Epic

by Lark O'Neal

  Are you there? Can we Skype?

  Love, way, way, way more than you know,

  Jess

  I hit send and pull the covers up to my neck, looking outside at all that silvery gloom. It’s beautiful, and I really am glad to be here, but there’s something nervous along the back of my neck. It’s an odd feeling, and I shrug my shoulders a couple of times to see if I can shake it out. Someone walks down the hallway, and a couple of minutes later I hear the shower go on. Maybe that’s what I’ll do in a little while, take a nice hot shower.

  My Skype rings, and I bolt upright, my mouth stretching into a grin of anticipation, and of course it’s Tyler, his icon a shot of him with a ski hat on, ties dangling around his chin. The light is catching on his cheekbones and jaw, so clean and beautiful, and my heart skitters. I click the icon and his face fills my screen.

  “Hey!” I say. “I’m so glad to see you!” He’s in his studio, the long windows behind him still showing light, even though it must be nearly eight. He’s wearing a tank top, his hair is messy, and there’s a soft smear of paint on his neck.

  “You look beautiful.” He pulls the screen to his mouth and kisses it, and ripples of hunger rock through me.

  I kiss back. “You do, too.” I grin. “You must have been painting. You have blue on your neck.”

  He wipes at it. “Ah, so I do. Sexy, right?”

  “Everything about you is sexy.” I drink in his face, his rock-star mouth, his clear eyes. Which I notice now look a little sad or something. “Is everything okay?”

  He glances away, picks up a beer. “Yeah, no worries. Tell me about your day. What did you do? Did you find out any more about the commercial?”

  “Yes!” I widen my eyes and pull my braid through my hands. “I got it! It pays a lot, Tyler. Six thousand dollars. New Zealand, but it’s still a lot.”

  “Really? That’s great!”

  “We start filming here in Nelson tomorrow, then go to Queenstown.”

  “That rocks. I spent a lot of time in Queenstown when I was training—you’ll love it. Lotta big sexy Aussies who come to ski.” He grins and takes another sip of beer.

  “Hmm. That sounds okay,” I say, teasing. “Maybe I’ll find some hot snowboarder, too.”

  “Or that.” Some of the tension leaves his face. “Show me your room, so I can picture you there.”

  “It’s beautiful.” I reverse the camera and pan the room, the windows, the walls. “It’s been raining pretty much since I got here,” I add, showing the view of the vineyards. “But we might get down to Kaikoura soon. My dad has a Mini! It’s so cute!”

  “Everything looks great. Now turn the camera back to you, Jess. I miss those eyes.”

  I touch the button and see myself in the corner again. “Hi.”

  “Hi.” He raises a hand, and I see his sleeve on the screen. “I’m touching your face, and your nose,” he says.

  Everything in me softens, and for a moment, I’m transported to the way it felt when we first started, before everything got so crazy. It was as if we made a new world in his tiny house on the top of the hill. I raise my hand and touch his chin, his hair. “Me, too. Your email was so ama—“

  A sudden rolling motion knocks the iPad out of my hand. It just flies up and falls on the bed. Bewildered, I start to reach for it, and then the rolling comes again, a longer, harder roll, and then whole bed is shaking. There’s a huge swell of noise, cracking, groaning, like a train, and I find myself on the floor, the iPad crashing down in front of me, but I can’t even reach it because the ground is completely unstable, or my position is, or—

  The door slams open. “Get over here in the doorway!” Kaleb roars, and even before I’m off the floor, he’s yanking me by the arm, slamming us into the threshold. His hand is on my head as the world pitches and rolls around us. Things are falling, breaking, slamming. Somewhere a girl is screaming. Darcy. I’m shaking and the earth is shaking, and I’m so scared I’m afraid I might pee my pants. It makes me think of the car coming through the restaurant, and my ears are filled with crashing in memory and crashing in the present and I’m hanging onto his arm and the doorway, and my heart feels like it might split. “How long—”

  “Quiet.”

  It goes on. I can smell the sweat under Kaleb’s arm, and my vision is filled with the curve of his bicep. His arm is taut and strong and the only stable thing in the world.

  The groaning stops. The pitching stops. The world goes completely, excruciatingly still.

  Kaleb lets go of a breath. “Right. That’s it.” He lets me go and we move apart. He’s wet, dressed only in a big white towel he grasps around his waist with one fist. I glimpse an aggressive tattoo on his brown hip before he covers it up, but it barely registers, because I’m shaking from head to toe, as if the earthquake is in my body now. My hands and legs, my torso and shoulders, everything is shivering, quivering. I can hardly stand.

  “Oh, my God,” I manage.

  “You okay?” His black curls are dripping on his shoulders.

  “Just freaked.” I lean on the doorjamb, trying to calm my body. My hands are trembling and I hold one up, as if looking at the shaking will make it stop. A streak of blood crosses my palm. “What’s this?” I hold it up for him to see.

  “Are you cut?”

  I spread my fingers, look at my arms. “No.” I see a streak on his towel and it settles me, gives me something else to focus on. “I think it’s you. Turn around.”

  He pivots. His back is long and nutty brown, with another tattoo that starts at the base of his spine and travels up to his shoulder in a stylized look. Maybe it’s the fear and adrenaline that have been coursing through my body, but the sight of it sends a current of buzzing electricity to my cheeks and right between my legs. It makes me feel dizzy, and I think to move away, but blood is leaking from a cut along his shoulder. The smell of it raises a strange, sudden, blistering lust in my cells, makes me want to lick the entire expanse of his back. I want to pull the towel away and see that enticing tattoo on his thigh. I want him to turn around with his wet body and take me really hard, right on the floor.

  All of this slams through me in a blasting two seconds—humiliating and shocking and not like me at all. I force myself to step back, heart pounding. “It’s…you. You’re bleeding.”

  “Not bad, right?”

  “No.”

  There must be something in my voice, because he turns in the most ordinary way, the nicest, most brotherly way, and reaches for me. I am so ashamed to realize I’m looking at his belly and the distinct swell of male stuff beneath the towel, and I step back, putting my hands behind my back. “You should go get dressed,” I whisper.

  For a second he doesn’t move, then he raises a hand and puts it to his naked chest. Naked hand, naked chest, naked skin. I can barely breathe. The tops of my cheeks are so hot I’m sure they must be bright red.

  His enormous amber eyes blink slowly like a tiger’s, and he nods. “Right,” he says, but he doesn’t move for the longest time, only looks at me, showing nothing on his opaque face. Even then, even when I know I shouldn’t be, I’m thinking of his legs, that tattoo on his hip, his hands.

  “You should go,” I say.

  A hint of a smile, so faint that I might even be imagining it, whispers over his lush lips, and then he’s gone.

  I sink down to the floor, feeling my whole body pulsing, still shaking. What was that all about?

  “Jess!” my dad calls. I hear his feet on the stairs, and then he appears at the door. “Jess, you all right? Answer me!”

  I try to get to my feet, but my legs are too rubbery. “I’m okay.”

  He squats down in front of me, eyes full of fear, and touches my hair, my face. “Anything hurt?”

  I shake my head slowly.

  His arms pull me close, into his chest. “Jesus, that scared me.” He kisses my head. “You’re shaking like a leaf, baby.”

  “I know. I can’t stop.” It was the same when the car crashed i
nto the restaurant, and now I’m thinking of Virginia, crushed under the roof. My heart is racing, and I put a hand over it.

  What is wrong with me?

  “Keiran!” It’s Katy, downstairs. “Problem.”

  My dad pulls back, his eyes clear and concerned. His hands are still on my arms. “Everything is fine, all right?”

  I nod. “I’m fine.”

  “Come down when you’re ready. I have to go check the wine vats, make sure nothing cracked.”

  He’s gone. In the hallway, he calls for Kaleb, and Kaleb answers. “Here, safe!”

  It’s only then, only then, that I think about Tyler. I clutch the necklace in my palm, warming the cold silver in my fist. He could have been witness to everything, the earthquakes and my weird reaction to Kaleb. Except that all of that reaction was internal. Not visible. At least I hope it wasn’t.

  Where is the iPad? It flew out of my hands with the world started rocking and I find it on the other side of the bed. And it takes that long for me to realize the house is dark and quiet. All my stuff is scattered all over the floor. The lamp is turned over, the bed shaken into the middle of the room. A crack has appeared in the wall, but the windows seem fine. How could that be? For a long minute I stand there, half-shivering, half-frozen.

  Get a hold of yourself! I shake the feeling off again and bend down to pick up the iPad. It seems fine, nothing broken, thank God. But when I try to rouse it, nothing happens. It won’t turn on at all.

  Kaleb appears at the door, dressed in jeans and a t-shirt. “Let’s go check on the others.”

  Clutching the iPad to my chest, I head toward him.

  “Wait,” he says. “Let’s find you some shoes and pants, maybe, yeah?”

  I look down and realize I’m in my underwear. It’s a nice pair, and my shirt is long, but still. How could I have forgotten that I took off my pants? I look behind me, trying to figure out where they are.

  “Don’t move,” he says, holding out a hand, palm up. He has flip flops on his strong brown feet, like an islander, which I guess he sort of is—New Zealand is an island—and he pads into the room on those feet, stepping over broken pictures and other things that got knocked to the floor. He grabs a pair of jeans from the foot of the bed, right where I left them, and shakes them out. With one hand he holds them out. I have to pry one arm off my iPad, and when I hold it out, it’s shaking visibly. I’m also freezing, so cold that my teeth are chattering.

  “You might have to put the iPad down for a minute.”

  I nod, but I can’t see where to put it. Kaleb takes it, standing close as I put on my jeans. He’s solid, safe. He sets my sandals out in front of my feet, and I step into them, one and then the other. My movements are jerky as I reach for the iPad again, and he settles a warm hand on my shoulder. “Let’s get you downstairs and have a bit of sugar.”

  “Sugar?” I echo blankly.

  “Mmm.” He leads me out of my room.

  Chapter SIX

  Downstairs, Katy has already lit candles in the family room, and she’s squatting in front of the fireplace, setting out wood and tucking in kindling. “Kaleb, Keiran wants you to come out to the shed. Torch on the kitchen counter.”

  He settles me on the couch next to Darcy, who’s wrapped in a quilt, her eyes red and puffy. She doesn’t look at us.

  Kaleb swirls a blanket around my shoulders. “A little shocky,” he says to Katy.

  “I’m fine,” I say.

  “Well, it won’t hurt to have a bickie.”

  I nod. When he hands me a couple of cookies, I blink. “Oh, bickie. I get it.”

  He chuckles. Gently, he kneels in front of his sister, putting his hands on her knees. “No worries, Darce.”

  “Bugger off.”

  Without obvious concern, he stands and turns to Katy. “Right. I’ll find Keiran. Need anything else?”

  She eyes her niece for a long moment, then shakes her head. “We’ll be all right. Go help your uncle.”

  * * *

  A couple of hours later we’re all sitting around the fireplace on a blanket, eating a picnic supper of thick slices of ham on white bread, and bananas, and glasses of beer poured out of big brown bottles. My dad is cheerful because the winery is safe, nothing broken except a few bottles of wine knocked down in the tasting room. One of his neighbors reported a vat knocked over, cracked and leaking.

  “I’ll have to get over there tomorrow and help him out.”

  “You think they’ll still start the filming?” I ask him.

  “I reckon we’ll find out in the morning,” he answers. “Phone service is out here, so Katy can drive you into town first thing.”

  “How long will the electricity and everything be out?”

  “Who knows.” My dad shrugs and brushes his hands together to rid them of crumbs. “Who wants to play a game?”

  “We need to get the bedrooms together, Keiran,” Katy says.

  “All right. Let’s do that, then play a game.” He eyes Darcy. “What do you want to play, Darce?”

  “Nothing,” she says sullenly. Her eyes are still red and swollen. “I want to leave this place and never come back. Ever.”

  “Every place has natural disasters, honey,” Dad says.

  “Not earthquakes. Jess never went through an earthquake before, so they must not have them in Colorado.” She gives me a hard look, almost daring me to say that’s wrong. “Are there?”

  “No,” I tell her honestly. “But we’ve had fires two years in a row. And now floods because of the fires.”

  “Fire goes out eventually.”

  I nod, thinking about when the fire came over the mountains a couple of years ago and burned a neighborhood to the ground. “But it’s pretty scary when it’s right in your face. And the floods are pretty epic.” I think about Tyler and watching the floods in Manitou from his house. I layer together a sandwich. I wonder if he’s worried, or thinks I hung up on him or something. “I think my dad’s point is that you’re never really safe.”

  He laughs. “Well, not exactly.”

  “But it’s kinda true, right? Life isn’t safe. Random things happen all the time.”

  “Not like an earthquake,” Darcy says fiercely. “I hate earthquakes.”

  Dad says, “Jess was working in a restaurant and a car drove through the front window.”

  “Is that true?” Kaleb asks, munching on an apple.

  “Yep. Lost my job, which is sort of indirectly how I ended up here.” I think of Virginia, stuck under the pile of rubble. “One of the girls I worked with died.”

  “That’s terrible,” Katy says. “I’m so sorry.”

  I shrug. It seems far away somehow, not part of this world. Maybe I can see why Darcy would want to leave if it helps make you feel better. “Maybe you should travel,” I say. “Go to Europe and backpack or something.”

  “Maybe.” She tilts her shoulder, sullenly staring into the middle distance. She’s really pretty even with swollen eyes. “Maybe we should all go, you and me and Kaleb.”

  I laugh lightly. “Maybe someday. I just got here.”

  * * *

  Thanks to all the upheaval, I am able to stay awake until 10:30. We all worked on the bedrooms together, making sure broken glass was swept up and all the junk was out of the way. In my bedroom with everybody else, I was suddenly embarrassed at the weird thoughts I had over Kaleb and could barely meet his eyes, but by the time we all gather around a Clue board, the feeling has passed. I was, as both Katy and Kaleb say, “a little shocky.” That’s all it was. As he moves Professor Plum around the board to look for clues, all I feel is brotherliness again. I mean, you’d have to be blind not to see how gorgeous he is, but more than that, he’s funny and nice, a good guy who looks out for his sister and his sort-of cousin, me.

  Katy wakes me early, bringing a cup of tea. “Drink up, dear,” she says. “We have a little trouble, I’m afraid.”

  Blinking, I sit up. The room is chilly, even in my long sleeved pajamas. “What
’s going on? Not the commercial, is it?”

  “No,” she says, and sits on my bed. “They sent a messenger down to say they’ll start tomorrow in Nelson. Evidently you’ll go right to Abel Tasman on Wednesday, since they have the rooms booked for the crew until Saturday.” She strokes the cat stretching beside me, and he yawns happily. “You’ll like it there—I stayed in the lodge there once with some friends, and it was spectacular.”

  “Mmm.” The tea is hot and sweet, exactly the way I love it, and I make an appreciative noise. “My mom and I drank tea, never coffee. I love the way it tastes here.”

  Her smile lights her pale blue eyes. “I’m sure you drank it like that as a child here, too. Everyone does.”

  “Right.” I take another sip. “So what’s the bad news?”

  “Darcy has taken off.” Her expression is weary. “Again. She has a lot of PTSD over the earthquakes, and sometimes she just goes missing.”

  “Where does she go?”

  “To her old house. Your dad already left to get her.”

  I feel a pinch of—what? Jealousy? Disappointment? “I would have ridden down with him.”

  “I’m sure you would, lamb. She’s just a bit out of control, and your dad’s the best influence on her.”

  I look away, trying to hide my nasty reaction, which is, what about me? I feel like I came a long way to see my dad and I’ve hardly had much chance to be with him at all, just him and me. But that’s just obnoxious. She needs him, and it’s not like my dad will disappear.

  Katy pats my leg. “Do you want to come with me to the neighbors’? It won’t be exciting, I’m afraid, just helping clean up a bit. Kaleb’s going with me.”

  I shake my head. “I’ll just read or something.”

  “That’s fine. The electricity is still out, but if you come down before I leave, I’ll show you how to work the camp stove, and I’ve put all the milk and perishables in a couple of coolers, so you’ll have plenty to eat.”

  She leaves me to get dressed, and I check my iPad again. It still doesn’t turn on, which gives me a hollow feeling in my gut. My phone still isn’t working, either, so the earthquake must have knocked down cell towers or something. I have no idea. I only know I feel cut -off and sad and a little scared.