Chapter 19 - Torrin
By the time Reid gets the tailgate closed, I'm starting to question whether the suspension on my truck is rated for the end of the world. Especially when the end of the world arrives with Louis Vuitton luggage. A lot of Louis Vuitton luggage.
I stare at the collection of bags wedged between boxes and plastic bins while Kara supervises the last tote going in.
"Is that seriously another suitcase?"
Kara doesn't even look at me. "Yes."
"What's in it?"
"My things."
"That clears it right up."
She finally turns, golden brows lifting as she gives me the kind of look that probably makes customer service workers cry. "Would you like an itemized list, Torrin?"
"No. I'd like to know if I'm going to lose my rear axle before we make it to the farm."
Reid puts his shoulder into the tailgate until the latch finally catches. "In her defense, most of this is food."
"Thank you." Kara points at her brother before turning back to me. "Some people appreciate my contributions to our continued survival."
"I appreciate the food. I'm questioning whether the apocalypse requires four Louis Vuitton bags."
"Five."
My eyes go back to the truck bed and recount. Five it is.
Luna and Elenor packed enough food to keep all of us fed for months. At least, that's what I thought when we loaded their stockpile this morning. Kara took one look at the contents of her parents' kitchen and butler's pantry and decided to tell them to hold her fucking beer.
The woman nearly doubles what we already have.
Every cupboard in that massive kitchen got emptied.
Canned goods, rice, pasta, flour, sugar, spices, coffee, tea, jars of sauces and things I don't even recognize.
Reid found enough baking supplies to open a small shop, and Kara refused to leave behind anything she considered useful.
Her definition of useful is broad enough to include several bottles of champagne.
Reid eyes the champagne case with open suspicion. "You know we're going to an old coal mine, right? Not Milan."
"Yes, Reid. Thank you. I was terribly confused when nobody offered me champagne during check in."
Luna laughs beside me, and my attention moves to her without any conscious decision on my part. It keeps doing that.
She's been helping load food for the last half hour, and a loose strand of slivery white hair has escaped her ponytail to curl against her cheek. She looks tired and messy and so fucking good that I have to drag my eyes back to Kara before Luna catches me staring.
I don't just want her because she's beautiful, though she is. Christ, she is. It has never once been only that.
It's that she spent the last half hour making sure Reid wasn't drowning while we tore apart his childhood home.
She kept finding reasons to bump her shoulder into his or hand him something, so he had to focus on her instead of the empty rooms around him.
That's who Luna is. She notices the exact second a person starts to go under, then throws them a rope without ever making it look like a rescue.
She does it to me too. My head has never been a quiet place to live, and it goes quiet around her.
Which brings me to the thing I can't explain about this morning.
I came home wrecked. Two days of driving on no sleep, a fight I barely remember winning, and a bone deep exhaustion that had settled in somewhere around Saskatchewan and refused to leave.
Then I fell asleep with my head in Luna's lap while her fingers moved through my hair.
I woke up without a single ache in my body.
Not one single ache. The tiredness is gone, the stiffness in my shoulder is gone, and I feel better than I have since before the moon cracked.
Probably just sleep. People fell better after they sleep.
"Earth to Torrin."
I blink at her. Luna is standing directly in front of me.
"Sorry. What?"
Her eyes narrow before she reaches up and presses the back of her hand against my forehead. Every thought in my head immediately abandons me.
"You look so much better than you did last night."
"Do I?"
"Way better." Her gaze moves over my face. "Seriously. You looked awful."
"Cheers, love."
"You know what I mean."
"I do." I catch her wrist before she can lower her hand and move it to my cheek, for another second of feeling her against my skin. "Must've been your magic touch all night long. You're very good for my stamina."
Her eyebrows pull together. Then understanding hits and a flush creeps into her cheeks.
I grin at her. "All those hours with your hands on me really did the trick."
"Oh my God." She yanks her hand away and smacks me in the chest with it. "That's not what you made it sound like."
"I only stated the facts."
"You absolutely did not."
"I slept with you. You had your hands on me most of the night, and I woke up feeling fantastic. All completely factual statements."
Her mouth falls open. Reid snorts behind us.
I should probably stop but there is no chance of that happening with that pretty blush filling her face.
"Best I've felt in days, actually."
"You're an asshole."
"Also factual, love."
She's trying not to smile now, and it makes me want to grab her and kiss those soft sweet lips of hers.
"Can we talk about the fact that Kara somehow packed more food out of this house than Gigi and took from an epic Save Mart shopping spree?" Luna asks, still pink, pointing toward the truck bed.
"Thank you." I gesture toward the mountain behind me. "That's what I've been saying."
Kara looks offended. "Your survival planning lacked ambition."
"We had enough food to survive for months."
"And now we have more."
Elenor walks toward us carrying a final box and nods approvingly. "I like the way she thinks."
"Of course you do."
Kara takes the box from her. "Their kitchen was embarrassingly understocked, but the butler's pantry made up for it."
I look at the bins already crammed between the tools and fuel cans we loaded earlier. Reid and Kara didn't raid that house. They stripped it for parts, and she managed it while bringing enough designer luggage to survive a six-month European vacation.
"Are we done?"
Kara considers the truck long enough to make me nervous.
"We're done."
"Thank Christ."
"For now."
I point at her. "No. You don't get to add that."
She smiles sweetly.
Luna sits beside me in the truck for the short trip to Jules's place.
Her hand rests on the seat between us, close enough that my fingers want to reach for hers again.
I had it in mine almost the entire drive over here.
She never pulled away, and after everything that's happened since I got back to Prairie Gap, that small point of contact keeps me settled.
I missed her while I was gone for the season.
Not just hearing her voice over the phone or getting one of her rambling messages at two in the morning because she forgot normal people sleep.
I missed her. The way she gives you shit one second and leans against you the next.
Or the way she says my name when she's worried about me, softer than she says anyone else's, even though I'm probably imagining that.
Her fingers shift on the seat. Mine move before I think better of it, brushing against them, and she turns her hand over. Just an open palm waiting beside my thigh in invitation. I slide my fingers through hers and keep driving.
Love for her squeezes my heart, and that's a problem I've been avoiding for a long time.
Wanting Luna isn't new for me. I knew years ago that whatever I felt for her had stopped being simple friendship, but there was always a reason not to touch it.
Her grief, baseball, the distance, timing, and the big one, the other guys.
Then the world cracked apart before any of us had a chance to figure out what came next.
Now there are no games to get back to and no twelve-hour drives between us.
There's absolutely no fucking excuse left for pretending I don't know what happens inside me every time she reaches for my hand.
Unfortunately, there are still the other guys who feel the same way about her. And now there's Mars.
Jesus fucking Christ. I don't have enough mental bandwidth for that mess today.
"That's Jules's place?"
Luna leans forward as I turn into the long circular driveway next door.
"Yep."
I shake my head at the size of it. "Rich people."
She glances at me. "You say that like Reid and Jules haven't been buying your broke, baseball playing ass dinner for years."
"That's friendship. Completely different."
"Uh huh."
I follow the drive around, thinking rich people must be morally opposed to backing out of places based on all these circular driveways they all have.
Jules's house is every bit as excessive as the Channing place next door.
The motorhome is parked near the front steps, and by the time I pull in behind him, Jules is coming outside with Gage and someone else.
I put the truck in park. "Who's that?"
Luna leans forward to look past me. "Where?"
"With Jules."
The third person is a girl younger than us, from what I can tell. She's standing beside a growing collection of boxes while Jules points toward the motorhome and says something to Gage.
Luna shakes her head with a frown. "I don't know."
Behind us, the Escalade and Jeep pull into the drive. Mars parks first, then Reid swings in behind him. Luna releases my hand and reaches to open her door. The loss of her touch shouldn't bother me as much as it does, but I ache for it now more than ever.
Everyone starts piling out at once. Gage is already opening one of the motorhome's storage compartments when I walk around the front of my truck.
Jules has raided his house just as thoroughly as Reid and Kara raided theirs.
Boxes are stacked across the driveway along with bags and a few things I can't identify from here.
The girl stands in the middle of it all with her arms crossed.
Then Kara gets out of the Escalade. She takes one look at the girl and stops dead.
Her entire face changes. Not dramatically, because Kara doesn't do dramatic unless she's choosing to.
Her mouth tightens slightly, her eyes narrow, and every bit of her body goes rigid.
Well, that's promising. Exactly what this apocalypse needs.
Luna comes around the truck and stops beside me. "Who is that?"
Kara shuts the SUV door harder than necessary. "Jules's little sister, Briar."
Luna's face immediately softens. "What? How did I not know Jules had a little sister. She's so..."
"No." Kara holds up one finger before Luna can finish. "Whatever sweet, nurturing thing that is about to come out of your mouth, stop it immediately."
Luna blinks at her. "I was just going to say she's so young."
"Your face was saying more."
"My face doesn't talk."
"Yours absolutely does, with a full range of subtitles. Whatever adorable little sister scenario you're building in your head, destroy it immediately."
"I wasn't building a scenario."
"You have the face."
"What face?"
"The one that says you're about to adopt something."
I cough into my fist.
Luna shoots me a look. "Don't encourage her."
"Wouldn't dream of it."
Kara nods toward the girl. "She's not that kind of little sister. Picture Regina George raised by a possessed doll that spins it’s head around."
Luna's eyebrows go up. "Seriously?"
"Without the character growth Regina eventually gets, yes."
A laugh escapes me. That reference I know, because I've spent enough time around Luna to have watched Mean Girls more than once. According to her, it's culturally important.
Elenor joins us after climbing out of the other side of the Escalade. "Really? Mean like your particular brand of entertaining bitchiness, or mean enough that I should hide the knives?"
Kara's head jerks back. "Excuse me? My brand is wholly unique. There is no comparison."
Elenor nods with fake sincerity, "Of course it is, darling."
"I've spent years cultivating this personality."
"And you've done beautiful work."
Kara's offended expression lasts another two seconds before she smiles.
Those two are fucking dangerous together.
Entertaining, but dangerous. They feed off each other when they get going.
Elenor and Jules together are just as bad in a different way.
Her eyes return to Briar, and she rubs her hands together with enough enthusiasm that I immediately feel sorry for the girl.
"Don't give it another thought. I'm always up for a new project. I'll take her in hand."
"Absolutely not!" Jules calls from twenty feet away without even turning around.
Elenor ignores him.
Kara laughs at that. "As much as I would love to see that, this one may be more than even you can handle." She points directly at Jules's sister. "Briar has had fifteen years of concentrated narcissist training. That's a lot of damage to undo."
The girl turns toward us. Her stare locks onto Kara.
"Kara."
There is enough disdain packed into those two syllables to confirm every single thing Kara just said.
Kara smiles brightly and sends all of it right back with nothing but a name. "Briar."
Beside me, Luna makes a tiny sound that could be a laugh trying to escape.
Briar's eyes move over our group, dismissing most of us before stopping on Elenor. "And who are you?"
Elenor's smile grows. This poor kid has no idea what she's just done.
"Your new project manager, darling."
Gage drops his head. Jules closes his eyes. Kara looks delighted, and Luna finally loses the fight and laughs. I look at her instead of Briar, because I can't help it.
Her hand comes up to cover her mouth, green eyes bright as she tries to get herself under control, and for a few seconds there's nothing heavy in her face.
I want that. Every stupid moment that makes her laugh, I want to be there for.
I want her reaching for my hand without thinking about it.
Give me more nights with my head in her lap while she plays with my hair, and mornings where I get to tease her until her cheeks turn pink.
I want the ordinary things with her, even if ordinary now includes magic, soldiers, dragons, and an apocalypse convoy full of Louis Vuitton.
Her eyes catch mine.
"What?"
I shake my head, smiling. "Nothing, love."
She narrows her eyes, because she knows I'm full of shit, but she smiles back. For now, that's enough.