Lucian

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When she got up, I figured she would go upstairs and try to catch her breath, so to speak. Just sort of calm down. But then she had her backpack and coat, and was at the front door and telling us all to fuck off on the way out. It all happened so fast that she was gone before I realized she was serious about leaving.

I stood up. “Good job, Bax,” I said. “Way to push too far.”

He held up his hands. “Well shit, I didn’t think she’d react like that. Jesus.”

“We literally just met her,” I said. “Tactful you are not.”

Bax sighed. “I’m sorry. That was a dick move.”

Dru gestured at the door, giving me a meaningful look. “Well? You’d better go after her.”

“Don’t be sorry to me you asshole, be sorry to her,” I said to Bax. “Assuming I can get her to come back.”

I didn’t bother with a coat, knowing time was of the essence if I was going to catch her in this blizzard. I left the bar, tugging my hoodie up over my head and stuffing my hands into the front pocket. I stood outside the door and looked left and right, but the snow was so thick I could barely see the sidewalk in front of me.

How far could she have gotten? This was bad. If she got lost in this, she could freeze to death a lot faster than she would realize.

“Joss!” I called. “Come back!”

“Fuck you.” I heard her voice not far away. “Just tell me where the nearest motel is.”

“You’ll never make it in this snow, for one thing,” I said, moving toward her voice. “And it’s booked solid, for another. I heard some customers talking yesterday about how all the hotels were sold out this weekend.”

“I’ll be fine.” Her voice was a murmur, depressed, flat. “Just leave me alone.”

I found her, then. Snow lay in a thick blanket over her shoulders and head, and was sticking to her dreads. She’d gone about three steps and then stopped, probably realizing her own danger.

“Joss, please.” I put my hand on her arm, standing in front of her. “Come back.”

Her eyes were hard and flat and emotionless. “Why should I?”

“Because you’ll literally freeze to death out here, if nothing else. Your coat is still wet, which will freeze around you and trap the cold in. It’s actually doing more harm than good.”

“So you just don’t want my death on your conscience?”

I couldn’t help a laugh. “Yeah, that’s it. That’s my only reason.”

She couldn’t stop a slight quirk of her lips as she attempted to suppress a smile. “How chivalrous of you.”

I let out a breath. “Joss, come on. For real, I want you to come back. We all do.”

“Your brother is an asshole.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“Your sisters-in-law are all intimidatingly beautiful and funny and cool.”

I nodded again. “I know that too.”

“Your family is overwhelming as fuck.”

“Also true.” I let my hand slide down to hers, and wrapped her fingers in my hand. “But we mean well, and we’re loyal, and we’d all give you the shirt off our backs.”

“Well, I am wearing Dru’s clothing.”

Her teeth were chattering, now, and she was shivering. I tugged her back toward the bar. “Come on, Joss. Just come back with me.”

“No more inquisitions.”

“Not a single question.”

“I’m not running from anything.” She stopped and glared up at me, making sure I saw how serious she was. “And I don’t like answering personal questions from people I don’t know. I’m very private.”

I led her back into the bar and relocked the door. “I understand completely. I’m pretty private myself.”

“How’s that work, in a family of fifteen people?”

I laughed. “It’s tricky.”

When Joss approached the table, Bax stood up and moved around to stand in front of her. “I apologize for being a dick,” he said, shooting her his trademark sassy, naughty, charming grin. “Sometimes my mouth runs away from my brain.”

“My dear, sweet husband has a chronic case of verbal diarrhea,” Eva put in. “But he doesn’t mean anything by it.”

Joss was frozen again, tensed, as if all the eyes and attention on her had a physically paralytic effect. “I—it’s fine. No big deal.”

Bax batted his eyelashes and did an impression of a sad puppy. “So you forgive me?”

Even Joss couldn’t help laughing at that. “Yes, Bax, I forgive you.”

Bax moved in, big burly arms held out wide. “Can I get a hug?”

If Joss was paralyzed by tense discomfort before, the prospect of hugging Baxter seemed to freeze her even further, to the point that she held her arms at her sides, hands fisted, shoulders turtled up, agonized awkwardness in every line and curve of her body.

“Ummm…”

I stepped up beside her and batted at Bax’s arms. “I don’t think she’s ready for the full Baxter hug experience.”

“I’m…not much of a hugger,” Joss said.

Bax just shrugged. “I’ll get you one day. You’ll hug me and you’ll love it. I’m a great hugger. World class.”

“Is that what the kids are calling it these days? Hugging?” Corin quipped, snorting.

Bax was close enough to Corin that he reached out without looking and slugged him in the chest. “I meant a totally normal, platonic, innocent hug, you filthy pervert.”

At that moment, Jax started crying, and despite Zane’s best efforts, he wouldn’t calm down. Eventually Mara took him and headed for the stairs.

“I think this little Badd boy is ready for a nap,” Mara said. “Which means this party has to quiet down.”

“Hey, Zane, wanna get a few sets in while your woman puts your spawn down for a nap?” Bax asked.

Zane nodded. “Sounds good. You cool with that, babe?”

Mara waved a hand. “Go for it. He had me up a lot last night anyway, so I’m gonna take a nap with him.”

Claire stood up and hauled at Brock’s arm. “Come on, babe. All that talk about dick made me horny. Take me home and fuck me.”

Joss choked on suppressed laughter, which made Claire cackle all the more loudly. “I think we’re scandalizing poor Joss, baby.”

Brock followed Claire, and then picked her up and pinned her against the wall with his hips, before turning his head to give Joss a playful wink. “Better avert your eyes, kiddo, this is about to get dirty. “

Joss looked at me, and then back at Claire and Brock, who were doing a pretty convincing job at pretending to fuck right there against the wall, with lots of exaggerated grunts and moans.

“Oh my god,” Joss breathed. “They’re crazy. You’re all crazy!”

“They’re just fucking with you.” I shouted at Brock and Claire, then: “Get a room!”

“It’s too far to make it home in this snow,” Brock said, his mouth nipping at Claire’s throat. “Can we borrow a room here?”

Bast waved a hand. “Zane’s old room is still empty. Go for it. Just wash the sheets when you’re done.”

Claire slid down, wiggled out from between Brock and the wall, and hauled him toward the stairs. “Come on, Brock! I need your cock.” She giggled. “That rhymes. Brock, Brock, give me your cock! Hickory dickory dock, I’m about to ride your cock.”

“CLAIRE!” Mara shouted. “Keep your perverted poetry to yourself! None of us need to hear that shit, you slut!”

Brock picked Claire up, tossed her over his shoulder, and carried her up the stairs, spanking her at every step…and not gently. Which only made her squeal in what sounded like equal parts outrage, pain, and pleasure.

“Are they really going to go have sex right now? Like they literally announced it to the whole group?” Joss asked me.

I nodded. “Yep. That’s Claire. She, ahh…her engine revs rather high, it seems.”

Joss just shook her head, and then rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “I was going to ask if I could go up there and be somewhere quiet, but now that they’re up there fucking…” she groaned, tipping her head back. “I really need to just sit and be somewhere quiet. I’m exhausted.”

I felt like an ass. She’d already said her day had been crazy long and hard, and she had already fallen into ice-cold water, and now she was struggling to deal with my crazy brothers.

“If you can brave the outside for another few seconds, we can go to the other apartment.” I addressed the rest of the group. “Joss did just fall into the Passage, guys. I’m gonna run down the street with her where it’s quieter.”

“Keep one hand on the wall,” Bast said. “Super easy to get turned around in shit that thick.”

“We’ll clean up here,” Xavier said. “You guys go. She’s probably crashing after the adrenaline rush of falling in. That can make you even more tired than the shock to the system itself.”

Bax grabbed his coat off the back of his chair and held it out. “You want this?”

I shook my head. “Nah. It’s not that far. Thanks though.”

I led her back outside. “It’s literally two doors down,” I told her. “So we’ll just follow the wall and jog. Ready?”

She nodded. I put her against the wall, and we trotted down the street. The wind blew the snow in swirling, sideways drifts, turning the snowflakes into a battering ram of icy razor blades, obscuring everything in a wall of white. I felt the brick transition as we passed the travel agency that was sandwiched between Badd’s and the studio, and then I felt the next transition, and then the front door of the studio was right there. I shoved the door open, keeping a tight grip on the doorknob as the wind tried to snatch the door away from me. We stumbled inside, mounds of snow drifting in after us, and then I put my shoulder to the door and shoved it closed, falling back against it, out of breath from the effort and the cold.

“Holy shit,” I panted. “Never seen a blizzard this bad in my life.”

“I heard it was supposed to be pretty temperate here,” Joss said, shaking snow off her head, her dreadlocks wiggling and dancing.

“It is, usually. But when people think of Alaska, they think it’s like this all the time, but it’s really not. I mean, unless you go up near the Arctic Circle, like in Barrow or somewhere way north. But down here? It snows, but not usually like this.”

I found the light switch and flipped it on, revealing the twins’ studio—racks of guitars, a stand holding several ukuleles, a banjo, and a mandolin, a drum set, several different types and sizes of hand drums like bongos and cajones and such, a sectioned off, soundproofed isolated recording booth, a high-end mix board, speakers, amps, microphones, a snake pit of cords and wires, concert posters on the walls from Canaan and Corin’s stint as Bishop’s Pawn as well as newer posters billing Canaan and Aerie as Canary, and a small desk with a pair of mammoth iMacs side by side.

Joss stared around at all the equipment. “Geez. Somebody must be hardcore into music.”

“The twins,” I answered. “They used to be Bishop’s Pawn. Now they own their own record label, and Canaan and Aerie tour as Canary.”

Joss snapped her fingers. “That’s why they look so familiar! I was sleeping at a bus station a week or so ago, and they had MTV on the TVs for some reason. They were playing a live recording of a Bishop’s Pawn concert from like two years ago or something.”

I nodded. “Yeah, they recorded a live concert special from…Atlanta, I think it was? Pretty big deal. Scored them their world tour with Rev Theory.” Something she said had me frowning at her. “Wait. Did you say you were sleeping at a bus station?”

She hung her head. “Shit. Forget I said that?”

I sighed. “Sure. I did promise no questions.” I jerked a thumb at the door behind where there were stairs leading up to the apartment above. “Let’s go upstairs. You can crash on my bed if you want.”

I preceded her up the stairs, but the silence between us was thick with the questions I wasn’t asking. That slip, added to the way she was dressed when I rescued her from the water, made me think she didn’t have a permanent housing situation.

I showed her my room—it’s small, but it’s mine. Most of the wall space is covered in bookshelves, stuffed and overstuffed with paperbacks and hardcovers, all well worn and dog-eared. My bed was underneath the window, the headboard something I made myself out of a set of bookcases, two on either side of the mattress and a third set on end horizontally across the top of them, with the books stacked vertically between the shelves in neat rows. The frame of the bed, underneath the mattress, was a bureau, essentially, with three large drawers on each side and two more at the foot, creating enough storage for all my clothes.

The only decoration in the room aside from the books was a large corkboard nailed to the backside of the door, on which are postcards and photographs from all the places I’ve been—Hawaii, Thailand, Burma, Laos, the Philippines, Taiwan, and most of the Indonesian islands.

Joss examined my room—it’s a queerly vulnerable feeling, showing someone my bedroom. This is my space, my private haven. It’s where I go to be alone—alone time is something I crave, and it is hard to come by with eight brothers and six sisters-in-law, plus a nephew, and my ever-increasing responsibilities at the bar.

As my brothers settle into life in Ketchikan for what has been just over a year now, several of them have found work outside the bar. Bax has the gym and his growing list of clients, Brock has his air service, flying tourists around the local area and points abroad, the twins have their music, so it’s really just Bast, Zane, Xavier, and me running the bar fulltime.

She shot me a look. “You read a lot, huh?”

I shrugged. “Yeah, it’s my only real hobby. I don’t get a lot of downtime from the bar, and what I do get, I spend in here reading.”

“That bar, where we were all eating—you own that?”

I shook my head. “I don’t—we do. My brothers and I. Our grandfather started it, our dad ran it, and then Dad passed a little over a year ago and now we run it.”

She perused the titles of the books—my tastes are broad, ranging from sci-fi to historical fiction to biography and science and mathematics.

“Little bit of everything, huh?” She plucked one of my favorite biographies on Teddy Roosevelt and thumbed through it. “He was a fascinating guy, Teddy.”

I nodded. “Sure was.”

She put the book back where I had it, and continued her examination. I hadn’t closed the door behind us, not wanting her to feel trapped or enclosed or awkward, but she caught a glimpse of the corkboard on the back of the door, and she closed the door to look at it.

Her breath caught when she saw the huge collage of photos and postcards. “Wow. I mean—wow. You’ve been to all these places?”

I nodded. “I started working on a fishing boat when I was…thirteen? The owner, Clint Mackey, was a friend of my dad’s, and I was obsessed with his boat from when I was a kid. I’d beg to go play on Captain Mackey’s boat whenever he was docked, and eventually he just told me if I’d come help him on the boat after school every day, he’d pay me. So I started cleaning and repairing nets after school, and he paid really well. I worked for Clint for years. I was never a very good student, not because I’m not smart, I was just…I was restless, you know? I wanted to be on the boat. Out on the water. I wanted to fish, not take stupid tests and do homework. I didn’t see the point. I’d have just dropped out and worked on the boat full-time, but my dad wouldn’t let me. So he made me a deal—if I got my GED, I could drop out of school and work with Clint full time. So I busted my ass, got my GED in a matter of months, and worked for Clint full-time until I was eighteen. The day I turned eighteen, I took a berth on a deep-sea fishing boat and sailed away. Never looked back, either, not till I got the email last year about Dad passing.”

“Sorry to hear about your father.”

I let out a breath. “Yeah, it was…I don’t know. Unexpected and not, at the same time. He wasn’t in good health during most of my life.”

She looked at me with compassion. “He was sick?”

I sat on my bed and wondered how much I should tell her. “Um, not sick, exactly.” I let out another slow breath. “My mom passed away when I was nine, and Dad was never the same after that. Drank a lot, worked open to close all day every day, and then passed out as soon he closed the bar. After Mom died, my only memories of Dad are of him behind the bar, a drink in hand, watching ESPN, or serving customers. Bast raised the rest of us, essentially. My dad just kind of…checked out. Mom was his whole world, I guess, and without her, he just couldn’t cope.”

Joss plopped down on the bed next to me, close but not touching. “So you’re an orphan.”

I nodded. “I guess so. Never really thought of it like that.”

Silence settled between us.

Joss sighed, flipping one end of a dreadlock between her fingers. “I guess we have those two things in common, at least.”

I eye her sideways. “That being what?”

“No parents and a penchant for travel.”

“I see.” I didn’t know what else to say.

She dug in her backpack and pulled out a pink pocket folder full of postcards and travel brochures—I noticed all the locations in her collection were Canadian. She opened the folder carefully—it was soaked from her fall, and everything in it was soft and wet, easily ripped.

“Dammit,” Joss whispered. “It’s all ruined.”

I know exactly how important a collection like that can be to someone for whom travel is a way of life. “Not necessarily,” I said. “We can salvage most of it.” I reached out a hand for the binder. “May I?”

She met my gaze warily. “What are you gonna do with it?”

“Blow-dry it.”

She smiled hesitantly. “I guess that could work.”

“I dropped a backpack full of books into the ocean once. I jumped in after it, swam down almost ninety feet before I caught it. I spent hours blow-drying those books to save them.”

I grinned at her, and then carefully removed each item from the binder and spread them out on the floor. I grabbed the hair dryer from the bathroom and brought it into my bedroom, plugged it in, and turned it on. Joss just sat and watched; hope blossomed in her eyes, as I spent the next hour saving her postcards and brochures.

We chatted as I dried her collection, talking about the places we’ve been. I told her about adventures from my travels, getting lost on a trip to a temple in Burma, almost getting shanghaied by pirates in Taiwan, weathering a typhoon off the coast of Java. In turn, she told me about walking across all of Canada by herself, and the people she met—long-haul truckers, farmers in their beat up old pickups, kind old ladies who insisted on putting her up the for the night, dodging local police as she tried to find somewhere to sleep. I still didn’t know exactly how she lost her parents, or how she ended up walking across Canada or why, and I didn’t ask.

When everything was mostly dry, we sat on the floor and just talked. I think I talked more to Joss in those hours than I have to anyone in my whole life. There’s just something about her that drew me in, made me want to hear what she had to say, made me want to share my own stories. Time vanished—we just talked. We talked music, politics, books, movies, our childhoods. The sky outside the window grew dark.

At some point during the course of the conversation, we ended up side by side on my bed, backs to the headboard, shoulders brushing. Gradually, we sank lower and lower, until somehow we were both lying down. It was comfortable, easy. We just lay there, and we talked to each other. Full night dropped in around us, and my eyes burned with fatigue, and Joss was clearly fading herself.

There was a pause in the conversation and, for the first time in hours, there was silence between us. It was utterly dark in my room—we never turned the light on, so we’d been talking in the darkness for a while now. I heard her breathing slow down and even out. I felt her twitch a little, toes curling in and relaxing, her thigh muscles where they brushed against mine tensing and relaxing.

I was utterly comfortable. Relaxed, more at ease at this moment, with this near-total stranger in my bed beside me, than I maybe have ever been.

The thought made my heart pound.

Deciding to give her space to sleep so she didn’t wake up disoriented and in a strange bed with a strange man, I sat up and twisted my legs off the bed. I felt her hand latch onto my wrist.

“Stay.” Her voice wasn’t even a whisper, just a sound so quiet, so sleepy, that if the room hadn’t been dead silent I would have missed it.

“You’re sure?”

She let go of my wrist. “Just don’t try anything.”

I lay back down, gingerly. Now that I’d decided to get up, my comfort and ease vanished. I was tense, hyperaware of her presence.

It took a long time, but I eventually fell asleep.