’s statement into a sexual innuendo. All my brothers have a woman in their lives, and they’ve each become much more physical in their demonstrations of affection—and not just with their significant other, but also with each other and with me.

So, where do I fit in? I don’t want to just fade into the background, but what do I say? How do I act? Especially right now. Women make me edgy, and this girl in particular, sitting next to me—Low, she calls herself—has got the fire hose in my brain turned on full blast.

She’s so beautiful it literally makes me question my own eyes, my sanity, my existence. Can she be real? Can a woman this perfect truly exist? Yet here she is, in defiance of all logic. Sitting beside me. Close—very close. Her leg brushes mine, sending an electric shock arcing through me—I do not mean that as hyperbole, either—the touch of her leg against mine was something I feel with acute awareness, a vicious tingle so powerful it is like touching an exposed live wire. I vibrate, all over, from the touch of her leg against mine. It was innocent—I know this. There was no hidden meaning or intent behind this—she was merely sitting on the couch beside me, as one human does with another human. That’s all.

Yet…I wonder.

All too often, I find out after the fact that I have missed a social cue, or overlooked a hint, or missed a subtlety in a situation. This is, in many ways, a defining characteristic of mine.

She’s talking right now, and I have to remind myself to tune in, to pay attention.

“…I shouldn’t have even attempted that variation on the sequence, especially on the deck of a boat. My yoga teacher back home would probably say something like ‘your yoga practice is for you, for your emotional, physical, and mental well-being, it is not a tool with which to impress people.’” Then she laughed, and the sound of her laughter could be recorded and sold as music. “I know better, I really do. That’s the kind of thing that keeps you humble, I guess, right?”

Is a response required of me? I honestly don’t know. I hesitate, probably for too long. “I would think it rather challenging to do any kind of yoga on the deck of a boat, much less something complicated like the Warrior Three sequence or whatever it was you were attempting.”

Another of those musical, bell-like laughs. “Well, it’s not like I was trying an inversion. And it wasn’t the rolling of the boat that toppled me, it was me being distracted.”

“There isn’t much roll on this boat, is there?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No, not all. It’s very gentle, and it just adds a fun little bit of extra challenge to anything requiring balance.” She pulled away the bag of ice from her head, probing the bump with her fingertips. “My head is getting cold, and the ice is melting, and the condensation is getting my hair wet.”

I took the bag of ice from her. “Would you like me to refresh the ice for you?”

She shook her head again. “No, that’s okay.” She stretched her leg out, rolling her ankle. “It’s actually my ankle that’s bothering me, at the moment.”

“Did you twist it?” I asked, after throwing the ice overboard.

Low shrugged. “I think so—it’s definitely sore now, but I think hitting my head probably eclipsed anything else that happened.”

I knelt on the floor in front of her. “May I examine your ankle?”

She smiled at me, and I had to look away quickly. “Sure. Examine away, Xavier.” She lifted her leg, and I cradled her ankle in my hand.

Propping her calf on my knee, I allowed her ankle to dangle freely, and then I gingerly, carefully probed the area, moving it in circles, testing the range of motion while watching her reactions. She winced a little as I rotated her ankle, but nothing more.

I smiled, attempting to look reassuring. “Twisted, but nothing worse. It isn’t swollen or tender to the touch from outside, so I think if you restrict the use of it for a day or so, you will be as good as new.”

“Are you sure you’re not a doctor?” she asked, leaving her leg propped up on my knee.

I gently set her foot onto the floor and stood up, wiping my hands on the front of my shorts—an automatic response to touching someone, a habit I’ve never been able to break. “I am very certain.” I laughed. “I think I would remember eight years of medical school and a residency.”

She laughed, and I felt myself wishing I could make her laugh all the time, because the sound was addictive. “I guess you would remember that, wouldn’t you?” She patted the couch beside her again, as I hadn’t sat back down yet. “I’m feeling better, but you don’t have to leave yet.”

Once again, I’m left wondering what she means. Does she want me to stay? Does she like talking to me? Is she being polite? Is this one of those situations where she’s saying I don’t have to leave yet, but she really means the opposite?

I don’t want to leave. I like her. I enjoy sitting with her, talking to her.

I looked at her as I sat down, trying to decipher her meaning, her intent. But I got distracted by what she looked like, how otherworldly, ethereally, indelibly lovely she was.

She was tall—I couldn’t even begin to guess at her height in feet and inches, but I think she was around the same height as Dru who was, she once mentioned, five-eight. If anything, Low was a little taller. Much of that height seemed to come from her legs, which were long—and being encased in calf-length yoga pants tight enough to be considered a second skin, I could see that those legs were not only elegant and graceful but strong and muscular as well. Her hips pinched inward dramatically to a narrow waist, and her abs had clear, hard definition. The sports bra she wore was pale blue, with a complicated arrangement of thin straps and a diamond-shaped cut-out in the middle showing a hint of the creamy white skin between her breasts.

I had always been under the impression that a sports bra was intended to minimize the size and weight of a woman’s breasts during exercise, to reduce the impact of kinetic energy upon the body during movement. The one Low was wearing, however, seemed…rather inadequate to that purpose. Every movement of her body created ripples of kinetic energy, each of which drew my attention—causing my gaze to fix on them for an embarrassingly long moment. She caught me staring—I knew she did, for even I couldn’t misunderstand the smirk and the way she glanced at me. She said nothing, however, only allowing the smirk to blossom into a full smile.

Which confused me. I didn’t think women appreciated being ogled—and I had been openly and disgustingly ogling her.

I forced my eyes up to hers, which was safer from a manners perspective, but far more dangerous from a hypnotic perspective. Her eyes were…I struggled for an apt descriptor for the shade of blue. Somewhere between cerulean, sapphire, and indigo. If I wasn’t physically present, and only seeing a photograph, I would have assumed the brightness and vividness and intensity of the blue of her eyes had been digitally enhanced. Her hair, too, seemed too perfect to be real. A true strawberry blonde, her hair seemed to grow in natural spirals—I found myself lost in those curls, too, following the pattern of the spirals, which were a perfect natural representation of the golden spiral. Her hair wasn’t a single shade of strawberry blonde, either, but an iridescent mix of red and gold and copper, the different shades more prominent depending on the angle of the light. I wondered if there was a mathematical expression for the shifting shades of her hair, or if I could capture in code the way her hair changed shades.

“Xavier?” Her voice betrayed confusion.

I blinked rapidly, fisting my hands to keep them from betraying a tic. “Yes?”

“I asked if you were born and raised in Alaska.”

I cursed myself mentally, realizing I’d spaced out—or, what others termed spacing out, but which was really just my mind spiraling off into a maze of interconnected thoughts. “Sorry. Ahh—yes. I was born and raised in Ketchikan.”

“So you’ve lived here your whole life?”

“I attended Stanford for a year, but other than that, yes, I have lived here my whole life.”

She frowned, a puzzled tilt to her head. “Why’d you drop out?”

“My father passed away. He left a somewhat complicated will, which stipulated that for any of his estate to be released, all of his sons had to live and work here together for a full year. At the time, you see, everyone but our oldest brother had moved away. The will meant none of us got any of the money unless we all came back. So, I dropped out of Stanford and came home.”

“Wow. That’s—why do you think he did that?”

I shrugged. “I do not know for certain, but I think when we all went our separate ways to pursue our various interests, it upset him. Which is ironic, in a way because he always encouraged us to follow our interests. I think he wanted us back together. He wanted to make sure we stuck together as brothers.”

“Why is it ironic?”

I sighed. “Well, that is a complicated question to answer. Our mother passed away when I was seven years old. It sent Dad into a deep depression he never recovered from. I was, for all intents and purposes, raised by my eldest brother, Sebastian. Dad was around, but…not of much use.” I fixed my eyes on the wood floor of the yacht’s main saloon—the living room of the ship, basically—counting the lines of darker shading in the grains until I felt able to respond; I reached fifty-nine. “The irony is that he was absent from us, mentally and emotionally, so when we left, it didn’t seem like it would matter much to him. Clearly, he felt differently.”

“That’s…that’s heavy, Xavier.”

“You asked.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up anything that would upset you.”

“I know you did not intend that.”

She eyed me. “So, do you resent having to leave Stanford?”

I resumed counting lines in the grain of the wood, and reached eighty more. “Resent? I do not know if that is the correct word. I enjoyed the educational challenge, and having the resources of a university at my disposal. But my brothers are my family. There is nothing I was being taught at Stanford that I could not find a way of teaching myself. So, I do not resent it, no. I was glad to be able to come home and reunite with my brothers. I am closer to all of them now than I ever was growing up.”

“Do you think you’ll go back?”

I frowned. “To Stanford?” I counted from eighty to one hundred and nine; usually, my long hesitations between responses bothered people, but Low seemed to not care, or if she was, she was not showing it. “No, I do not believe that would add value to my life in any way.”

There was a silence, then. I felt an expectation to fill it, but had no idea what to say. Questions of my own? What should I ask?

Just then a small brown bird landed on the bow of her boat, visible through the open doorway, and I watched as it cheeped and chirruped, its tail flicking, beak parting, its small body swiveling this way and that.

“Where are you from, Low?” I finally asked, after it flew away.

She smiled at my question, and shifted closer to me. “I’m an LA girl, born and raised.”

“Have you received upper education?”

She blinked at my question, and then laughed, leaning into me. “You’re so weird and funny, you know that? Yes, I went to NYU.”

“What did you study?”

“Fine arts.” I expected her to elaborate on this, but she didn’t.

“And why are you here in Ketchikan?”

Reading facial expressions properly is something I’m terrible at, part of the curse of my social issues, but it seemed to me that her gaze went distant, as if somehow a shutter had gone down behind her eyes.

“I needed to get away from LA.” She shrugged a thin shoulder. “It’s so hectic down there, you know? I needed to be somewhere quiet and peaceful and beautiful.”

“If you want real peace and quiet, take your boat out into some of the smaller channels. You can just drop your anchor and sit and, chances are, you won’t see or hear another soul all day long.”

“That sounds nice.”

“You have a boat, why do you not just…go?”

She shrugged, waving a hand. “Oh, I gave Captain Fisk and the rest of the crew time off. I needed to be alone.”

“Do you have a launch?” I asked.

Low frowned. “A what?”

“A smaller boat within this one, usually with an outboard motor and typically only large enough to hold a few people.”

She shrugged a shoulder again. “Probably. I wouldn’t know where it is, though, or how to launch it or how to drive it, or where to go.”

I wasn’t sure why I was suggesting this, but the words emerged anyway. “I am a fairly capable person, and I know the area. If you wanted to do a little local sightseeing, I could show you around.”

She stared at me for a moment, her eyes boring into mine intently, and I would have given anything to know what she was thinking, for I could not read her expression whatsoever. “I…that…I wouldn’t mind seeing some of the other channels in the area.”

There was significant hesitation there, but I couldn’t parse exactly what, or why.

“We could go up past Beaver Falls, maybe,” I suggested. “Toss an anchor over and see if we can catch some fish.”

Her frown was disbelieving. “Fishing?”

“Have you never tried it?”

She smirked. “No, as a matter of fact, I have not. It never seemed very interesting, and my life thus far hasn’t provided an opportunity.”

“Fishing as an activity by itself is the most boring thing on the planet, if you ask me,” I said. “But as an excuse to sit out in the beauty of nature for a few hours, it is unparalleled.”

This turned her smirk into a hesitant smile. “That sounds nice.” She was sitting so close to me now that her thigh and hip were against mine, and her arm nudged mine, and I could feel her hair tickling my cheek. She smelled good—lavender, and something less definable but sweet and heady. “You wouldn’t mind showing a city girl how to fish?”

“If you are looking for someone to teach you how to really fish, my brother Brock would be your better bet—he takes tourists out to his favorite spots and sets them up. I can put a worm on a hook and cast it out for you, and then we could just kind of…sit and enjoy the day, I guess. I am not a big fishing person myself, but I like getting out on the water sometimes. I have not done that in a long time, come to think of it.”

She put her hand on my forearm. I froze, tensed, but I don’t think she noticed. “What if we were to catch a really big fish?” She asked this with her face sort of close to mine, looking at me intently, sitting pressed against me.

Did she have an issue with not understanding personal space? Did she not realize how close she was? Was she that close on purpose? Did it mean something?

Part of me wanted to believe it meant she liked me, but I immediately threw that notion out the window. It was ridiculous. She was a goddess made flesh, and I was…well, she’d said it herself—weird and funny, which doesn’t seem like a good thing, if you want a girl to like you, but what do I know?

I wanted her to like me, even as I was distinctly uncomfortable with her hand on me.

But it was not as uncomfortable as I thought it would be. The tingle, the electric vibration searing through my whole body wasn’t as painful and intense and off-putting and overwhelming as it was when other people touched me. With Low, it was…different, somehow.

“If we caught something,” I eventually answered, “I imagine we would throw it back.”

“You said your brother takes tourists fishing—is he a charter captain?”

I blinked at the sudden change in topic. “He is a pilot. He owns a seaplane ferry and taxi service. He flies tourists to good fishing spots, drops them off at a camping location, or so they can go canoeing or hiking. He takes them from Ketchikan to other air or water access-only locations.”

“And your other brothers?”

“Would you like the full rundown of my brothers?”

She nodded. “Yes, please. If you don’t mind.”

“In order from oldest to youngest, we are: Sebastian, Zane, Brock, Baxter, Canaan and Corin, Lucian, and me. Bast—our nickname for Sebastian—is the oldest, and he runs the bar. Zane is the other main bartender. Brock is the pilot, and he works a few shifts behind the bar at night and on the weekends. Baxter owns a gym, primarily training MMA fighters and a few private fitness clients, and he works a few shifts here and there too, usually as a bouncer and backup bartender as needed when it gets slammed. Canaan and Corin are identical twins. Canaan and his wife Aerie are musicians and are on tour pretty much permanently, and Corin and his wife Tate just had a baby—Tate and Aerie are also identical twins. Corin and Canaan have their own production company, which Corin primarily runs by himself while Canaan tours. Luce and his girlfriend just opened a coffee shop and bookstore that they run together. And then there is me.”

“So you’re the youngest?”

I nodded. “Yes.” I shot her a quick look, not letting myself stare too long. “And what about you, Low?”

The shuttering of her expression happened again, and I wondered if she perhaps didn’t like talking about herself. “Only child, and my parents live in Carmel-by-the-Sea.”

“That is truly the name of the city?” I asked.

She laughed. “It really is. It’s actually a pretty magical place.”

“Did you grow up there?”

She shook her head. “No. We lived in suburban LA most of my life. My parents retired recently, and that’s where they retired to.”

“What do you do, Low?” I asked. This question was followed by a long, long pause, which even I could register as a serious reticence to answer the question. I smiled at her, attempting to diffuse the sudden and intense awkwardness. “It is not important. What one does for a living does not compromise the whole of who one is, after all.” I chuckled. “At least, for my own sake, I certainly hope not.”

She frowned at me, an expression that managed to be adorable and confused and alluring and elegant all at once. “Why do you say that?”

I sighed. “Well, there are many who would say that considering my…intellectual capacity, or what one might term my potential—that I am certainly not living up to or fulfilling what my raw, basic abilities would indicate I am capable of.”

Low laughed, and I breathed in deeply, trying to soak up the sound of her laughter into my pores. “Xavier, I hope you won’t be offended if I say you sometimes talk like an AI program written to sound like a professor with, like, three PhDs.”

I blinked rapidly, processing what she’d said, trying to determine if I was, in fact, offended. “That does not offend me. It would seem rather accurate, I suppose. I do not have even an associate’s degree, much less a PhD but, again, I would hope that lack does not equate to lack of ability. I could have a PhD, were the circumstances of my life somewhat altered.”

“You could have a PhD? How old are you?”

“I just turned twenty recently.”

“A PhD takes, like, eight years to earn, doesn’t it?”

“Not if one is motivated, has the work capacity, and the raw intellectual ability.” I shrugged. “If I’d had parents to push me to leap ahead educationally, within the accepted system, I would be in a much different place at this moment, educationally. But my mother died, and my father became a workaholic, and turned to alcohol as a coping mechanism, and my oldest brother had all he could do as little more than a child himself to take care of the rest of us. So, I never skipped grades, despite my intellectual capability.”

“What do you mean, intellectual capability? Are you, like, a MENSA genius or something?”

I nodded. “Something like that. I’ve never taken a test to measure it. I see no point. It would not prove anything, nor gain me anything. I am what some would call a polymath.”

She chewed on a lip, frowning, staring up and to the right, a sign that she was accessing her memory. “A polymath—like Da Vinci? Very good at several disciplines?”

“Precisely. I have a naturally perfect memory—an eidetic memory, it’s called—which I have honed over the years through practice, and I have a rather prodigious innate facility with mathematics, as well. Memorizing and understanding literature is as easy for me as mentally performing complicated mathematics. Learning things like robotics and coding are as simple as reciting Shakespeare or Homer.”

Low snorted. “Who quotes Homer? I went to NYU for fine arts and I had a hard time with Homer.”

“I taught myself classical Greek one summer, because I was bored and it seemed fun. I have read Homer in his original tongue, which makes understanding it in English a much simpler process.”

She blinked at me. “Wait, wait, wait—you taught yourself classical Greek…for fun? When was this?”

I realized I might perhaps be approaching territory where it would sound like bragging. “I had The Iliad memorized in English by eighth grade, and taught myself Greek the summer between ninth and tenth grade, the same year I taught myself Latin.”

“Any other ridiculous accomplishments you’d like to casually mention?” she asked, laughing.

I didn’t see them as accomplishments, merely things I’d done to try to challenge myself; I didn’t say so though—I’d learned that the hard way. People didn’t see it the same way, I’d discovered.

“I exchanged emails with a math professor at MIT for many years, beginning in the ninth grade. I had gone through every math textbook I could find, both in the public library here and via loans from other libraries, and from the high school and college libraries available to me. I had no money, so I couldn’t buy them online, but I did have an email account, so I would spend my afternoons on a computer in the public library, pestering this MIT professor to, in effect, tutor me in advanced mathematics. He did it for free, out of interest to see what I was capable of. He always wanted me to come to MIT so he could work with me in person, but I never got the chance.”

“Sounds like Good Will Hunting.”

I frowned. “What is that?”

She laughed. “Ummm, a movie? Matt Damon, Ben and Casey Affleck, Robin Williams, and Minnie Driver? Janitor at MIT turns out to be a math whiz, but has no interest in pursuing anything with it, because he’s scared to leave the life he knows?”

I shook my head. “I do not watch television or movies.”

“Ever?” Her voice sounded…sharp, somehow. As if the question was weighted in some way I couldn’t fathom.

I shrugged. “Rarely. Sometimes, if my family is watching something, I will sit with them, but I do not often understand what it is I am watching.”

“And…why do you talk the way you do?” She frowned. “You don’t have to answer that.”

I was distinctly uncomfortable with the question, and recited pi until my nerves calmed enough to formulate some kind of cogent response. “I…it is how I am most comfortable expressing myself in unfamiliar situations. I attempted for many years to pretend to speak what others would term ‘normally’, but the stress of the effort was not worthwhile. It was an attempt to fit in. I adopted the habit of pretending to speak normally when I was at Stanford, and then, when I moved back here, I gradually came to realize my brothers did not care how I spoke, and I did not need to pretend to speak normally to impress them, so I have since ceased the practice.”

Low was quiet after that, without a response—which made me wonder what she was thinking. In fact, I was spending nearly every moment with her wondering what she was thinking, and getting nowhere. My understanding of the thought process of the female gender is, quite honestly, utterly laughable.

“You’d really take me fishing?” she finally asked, sounding apprehensive.

I nodded. “I really would. It should prove a rather fun and relaxing diversion.”

“Just you and me?”

“I thought perhaps we could invite all seven of my brothers and their seven significant others. The more the merrier, yes?”

Low’s expression morphed immediately, scrutinizing me. “I…um—”

I lifted an eyebrow. “That was an attempt at jocularity, Low.”

She breathed out, a huff of either embarrassment or relief, or maybe both. “I knew that.”

“Humor is not my forte.”

“Nor mine, it would seem.” She smiled again, and the sun suddenly seemed to shine brighter. “I’m on vacation, and I’m not really in a mental or emotional place where I want to be around a lot of people.”

“You chose Ketchikan for that very reason.”

“Yeah.”

“It would be just you and me, Low.”

She bumped me with her shoulder, and my bare arm tingled where her skin sizzled against mine. “Sounds like a lot of fun.”

My phone chirped, then. I glanced at it—I had a text from Bast: we just had a bachelorette party walk in. 34 hungry drunk women. Need you back asap.

I typed a quick response. I shall return shortly. X

Bast’s response was immediate. I know it’s you, bro. You don’t need to sign a text message. Unless your trying to send me a virtual kiss?

*You’re*

Don’t correct my grammar, dork knob. Just get your ass back here.

I pocketed the phone and glanced up at Low. “My apologies. I am needed back at the bar.”

Low patted my leg, her hand coming to rest on my thigh, just above my knee. “Thank you for rescuing me, Xavier.”

“I merely provided a little assistance, that is all.”

“Well, thank you, all the same.”

“You are welcome.” I stood up. “It was a delight and pleasure to meet you, Low.”

I wanted to do something to impress her; a gesture of some kind, but the only thing I could think of was to kiss her hand. Which I was afraid would only freak her out, or make her think I was even weirder than she already did.

Yet, when she held out her hand, probably meaning for me to shake it, I found myself bowing over her hand and pressing my lips, ever so lightly, to the back of it. She sucked in a sharp breath when I did so, her eyes fixing on mine. There was another pause, rife with what felt like a million subtleties and subtexts I couldn’t fathom or comprehend.

And then, standing, Low made a funny, faux-prim face. “The pleasure was assuredly all mine, Mr. Badd,” she said, affecting a shockingly accurate proper, posh British accent. She dropped the face and the accent, leaning close to me and smiling. “Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow.”

I left then, my heart beating absurdly hard, my lips tingling from the warmth of her skin, a million questions racing through my mind.