Page 74 of Ash Fall

"No. I don't think we'll scare her off." His thumb starts tapping the wheel again. "This has been coming for a long time, Reid, and our girl isn't oblivious. She knows how we feel about her. She's known for a while, and she's been very carefully not looking directly at it."

"That's not the same as her wanting us back."

"It isn't," he agrees. "We made a promise, though. Treading water in the middle of downtown Vancouver, half drowned, absolutely certain we were about to die out there, we swore that if we got home we would tell her. We've been home for days and neither one of us has had a serious conversation about it with her yet."

My stomach drops, because he's right, and because I remember exactly what the water felt like when I said it.

"Things have been insane since we got back," I say. "I'd love it if we had more than two minutes between running to the next emergency. She deserves better than getting told or asked something like that in a hallway in between our to-do lists."

Jules scoffs at that. "Good luck. The way this is going we won't get one minute, let alone two, for the next week. Probably longer." His jaw sets and determination fills his face. "I'm done waiting. We’ve loved that girl from a distance long enough, and we're about to start a whole new life with forty other people living on top of us. I intend to start it the way I plan on finishing it, which is with her. Before we close our eyes tonight, Luna is going to know exactly how we feel and exactly what we want."

Nerves come up through me fast enough that my hands go cold in my lap.

Women have never been simple for me. Somebody gets close, or interested, or just stands nearer than I'm ready for, and my chest locks down while my brain walks out of the room. Our therapist spent a long time helping me understand why my body does that. What my mother and her friend did to me is not something I carry shame about anymore, but the aftereffects are still there. Understanding it helps but knowing the reason has still never once stopped it from happening.

Except for Luna. Being close to Luna has never done that to me, not one single time.

The first time I ever laid eyes on her, she read the panic on my face from twenty feet away and walked straight into it. She lied to a girl's face, hooked her arm through mine, and got me out of there. There was not one question out of her the whole way. Two soft pats on my back, and then she left me with the guys and kept walking like none of it had happened. She has been doing her version of that ever since and she has never once asked me for anything back. Being near her has never made me feel anxiety or panic like other women do. He’s the only one I’ve ever wanted. It was always going to be her.

The part that scares me is not that she'd laugh. Luna would never laugh. She'd be kind about it, and I would have to stand there and watch her be kind while she told me no. That promise in the water was real, though. Every word of it was true, and I'm not letting what somebody else did to me make this decision too.

"There's a problem with your timeline," I tell him. "You know Gage isn't on board with any of this. You proved that today. He was furious."

Jules scowls at the road, then lifts one shoulder. "I'm not worried about Gage. He wants her as badly as the rest of us do, he just needs the right leverage applied before he'll admit it out loud. Out of all of us, it’ll be the toughest for him to change his mindset. Ultimately though, he wants her to be happy just like we do. And it’s not like we’re strangers at a keg party looking for a gang bang, he knows we all have her best interests at heart. Torrin will be the easiest sign up of the whole group. That man will join my little sexual pyramid scheme with his hand already raised."

A laugh blasts out of me then dies just as fast. "It's not only about sex, Jules."

"I know that, Reid."

"No, I need you to actually hear it." I tell him seriously. "With her, with all of us, it's so much more than that."

He's quiet for a second, and when he answers, everything sharp has gone out of his face.

"Yeah. It's all of her, and it's all of us together, the way it's supposed to be." He clears his throat and the smooth slides back over him. "Also the sex. Let's not pretend."

"And Mars?" I ask, because that could be a major complication. "Where does he fit into this?"

The tapping stops again. Jules blows out a long breath through his nose.

"I don't know. That depends entirely on Luna." He watches the road roll under Torrin's tires. "I can picture our future down to the furniture, but it comes down to what she wants and what makes her happy. If she truly can’t get on board with any of this, then I don't have the first clue what we do."

Neither of us has an answer for that, so we leave it there, and up ahead the trucks slow and put on their signals.

The turn takes us down a long, paved road with a green sign at the entrance. Everything opens up at the end into a visitor centre parking lot big enough for tour buses. Two storeys of glass catch the afternoon sun where the building sits flush into the face of the rock. I know from the school trip that a cafeteria with about two hundred seats is sitting behind those windows. Relief goes through me so hard my eyes sting. We're here. Whatever comes next, we made it here.

Everybody spills out at once, stretching stiff legs and looking around. The kids and Penny are running before their feet are all the way down. Gage walks straight up to the main doors and hauls on the handles, which don't budge. He bangs the side of his fist against the glass while Torrin heads for the truck bed to find something to pry them open with.

That's when a shape moves inside the dark lobby.

An older man comes toward the doors with a set of keys already up in his hand. He looks to be about Anders's age with a narrow build and a solid, upright stance. There’s a laminated name tag hanging from a lanyard outside of his canvas jacket. It’s almost eerie how everyone gets quiet while we wait for him to work the lock and it hits me that I never considered the possibility that we wouldn’t be able to get in. He steps out into the sunlight, blinking at the size of the group that has just parked in his lot.

"Sorry, folks," he says. "We're closed. We're not running tours with everything that's going on."

Anders is already moving, hand out, easy as a neighbour at a fence line. "Well, turns out we’re not here for a tour. Could I borrow you for a private word, just inside those doors?"

The man looks past him at the buses, the trailers, the cattle liner, and the forty people standing in his parking lot. I can’t hear people’s thoughts, but I can see on his face when he decides to be curious instead of afraid. He holds the door open for Anders and the two of them disappear into the dark of the lobby together.

Then every bird in Alberta screams at once.