Page 62 of Ash Fall

She laughs, but she still backs toward Anders's pickup. "I'll see you at the mine."

"Cold, Luna."

"Coward," she corrects, pointing at herself. "We've established this."

Then she turns and climbs into the passenger seat before I can convince her otherwise, and I watch her buckle in with a fair amount of disbelief.

Gage walks past, carrying one last bag toward the motorhome. He looks at Anders's truck, then looks at me. "She ditch you too?"

"Appears so."

Something almost like satisfaction moves across his face, and I narrow my eyes at him. "Why don’t you tell me what put you in a shit mood? I know it has something to do with her and Jules."

His expression closes immediately. "No idea what you're talking about."

Jules calls, "I do."

Gage turns his head toward him and throws out a half-hearted, "Fuck you." But it lacks the heat of anger so he must have cooled off.

Jules throws his head back laughing, and Luna slides lower in Anders's passenger seat until the dashboard almost hides her. I look from her to Gage, then over to Jules. That story is coming out of somebody eventually, just not right now, so I let it go and climb into my truck. One by one everyone's engines start across the yard until the quiet farmyard fills with diesel rumble and exhaust.

The walkie-talkie crackles. "Everybody ready?" Anders asks.

Everyone sounds off that they’re ready and then Anders's truck pulls forward and this time, when the convoy starts moving, it feels different. We're not running from anything. Every one of us is finally heading toward something instead.

I don't know what the Harlow Mine is going to become once we get there. Home sounds too optimistic, and shelter doesn't feel big enough for everything we're asking it to be. We’ll need so much to make it work but I have faith that together we’ll find a way to make a future there.

Chapter 24 - Mars

We've been on the road for a little over an hour, and by my best guess we're somewhere around halfway to the mine. We had to backtrack once when a wreck blocked both lanes of the highway in a place where we couldn't drive through the ditches. Thankfully it wasn't too far back to a range road that we could use to cut over and around. We've slowed to crawl past a few more wrecks since then, but so far, we haven't seen a single moving vehicle that isn't part of our convoy.

That bothers me more with every kilometer. Alberta is spread out enough that sections of empty roads aren't unusual once you get away from the cities, but this feels different. No semis, no farm trucks, no families with vehicles packed to the roof trying to get somewhere safer. There are only abandoned vehicles, long stretches of pavement, and our convoy winding through all of it.

Maybe people are hunkered down at home because the walls of home still feel safer than whatever is happening outside them. I can understand that, especially after everything we've seen. The other possibility is that something worse happened while we were busy surviving our own corner of this disaster, and I don't want to spend too much time imagining what that could be.

By the time we left the farm, the final vehicle shuffle had put me alone in the Jeep. I thought I'd appreciate the quiet after the tension of the last day, but I was wrong. I'd take Reid talking too much, Jules being an asshole, or even Gage giving directions nobody asked for if it kept me from having this much room inside my own head.

I reach for the stereo again even though I already know what I'm going to get. FM has been dead since we left the farm, every station nothing but static, while AM lasted a little longer. For the first twenty minutes, pieces of broadcasts faded in and out between bursts of interference. A clipped emergency announcement, someone talking about ash, a strained report about highway closures, then half a sentence from a station too far away for me to identify before that signal disappeared too.

Now every frequency gives me the same hiss, and after another pass through the dial I finally snap it off. The sudden quiet should be better, but without the static filling the Jeep my thoughts go exactly where I've been trying to keep them from going.

Luna has been in my head almost every minute since yesterday. Keeping my distance from her is the right thing to do, and I know that even when every part of me wants the opposite. Yesterday tore both of us open in ways neither of us expected, and she deserves time to process what she learned without me hovering around her waiting for her to change her mind.

I meant the promise I made to myself in her bedroom. I'll prove I can stay, prove I can be useful, and prove I deserve a place beside the people I abandoned. That holds even if the only place Luna ever gives me is as one more friend in the group. Knowing what I need to do doesn't make it any easier though after spending years missing her from a distance, only to finally get her back within reach, and then force myself not to push for more.

Every instinct I have still turns toward her. I see that cinnamon hair and remember it spread across my pillow. I look at her mouth and know exactly how it feels under mine, which makes keeping my hands to myself a special kind of hell I fully deserve.

The part I wasn't prepared for is seeing her relationships with the guys. I knew they were close with her. They helped pull her back together after the accident while I was busy running from what I thought I'd done, and they were there for every ugly day I should have been there too. I'm not stupid enough to resent them for that. But what I am starting to realize is how little I actually know about what happened between all of them while I was gone.

I saw her at the farm when color climbed straight into her cheeks, Gage had been in a foul mood for the better part of an hour, and Jules looked pleased enough with himself to get punched on principle. I know my girl. Every version of that blush is familiar to me, and that one had more behind it than embarrassment over some stupid joke between friends.

Something happened, but I don't know whether it happened with Gage or Jules. Maybe Gage, because the way he watches her has changed, or maybe I'm only finally noticing what was there all along. Then again, Jules looked so fucking satisfied with himself that I wanted to wipe the grin off his face, and Luna could barely look at either of them without turning pink.

My fingers tighten around the steering wheel until the leather creaks, and the question I've been avoiding digs in harder. If Luna ends up with one of my friends, what the hell am I supposed to do with that? Smile and tell them I'm happy while another man touches her the way I remember touching her, then watch her build the life I wanted with somebody I used to call a brother?

For her, I want to believe I could handle it because she deserves whatever makes her happy. Where I'm concerned, I have no fucking idea, and the uncertainty twists through my gut as another thought follows it. Would I even be able to stay with the group if I had to watch that every day?

The answer to that one has to be yes, no matter how much it hurts. Leaving cannot be my answer again. I already proved what running costs, and if she chooses Gage, Jules, or anyone else, then it's her choice. Punishing her for it by disappearing isn't something I get to do, even if staying tears me apart.