Page 16 of Badd Ass
She chuckled. “Having watched you get, like, twenty numbers just standing there in the bar tonight, I guess I can see how that might be.”
“Bast and I used to have a competition to see which one of us could collect the most digits in a night.”
“Who won?”
“Oh shit, Bast always won by a landslide.” She seemed skeptical, which made me laugh. “You haven’t really met Bast. You’ll understand when you meet him.”
“So Bast is a player, Bax is a hard-drinking brawler…”
“He’s not really a brawler, he just…he’s a football player. He’s rough by nature.” We were getting close the overlook, now, I realized. “Then there’s Brock. He’s a stunt pilot. Him and Baxter are what you call Irish twins, born within a twelve months of each other. Brock is…he’s…I dunno how to explain him. Probably the prettiest of us all and the most conservative. Brock was the straight-A student, the class president, the one who saved his money to pay for his own flight lessons.”
“I thought the other two were the twins, the ones playing on the stage?”
“Yeah, they’re the identical twins. Canaan and Corin.” I glanced at Mara. “You ever hear of a band called Bishop’s Pawn?”
She nodded. “Sure. I actually saw them play in LA once.” I saw the dime drop. “Wait, that’s them? Your brothers are Bishop’s Pawn?”
“That’s them.” I felt oddly proud that she’d heard of them. I mean, I knew the twins were talented, and that they’d made it pretty big, but when some girl you just met has heard of them, has seen them play? Kind of makes you realize exactly how famous they are.
“That’s pretty cool. They’re crazy good. They put on an amazing show. Claire and I went together; we took a long weekend in LA.” She pushed ahead of me as we reached the overlook. “Wow…nowthisis amazing.”
“Quite a view, huh?”
Ketchikan was spread out beneath us to our right, Gavina Island was directly across from us, and the massive bulk of the mountains sheltered us in the dark shadows of the night. There was a fence following the edge of the bluff, so we leaned against it and stared out at the cluster of lights below and the starlight on the rippling water.
“So.” She tugged the hood of her sweatshirt over her head against the cool breeze riffling through her hair. “Sebastian, you, Baxter, Brock, Canaan and Corin…”
“Actually, Brock is older by a year,” I corrected. “Lucian is next after Bax, and he’s a lot different than the rest of us. He dropped out of high school when he was, like, a sophomore I think. He wanted to work the fishing boats. Dad made Lucian a deal that as long as he had his GED by the time he was eighteen, he could work the nets instead of going to school. Luce had that GED in the bag by the time he was seventeen, and the second he had it, he was gone. He got a berth on a tanker and ended up who knows where. He’s just an odd cat. He’s quiet, intense, and—how would you put it? Wise beyond his years, I guess. Just…he can be hard to get to know.”
“And then Xavier is the youngest?”
“Yep. Xavier is…he’s a genius, in the literal sense. He builds robots and studies quantum physics for fun, reads hundreds of pages in a matter of an hour…he graduated high school at sixteen, got a full ride to Stanford on academics and soccer. He’s gonna be the next Einstein or Hawking, I’m pretty sure.”
Mara twisted to lean sideways against the railing so she could look at me. “And then there’s you.”
I shrugged, unsure where she was going with this. “Then there’s me.”
She hesitated, thinking, and I stayed quiet, letting her have the time to process her thoughts. “I know I bolted last night, or this morning, or whatever.”
I nodded. “You did kind of pull a runner.”
She glanced down, picking at the wood of the railing. “Yeah, well, that’s kind of my M-O. And I—”
“Whatisyour M-O? Just so I’m clear.”
“Sleep with someone after the bar, and leave early in the morning before they’re awake. No strings, no weirdness.”
I nodded. “Same here, for the most part. Although I’m not impartial to breakfast if she seems down with it.”
“Yeah, I don’t stay for breakfast. I rarely even stay for round two. I just—it’s not me.”
“Why not?”
She sighed. “Can we maybe hold off on the psychoanalysis for the moment?”
I rolled a shoulder. “Sure. Go ahead, I’ll shut up and listen.”
“Good plan.” She paused to think again, and then continued. “I’m in Ketchikan for a week. I haven’t taken vacation days in a long time, and Claire is only here through tomorrow afternoon, so…I’ll have some free time, I guess. And—and…I thought we could…hang out, or something.”