Chapter 32 - Luna
I have no idea what time it is when I wake up and realize that I’m alone in this giant bed.
The glow from the bright overhead lights of the bay is muted but it makes it through the blinds covering the window opposite the bed, and the blankets on either side of me are thrown back and long cold. Somebody tucked mine up over my shoulder before they left. My money's on Reid.
I should get up and get to work. Instead, I lie there for a bit enjoying the feeling of being comfortable and cozy and stare at a new ceiling.
It hits me that I’ll likely never wake up staring at the familiar ceiling of my childhood home again as I let myself catch up with everything from yesterday.
Three of them kissed me. Three of them, in one day.
Reid brought his shaking hands and his whole heart.
Jules kissed me the way he does everything, certain he'd already won. Torrin was so soft and sure it made my knees almost give out. As confusing as all of that should be, confusion is not the thing humming through me this morning. The thing humming through me wants more. It feels like there’s a well inside of me and it wants, needs to be filled.
The whole of me wants more contact, more of their mouths, more of their hands, more of them.
I roll my eyes at the ceiling. Or maybe it's just been a very long time since I've had an orgasm.
Then I think about Gage, and the humming comes to a dead stop.
He wouldn't even sleep in the same camper as the rest of us last night.
The man walked in, looked at me for one second, and walked back out and I have no idea where he ended up sleeping.
I can't stand it. Him hurting and me being the reason, both of those are unbearable to me.
Lying here cataloguing kisses while he's out there somewhere hurting is not something I can do for one more minute.
I don't have the answers on how to fix this. There’s no manual.
There isn’t even a talk show we could go on anymore to have some pretend doctor help us work through our feelings.
Nobody has explained how any of this would work, or if it even can.
What I do know is that it has to start with an actual conversation where all five of us are in one room with nobody storming off.
That’s never going to happen while he won't look at me, so I get up and get dressed.
The bay feels wrong when I come down the steps of the fifth wheel and it takes me a second to work out why.
The whole place is quiet. No tools are banging or people rushing around.
Instead, there's a crowd of maybe thirty people, bunched up at the biggest open bay door with their backs to me and all of them dead silent and looking out.
I cross the floor and work my way in between shoulders until I can see.
Snow is falling.
That's my first thought, actual snow drifting down soft and slow across the service road, the pen, the badlands beyond.
My brain trips over it, because it's July but then I see the colour of it.
It isn't white. It's a muted grey with shades of brown, settling on the road in a film that the wind smears sideways, and the light behind it is the colour of dirty dishwater.
It isn't snow at all. The ash is here.
Whatever reprieve we had is over. Everything out there just got more dangerous, breathing included.
I stand in that silent crowd watching the sky come down and feel the weight of it press on all of us at once.
How long? How long will the ash fall and keep us trapped inside?
The question has anxiety tensing my shoulders as I turn to look away and notice the other new thing.
A corridor runs from the bay door across the service road to the pen, and it wasn't there when I went to sleep.
Earth walls stand just over the height of a tall man, packed smooth, and arched over the top of them is a roof that catches the grey light and gleams. It looks almost like glass.
Somebody roofed a hallway in glass, except this is thicker than glass, with a soft frosted shine to it.
"Pretty good, right?"
Kara appears at my elbow and pushes a travel mug into my hands. The coffee smell coming off it nearly makes me tear up. She juts her chin toward the corridor with a smirk.
"I got skills. I did that."
"What?" I look from her to the gleaming roof and back. "What do you mean you did that?"
"Okay, well, obviously Gage made the walls." She waves a hand. "And Jules helped. He pulled water up out of the stock tank and just, I don't know how to explain it properly, he floated it up in this big sheet and curved it over the top of the walls and held it there. And then I turned it to ice."
I stare at her. The roof is a single frozen arch, seamless, running the whole way to the pen. Anybody can walk out to feed cattle without one flake of ash touching them.
"Wow. Just wow. You really do have skills besides chilling your cocktails, I guess."
"Please." She examines her nails. "I am a woman of many, many talents." The nails apparently disappoint her, because her face falls. "God, these are never going to recover after this. Do you think anybody off that charter bus knows how to do a proper manicure?"
"You could put up a sign-up sheet."
"Don't tempt me. Come on, let's go eat something before we get conscripted into slave labor."
We turn to push back through the crowd, but my feet come to a stop when I spot something.
The woman with the bible is standing a few bodies away, hands wrapped around it the way they always are.
Clayton's sister, Marlene, I think. Her eyes aren't on the ash.
They're on Kara, and the look on her face stops me cold.
It isn't wariness or disapproval. What's on her face is straight up hate.
The crowd shifts, somebody crosses my view, and when the gap opens again she's turned back to the falling ash with her lips moving. I shake my head. I must have misread it. That's what I tell myself even as a cold little knot settles in behind my ribs anyway. I hurry to catch up with Kara.
"Hey." I keep my voice down as we walk. "Do you think any of the new people have magic we don't know about?"
Kara shrugs one shoulder. "No idea. Nobody's performed any marvellous party tricks yet. It feels a little intrusive to just go around asking, though, right? Like…Hi, welcome, are you Gryffindor or Slytherin?"
"I guess so." I chew on it. "I'm just curious. We can't be the only ones who got given these things."
"No, we're definitely not. There were reports everywhere before communications died of people doing strange things all over the world, and the guys have all run into it or seen it firsthand.
" She tips her head, thinking. "The Delford people, though?
I don't know. The ripple, the shift, whatever we're calling the thing where the two realms dipped into each other.
It took from that area, right? It took their whole town.
So maybe it didn't leave anything behind either, no gifts, nothing.
Maybe taking is all it did there." She shrugs again. "Just a theory."
"That kind of makes sense." I blow across my coffee. "God, wouldn't it be nice if any of this came with a user manual?"
She huffs a laugh. "Chapter one, congratulations on your apocalypse. Chapter two, stop screaming in panic."
"Anyway," I try to make it sound casual and fail completely. "Have you seen Gage this morning?"
"I did see Mr. Grumpy Pants, actually. He was up before everybody, building that corridor." She side-eyes me. "What's up with that? Any idea?"
I sigh from somewhere around my ankles. "Yeah. There was a little bit of drama last night."
Kara's whole face lights up. "Spill the tea."
Gigi materializes beside us at exactly that moment, the way she does whenever the word drama gets used within a hundred feet of her.
The three of us walk to the motorhome while I lay it out.
Reid kissing me behind the motorhome. Jules right after him.
Gage seeing all of it, the fight nobody will describe to me, the way he walked out of the fifth wheel last night.
"Oh, and Torrin also kissed me. So, yeah, that happened too."
Kara makes a sound only kettles should make.
"I have no idea what I'm doing," I finish, miserable. "I just know I have to talk to Gage and try to fix this, because the last thing I ever want to do is hurt him."
Gigi doesn't even take a breath as she jumps in. "Try reverse psychology on him." She holds up one finger, then a second one. "And if that doesn't work, try reverse cowgirl. One of the two will get you what you want."
"Gigi!"
Kara is laughing as she stabs a finger at Gigi. "What she said!"
"It's not just about sex with them," I grind out, and I can hear how prim that sounds.
"Sure." Kara rolls her eyes. "But it's also a little bit about sex too, right?"
I throw my hands up, which costs me some coffee and has the brat jumping back so it doesn’t land on her designer jeans.
"Oh, come on," she points at me. "You cannot stand there and tell me you wouldn't be down for that.
All of them. And listen, as much as I want no details, and I mean none, zero, about you and my brother, even I can admit it's objectively hot to have multiple men lining up to make all your dreams come true. "
"It's complicated." I say it too loud. "I don't even know how it would work."
Gigi's hand shoots up. "Oh! Oh. I can draw you a diagram if you want."
I give up. Turning on my heel, I march up the motorhome steps. "We're making breakfast now. Breakfast is happening."
They follow me in, still cackling.
Cooking with Gigi settles me the way it always has.
We build a feast out of what we brought, eggs and rehydrated sausage links and a mountain of toast. Gigi hums to herself while she works two pans at once, and Kara butters while providing commentary.
My hands stay busy and my head goes exactly where I told it not to.
How would it even work?