Brian Campo (briancampo) wrote in birthrightrpg, @ 2022-01-19 09:01:00 |
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Entry tags: | brian campo, tasha sloan |
Wouldn't Take It Back
Who: Tasha, Brian
What: House Party
When: New Year’s Eve
Where: Hobart Avenue, Las Vegas
The house on Hobart Avenue was a Las Vegas rarity. Built in the 1960s, it was a split-level on a decent-sized lot at the end of a cul de sac. In the front, there was a two-car, concrete driveway with a pebble lawn, a couple of palm trees, and a cluster of overgrown cacti. In the back, the fenced-in yard had a sheltered patio with a picnic table and grill, a rectangular pool, a hot tub, a trampoline, and a workshop designed for tools but currently storing a lot of gear. Inside the house, the floorplan was original, the furnishings a bit dated, but it was relatively clean with a nostalgic flavor that included a corded wall phone.
The group who rented the three-bedroom house had a sort of rolling lease. Tenants were added and subtracted, but they never completely surrendered occupancy. You’d be hard-pressed to find a struggling local musician who hadn’t lived there for a couple of months or crashed on the couch.
It was in a boisterous neighborhood full of big families, young renters, and people who shot off their own fireworks and didn’t call the cops if the bass was loud. They looked out for each other. That included averting their eyes from whatever the hell was happening in that hot tub, or chasing a thief away from a sedan with a bat.
It was a good place for a house party.
Brian poured from a bottle on the kitchen counter and brought it back to Tasha. “Maker’s Mark, neat.” It was a double. He was playing it reckless and drinking whatever had been handed to him in a red Solo cup. Brian took a sip and looked at it, confused. “Try this. I can’t decide if it’s terrible or not.”
Tasha had been leaning against a wall due to knowing all too well what events had transpired on that couch. She was in a good mood, feeling unusually – and perhaps foolishly – optimistic about the prospect of a new year as she took in the goings-on at the party while waiting for Brian to return. The location was comforting in its familiarity, and the fact that she could smoke inside was a plus that couldn’t be said about some of the more structured venue parties taking place along the strip. Of course, the hunter was perennially trying to ‘cut back’, but alcohol would help fill the void. Healthy swaps.
Tasha perked up visibly when Brian came back with drinks, thanking him for the Maker’s Mark before peering curiously into the plastic drinking receptacle. “Oversell it, why don’t you,” she grinned before taking it from him and lifting it just enough to get a splash of the liquid on the tip of her tongue. Her eyes drifted ceiling-ward as she tried to discern the mixture of flavors she was getting. “This is more confusing than the ass juice shot,” the hunter proclaimed before handing him back the Solo cup and using her bourbon as a palate cleanser. “There’s a very small but real possibility of prescription cough syrup being in that,” she advised sagely before offering him a sip of her own drink.
He happily traded cups for the length of a sip, then gave it back. Tasha was right about the drink, but it was lower risk than accepting a hit of whatever was going around on the patio. “In that case, I should send you a text,” Brian said, taking up space on the wall beside her, “Releasing you from liability for whatever happens in the next few hours. Not that I’m making assumptions.” He raised his hands. “The night is young. I heard the guy by the door with the watch fob plays the viol.”
He nudged up the sleeves of his waffle shirt. Somewhere in the house, a playlist shuffled onto the opening percussion of ‘Do You Wanna Touch Me.’
She linked one arm around his in a bid to get closer, her drink in her free hand as she stood next to him. Tasha was well aware of the fact that her newfound optimism had a lot to do with the sometimes overwhelming mess of feelings that she had for Brian. But too much introspection on her part led to historically treacherous territory, so she was holding off on the self-examination for now and just trying to enjoy the ride. “Oh man, do you think I can put in a request for ‘the Devil Went Down to Georgia’?
Brian’s eyes closed as he savored the idea. He brought the plastic cup to his heart. “Please. I would do anything, up to and including adding the Korn version to the jukebox at Lucky’s.” He leaned closer and nuzzled his way past the locks of Tasha’s hair to kiss the side of her neck. She smelled good, like her natural scent with a mixture of skin and hair care products that got more familiar all the time. It was good to have his wolfish sense of smell back in working order; being without it for a while had made it feel like he had shoved cotton into his nose.
He crossed his fingers that she was good with that level of PDA. A house party full of people they both knew was different from a bar, and he had a vague understanding that this was experimental turf for Tasha. Brian was trying to figure out the line between ‘yeah, I like you, this is good,’ and ‘Jesus Christ, you’re smothering me.’ It was easier than it used to be. Brian knew he had a tendency to dive headfirst into what he thought was the emotional deep end, only to realize too late it was the shallow end. He should get a tattoo of that stick figure bashing his brains out on the bottom of a pool.
He straightened up and downed half the contents of the cup.
Tasha closed her eyes briefly, enjoying the sensation of his lips and warm breath brushing over her neck. When she opened them again, her gaze alighted on a few overly zealous partiers who were clumsily stripping down to their underwear with excited declarations of jumping into the hot tub out back. She raised an eyebrow slightly before quickly checking the current temperature on her phone’s weather app. Tasha turned to face Brian. “Do you want to watch some drunk people make possibly bad decisions, or would that remind you too much of work?” the hunter asked him with a smirk. The fingers that were currently wrapped around his bicep gave it an affectionate squeeze as she finished off her own drink.
“You kidding? I definitely want to see that. I don’t have to break it up.” Brian pushed away from the drywall and tugged her in the direction of the back door. “What are you thinking, trampoline? Operating a grill?” He gulped the bottom of his drink and suppressed a full body shiver at the aftertaste. The cup sailed into an open trash can and landed amongst a pile of paper plates and gnawed pizza crusts. “I heard Randy’s shooting off artillery shells and roman candles in the driveway later. Yes. The same Randy who plays drums with nine fingers.”
“Sounds like it will be eight fingers after tonight,” Tasha remarked as she held onto Brian’s hand, trailing after him and passing at least a few people making out rather ostentatiously. And it wasn’t even midnight yet. Something glass-like glinted in her peripheral vision and her eyes narrowed astutely. “Hang on,” the hunter told him before investigating, rewarded for her efforts by finding a poorly hidden, half-full bottle of Don Julio, which she snatched up with her free hand before they headed outside. “Score.” Between her leather jacket and the artificial warmth that would be provided by the alcohol, Tasha was set. Steam drifted up from the hot tub as the partially clothed guests giddily dunked themselves in the swirling water. Someone had pulled a unicorn float from the pool and placed it in the hot tub.
“Hmmm, I’m thinking…trampoline. Maybe a nice, festive compound fracture?” The hunter grinned and leaned in to press a mischievous kiss against his cheek before uncapping the tequila.
Brian balanced on one leg while he took off his shoes and socks and dropped them beside the empty trampoline. He watched her swallow a shot of liquor and realized she had made off with an entire bottle of tequila. Tasha might be the ideal woman.
“I always say it only counts if you can see bone.” The werewolf climbed on the frame and rolled into the center of the canvas. It was a good thing they left the net up. Nothing about the ground suggested it was a nice place to land. Brian got up and did a test bounce. His mouth broke into a smile. “Shit. I haven’t done this since I was…” He fell silent as he jumped. “Seventeen?” Someone had propped open the kitchen window to let in some cold, fresh air. Music drifted out of it.
She carefully set the bottle down on the ground before crouching down to undo the laces on her boots, pulling them off and setting them aside. Tasha cradled the tequila under one arm as she climbed up to join Brian on the trampoline. At first she just stood there, watching him jump as she smiled, wavering slightly as he landed. She offered him the alcohol.
“I haven’t done this since…” The hunter tried to remember, and could only recall a neglected trampoline in an old friend’s backyard in Seattle, perpetually wet and slick from rain and littered with pine needles that they didn’t bother to clean off before jumping, the way they scratched at the bottoms of their bare feet. It was an old-school style without the safety netting. “Forever.” Tasha moved closer to the center and jumped, too. She could hear the springs creak.
“What did you just say? Never?” Brian jumped higher in a bid to toss Tasha into the air. The neighbors’ yards came in and out of view: Car with a tarp up on blocks; play kitchen faded from the sun. Over in the hot tub beneath the patio cover, somebody had started up a game of no-hands pass the bottle. He bounced into a cross-legged position and propelled himself out of the way. “C’mon, give me the bottle. This is a bucket list kinda thing. You bounce.” No, he wasn't trying to see if he could drink out of the bottle without dribbling it down his chin.
“I didn’t say ‘never’,” Tasha corrected as she went slightly airborne. She landed with most of her weight supported on her left foot. There was a brief moment where she considered bouncing hard at the same moment that Brian took a drink from the tequila, but decided against it. For now. There was a distant crashing noise through the house’s kitchen window. Was it really a party until someone broke something? The hunter continued like this for a moment or two until she realized she missed being near him. On her last landing, Tasha dropped down on her knees, the residual kinetic energy making the both of them bob up and down slightly as she crawled over to where he sat. “Come here,” she told him, hooking a thumb into the collar of his shirt and leaning forward to press her lips against his mouth.
“Mmf.” With his mouth pressed against hers and a grin creeping onto his face, Brian blindly screwed the sticky cap on the bottle of tequila and set it beside him. He wrapped his arms around Tasha and leaned back onto the canvas, taking her with him. The springs swayed and bounced as their weight shifted into a single dip in the fabric. Brian kissed her back the way he wanted to, with his mouth open and his hands all over her neck and back.
Being around her made him feel good. Tasha was eighty percent cool and twenty percent the cute kind of awkward; it wasn’t obvious but it eeked out around the edges and reassured him that he wasn’t the only one making an ass of himself. “Hey. What were you doing last year? Do you remember?”
She let herself be carried along with him, the rest of the activity going on around them fading into background noise as they kissed. Her fingers ran through his hair, and when Brian pulled away to speak, Tasha briefly buried her face against his neck. The stubble along his jaw brushed against her cheek. Each point of contact the hunter made with him was like a tactile reminder that this was real, no longer just a theoretical exercise in her head, and it was amazing. “Last year?” she murmured before pulling back to look at him. “I was at that party at the Bellagio, when the power went out and some comparatively mild chaos ensued.” The edges of her mouth turned up as her fingers dipped beneath the material of Brian’s shirt, feeling the warmth of his skin. “This is way better.”
Brian frowned at the black-hazy sky. “Oh. Wow. I forgot all about that. Jesus, your hands are cold!” He laughed and grabbed her fingers to move them to the less sensitive turf of his chest. He settled back into the swaying safety net that cradled them. How had he lost track of a whole event? He had a vague memory of pretending to sword fight Sonya with a pair of silver tongs, then lights out. He found Nesryn and they left. “It’s like life is on a sliding scale of how weird or messed up a day is, so some things don’t stick.” Brian rubbed his eyes. “Or it could be I blocked it out because I had to iron my pants.”
He sighed, coaxed a few locks of hair over Tasha’s shoulder, and ran his thumb across her cheekbone. Lying back like this, the alcohol was warmer in his stomach. He had a nice kind of buzz. Just enough to make the edges fuzzy. The speakers kept up their steady thump.
“Sorry, I forgot,” Tasha half-fibbed, lightly dragging her nails over his chest. She tried to make up for it by wrapping one leg around his and kissing a spot on the side of his neck, just beneath Brian’s chin. “Yeah, it was probably a two…maybe a two and a half on the General Weirdness Scale? Electrical failure kind of gets lost in the shuffle compared to dick-swinging satyrs and waking up with your carpet on fire.” The hunter removed one hand to reach over and grab the Don Julio, uncapping it with her thumb and index finger before lifting her head to take a pull. “Not that I’m jaded or anything,” she added with a smirk, wiping her chin with the back of her hand when there was a slight amount of gravity-assisted spillage.
“What would you like to be different about next year?” Tasha asked him as she got settled again. “Not resolutions, because fuck those.” She grinned.
While she had it open, Brian took the bottle and swallowed some tequila. Its slosh comforted him, one of those strangely familiar sounds that could take him over a decade back in time to a similarly blurry feeling: it was all gonna be alright because he was flat on his back with a drink and a night sky above him, and this time he had a beautiful girl in the crook of his arm. “If I tell you,” he said,” closing the bottle, “It’s a secret. Alright?” Brian looked at her for confirmation. “I think… I want to be working in a venue in Vegas. Doesn’t have to be Vegas but yeah. Not a bar, not cramming in music on the side. I want to push myself back in that direction. I wish I could pack up Lucky’s and take it with me and make it everything I want it to be, but it’s not mine. As soon as I can figure out how to make that happen, I want out of Searchlight.”
He closed his eyes. He felt a certain amount of guilt with the admission. So many had come and gone and it felt like partly his responsibility to keep an eye out on the town. But things were slowing down there, spreading out, and he had a sense that it was a ‘leave or perish’ situation for his dreams.
Tasha nodded to indicate that what he was about to tell her would be kept in full confidence; not that she made it a habit to detail their private conversations to anyone else. As Brian spoke, something warm and slightly dizzying grew somewhere in the region of her stomach, having absolutely nothing to do with the tequila she had just imbibed. If she had to try to identify it, she would say it was something akin to an intense affection, but mixed with something frustratingly ineffable. “I think you should do it,” Tasha told him, one hand reaching down to twine her fingers through his. “And not just because you would be closer to me, though that is a plus,” the hunter added with a soft smile. Her palm rested flat against his chest. “Lucky’s will go on existing without you, or it won’t, but no one can say you didn’t put in the work there. You’re amazing.”
His eyebrows raised. That was flattering.
Brian exhaled and squeezed her fingers. He lifted them up between him and the sky and studied her hand next to his. “I wish it felt like that. That it’d be alright. Then I start thinking, when did I develop this complex that it’s gotta be me? Which leads me down another track, and I realize… maybe it’s not about protecting Lucky’s. Maybe I just like being that guy, the one holding something together, and what happens when I’m not that guy? How’m I gonna feel about that? And then I’m like… shit. Did I try to make up for leaving my family and my pack with a bar?”
Brian let go of her hand and rubbed his eyes. “Wow. That… is embarrassing. What about you? What do you want to be different?”
“Oh…” Tasha replied slowly, looking up at their hands, at the patch of sky beyond that still held a smattering of pin-prick stars despite the light pollution of Las Vegas. Or maybe they were satellites. “It kind of sounds like you’re in a codependent relationship with Lucky’s,” she told him gently. “And those aren’t easy to leave, for a multitude of reasons, but people do it. It feels horrible at first, like ripping yourself out at the roots. But eventually you feel better.” These statements were obviously autobiographical in nature. When Brian turned that same question on her, she fell silent. Because thinking about what she wanted always felt overly indulgent, like a child’s game she was too old to play and didn’t want to get caught doing. The hunter licked her lips slightly, tasting the tequila on them, before turning her head to face him.
“I want to be less afraid about losing things before I even have them,” Tasha stated, thinking back to the conversation they had outside Lux. The house analogy. “And I think…if this is still a trial version between us, I’d like to upgrade to the full experience.” She smiled. “If you wanted. Because I really, really like you.”
Brian’s forehead creased. “What? Wait. This whole time since Samhain we’ve been casual?” He sat up on the springy surface and rolled onto his knees. The werewolf sat there for a second collecting his thoughts. His fingers pushed through his hair and locked at the base of his neck. “Just a sec. I’m thinking of all the sex I could’ve been having for the last two months.” Mumbling under his breath, he groped along the trampoline to make sure he had his wallet and phone.
Turning around also gave him cover for the grin spreading across his face.
“Oh my god, shut up, you know what I mean.” But Tasha was grinning, too. The conversation felt very ‘junior high’ but in a nostalgic way that made her feel good. Brian made her feel good. She let him turn away at first, but shortly removed the hand that had been resting on his chest and placed it on his chin to steer his face back to hers. She kissed him again, briefly wondering how obscured from view they were through the safety netting. Her tongue slipped past his lips. There was a loud, echoing pop as someone set off a Roman Candle.
And that fast, because she was persuasive— or he had a massive inability to resist — he was sinking back onto the trampoline with Tasha. It was a feat of physics to keep them from rolling around, but he managed to shift onto his side and hover over her. Brian’s hand was on her waist, hip, the back of her thigh with something he allowed himself to think of as possessiveness instead of batting it away because it might be a problem. His tongue stroked hers. It was the same kiss but it felt different to him. Like a loosening up. He didn’t need to tell himself to keep things light if he was free to feel something real. “Yeah,” he said. “I know what you mean. I’ll take the upgrade.” Brian looked over the landscape of her face. “I really, really like you, too.”
Tasha was conflicted as she looked up at him. Part of her wanted them to find the nearest private place, and another part of her…well, mostly she just wanted him all to herself. And that roaming hand was putting a lot of vivid mental imagery into her head. “How long until midnight, again?” she asked, somewhat rhetorically. The hunter forced herself to dial back into their surroundings in an effort to focus; the smell of chlorine coming off of the pool, the splash of water, a mild argument going on in the hot tub about whose turn it was to get out and fetch another round of drinks.
“So, we’ve bounced. We’ve had semi-deep conversation. What party activity is next?” Tasha asked him, reaching up to brush her thumb along his jaw. God, she loved his face.
“Huh.” Brian gave it some thought. “Well, traditionally? And speaking from the perspective of my early twenties, since that seems to be the vibe tonight,” he began, angling his head towards the hot tub. “It goes sex on someone else’s furniture, over the top argument, piss in an inappropriate place, lose a shoe. Or we could pretend we’re on Mountain Time and start counting down in five minutes. But that’s kind of an old man move.”
“Oh, if we’re going the early twenties route, I need to be way more fucked up than this,” Tasha told him, gesturing to the dwindling bottle of booze nestled next to them. “Though I have to admit, the sex part is appealing.” Her gaze drifted toward the house. “Maaaaybe not on any of the furniture in there.” She tugged playfully at the hem of his shirt, feeling light and effervescent. The hunter rolled away from him to sit up, bounced slightly against the canvas as she studied Brian thoughtfully. “Come on, let’s go for a walk.”
“Alright.” Brian hauled himself up and searched for the opening in the net. It was a lot easier when they were kids and could roll off at will. He held it open for Tasha and stepped onto the cold concrete. “Shoes. Gonna need shoes.” He ducked underneath the trampoline and found where he’d kicked them in his haste to get on. He gave them a good shake to make sure he hadn’t picked up any wildlife and put on his socks and shoes. “By the way, thank you? For asking me to be your boyfriend on New Year’s. I can work with that date and it makes Valentine’s Day a lot less confusing. I was thinking. We should go somewhere that weekend. Skip the whole flowers and uncomfortable dinner thing and get out of Vegas.” He started backing towards the driveway. “Where’ve you always wanted to go?”
Tasha followed after him, grabbing the bottle and setting it down as she navigated getting her boots back on. She looked up at Brian with a grin. “I’m gonna tell you right now, please no flowers or fancy dinners. I never know what to do with the former and I’m always still hungry after the latter.” Once her laces were secured, she stood up and grabbed his hand. “We should go somewhere like…secluded and nature-y, but not in a Searchlight, middle of the desert kind of way,” the hunter mused as they walked. She waved at some people she vaguely knew with her tequila-holding hand as they passed, the liquid sloshing around.
“Very few people around and absolutely none that know us,” Tasha added. “I don’t know why, but that sounds incredibly appealing right now.”
He squeezed her hand. “Alright, I always wanted to check out Colorado. I’m thinking mountains, trees, snow, the kind of stores that sell antler chandeliers that you impulse buy after too many beers. Y’know? You don’t know.” The were shook his head. He wouldn’t buy anything with antlers. Probably. Brian pictured himself in an oversize coat breathing in the clean air. Did he own a coat anymore?
She stopped and turned to face him with an affectionate smile, letting go of his hand so she could put both of hers on his shoulders. “These are the kinds of bad decisions I feel good about supporting,” Tasha told him. “Antler chandeliers, yes. Waking up hungover in a Lake Tahoe cabin with a trunkful of used weapons and little memory of the preceding twenty-four hours? Not so much.” The hunter shrugged. “Just as a completely random, hypothetical example.” Tasha leaned in and planted a rather chaste kiss against his forehead before taking his hand again. “And there should definitely be snow,” she added as they continued walking. “And not the random, suspicious kind that occurs in the middle of the desert and might have been magical in origin.”
“Got it. No Lake Tahoe.” He reminded himself that Tasha was a hunter. One with assorted skeletons buried in different regions. “I’m gonna make a case for Durango. Hear me out. It’s got skiing, it’s got snowboarding. You want hot springs? It’s got Pinkerton. It's a food mecca, and… it’s got the Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. A steam engine, Tasha. They let you ride it.” Was he saying all this out loud? He stole the tequila from her and took a long drink. Damn, he was optimistic. He leaned down and loudly kissed the top of her head. “And if any of this is starting to sound too wholesome, just remember, I play in a rock band and I can shapeshift. Rock band, shapeshift. Got it? Rock band, shapeshift.”
As Brian talked, she was only reminded of the things that had attracted her to him in the first place, before the idea of him as a romantic prospect had ever entered her mind consciously; she just knew she liked being around him. Tasha grinned as he described Durango. “You’ve won me over,” she assured him. There were more fireworks going off around them, staccato pops and whistles of varying intensity. Dogs barking in the distance. Part of her wondered what the current fire index was. “And I don’t think of you as wholesome, by the way, but if for some reason I was ever tempted to, all I would have to do is remember what you’re like in bed.” Her grin turned a little suggestive as she watched his face for his reaction.
“What, you mean like this?” Brian swung her up against his chest and meandered down the middle of the street, looking for a random car to lean on. Tasha’s feet were a good foot off the ground. He attached his mouth to the sound of her neck. Her skin tasted good, a lot better than tequila. Brian spotted an SUV out of the corner of his eye and leaned her into it.
HONKHONKHONKHONK… whooooOOOOP… whooooOOOOP.
“Oh, that backfired.”
At first, Tasha was just swept up, figuratively and literally, holding onto Brian with one hand clasped around the bottle. She automatically lifted her legs to hook around his waist and tilted her head to allow him better access to his neck. And then the alarm was blaring, and at first the sound was so jarring, she could barely think. “Oh my god.” The hunter disengaged herself from him and grabbed his hand, laughing in disbelief. She wondered how long they had until one of the disgruntled residents came stumbling out of one of the houses to make sure they weren’t about to be the victim of grand theft auto. “Come on!” Tasha led them back toward the party.
Brian took off running at a tear, his head start guaranteeing he’d leave Tasha a few paces behind him. “It was her!” he yelled over the competing noise of music and fireworks. He skidded over the hood of a car he knew was too old to have a system and raced toward base, whatever that was. It might have worked without the tequila and the mixed drink with cough syrup. It might have ended in a victory dance, Rocky Balboa style, upon the stoop of the house. Brian might have accurately judged the height of the low, concrete wall at the edge of the property.
Instead he face-planted on the pebble-strewn lawn.
Tasha watched, mouth agape, as Brian not only completely abandoned her, but tried to throw her under the bus, too. She looked around wildly, but the alarm had stopped and no one had come angrily running out of their house in a bathrobe, so that was a good sign. But she was definitely going to get him back. In fact, she now regretted not jumping on the trampoline while he was trying to drink the tequila. The hunter had almost caught up with him when he went down, and she had to cover her mouth with her hand. Don’t laugh until you know he’s okay, don’t laugh until…. Tasha crouched down beside him and lowered her head to take a peek. “Before I say or do anything else…are you okay?” Her mouth was twitching.
Flat on his face, Brian slowly, gingerly, folded his arms over his head. “...unnngghh…” His torso shook with exaggerated crying, knees bending in a feeble attempt to crawl away. “Don’t look at me. I’m a monster.” At the least, he had torn jeans, a goose egg, and a trickle of blood under his nose. Nothing felt broken. Maybe he’d get out of this without becoming another NYE drunk emergency room statistic.
“Nooo, wait, let me comfort you. I can be comforting,” Tasha told him, putting a hand on his back as he tried to crawl away. But first, she wanted to check out the damage. She dug her phone out and used the flashlight setting for illumination as she crouched over him. She noticed the line of blood that came from Brian’s nose and reached into her other jacket pocket and pulled out some 7-11 napkins. They were clean but they definitely smelled like coffee. The hunter handed them over to him as she gave him a sympathetic look. Tasha leaned over and planted a careful kiss on some uninjured territory near his jaw. “I guess next time you’ll think twice before you try to leave me behind, huh?” she asked gently. She clicked off the flashlight and opened up Uber just to get a peak at the surge pricing. “Do you want to go back to mine?”
Brian sat up and stuck the napkin to his nostril. She was comforting. The hand on his back was nice. Should he milk this thing and see how far it took him? “Yes, I want to go back to your place. Yes, I’m sorry… it was wrong. I’ll never race you again. There’s no chance I’m saying this to get karma off my back.” He examined the blood-speckled napkin. “Nice. French vanilla?” Brian grabbed her hand and got up. He made sure he wasn’t leaving anything other than his DNA on the lawn.
When they were upright, he made sure his face was clean and kissed her cheek. “Alright, you can laugh.”
“The urge to laugh has passed,” Tasha admitted as she tilted his chin for a final assessing look at his face, then ordered them a car. “And on the bright side, it’s still technically 2021 so you can leave this whole incident behind come midnight. Ancient history.” She ran her fingers carefully through his hair with obvious affection. Honestly, if Tasha had thought of it first, this could have been her with the bloody nose, so she couldn’t really fault Brian. The hunter leaned her head against his shoulder.
“Nah, the last part of 2021 wasn’t bad,” he said, drawing his knees up. They might as well get comfortable waiting. Brian looped an arm around Tasha’s back. “I feel more like myself than I have since… the last six years? So if it’s alright with you, I’m gonna try to keep you around. That’s my resolution. Every day, do something that makes Tasha want to stick around.”
She leaned into his arm, and instead of the usual internal monologue questioning whether she deserved it, or if getting used to it meant its certain eventual doom, Tasha just decided to shut up and enjoy it. “See, you have it wrong,” she told Brian, checking her phone screen as the car’s progress was tracked before letting her hand drop. “You don’t have to worry about me sticking around because you won’t be able to get rid of me.” Though he couldn’t see her face, it was obvious from the tone of her voice that she was smiling. The hunter wouldn’t take back the latter part of 2021, either.