by Chloe Garner
Jason barreled into Sam, like a bull. Sam pushed the worst bruise on Jason’s ribs with two fingers, and his brother staggered sideways.
“Let’s see it, old man,” Sam said. Jason swung, and Sam bobbed away, but the next swing caught him, and Jason bent him over double, headlocked, and started trying to take his feet out. Sam swung for stomach contact, but Samantha hadn’t worked over his abs hard enough, and there wasn’t any advantage. He kicked back at Jason’s feet, hands scrambling for a grip on Jason’s shirt to give him a balance point. They tipped sideways into a building and Jason buckled one of Sam’s knees, now holding him up by his head.
“Say it,” Jason said.
“Never,” Sam laughed, getting his feet under him again and getting a grip on Jason’s wrist. He stood, lifting Jason off his feet and knuckled him in the ribs again. Jason’s arm whipped away in instinctive self-defense, and they faced each other again.
“You cheat,” Jason said.
“Only rule is there are no rules,” Sam answered. Jason charged him again. Sam howled with laughter as he grabbed Jason’s shoulders to turn him away, but Jason twisted at the waist and slid around behind him, putting him in another headlock.
“Sweet moves,” Sam coughed.
“I’m Batman,” Jason said. Sam laughed and backed into a wall. Jason grunted, and at Sam’s second attempt to crush him, got his feet behind him and pushed off, sending Sam stumbling across the alley. They collided sideways with the far wall, and Jason hooked his heel around Sam’s knee and pulled his leg out from under him. Sam sagged against the wall to stay up.
“Say it,” Jason said. Sam coughed again.
“No.”
“Boys, boys,” Samantha said. Jason dropped his lock on Sam’s neck and hopped to the side, clapping Sam on the back as he stood, rubbing his throat.
“She said it’d be worth coming out to watch,” Alexander said. “She was totally right.”
“Alexander and I have decided to find some place that will sell us a box of ice cream, and then go back to the room and find some bad TV movie to watch. Who’s in?”
“Two boxes,” Jason said. Sam shook his head and looked up at Samantha.
“Three.”
She grinned.
“Done.”
They walked back to the parking lot and Alexander got his keys out.
“You guys go figure out what’s on, we’ll track down the ice cream?”
“Chocolate,” Jason said. Sam looked at Samantha and she smiled. She was such a pure, blazing happy that he didn’t really trust her to think splitting up through. She warmed, acknowledging him with focus, then looked hard at Jason. He nodded.
“Mint chocolate chip,” he said. She grinned.
“We’ll see you in a bit.”
He got into the car and Jason didn’t look at him.
“Surprised you let her go.”
“We’ve got it figured out,” Sam said.
“Uh huh,” Jason said.
“What does that mean?”
“All four of us know you’ve got it figured out,” Jason said. “The panicked look on your face.”
“Shut up. I wasn’t panicked.”
“You so were. Because he’s going to take her to a grocery store to get ice cream. Seriously, dude. We’re on vacation. Lighten up.”
Sam glanced at him.
“You didn’t win.”
“I so did.”
“No. You so didn’t. I was still standing.”
“Dude, the ground was covered in broken glass. I wasn’t going to drop you. That’s just common courtesy.”
“You weren’t going to drop me,” Sam said, “either way.”
“I had you,” Jason said.
“Not even close,” Sam said.
“Rematch at the hotel?” Jason asked. Sam laughed.
“I’d prefer to keep what’s left of my dignity intact in front of Sam’s new guy.”
“Sounds like chicken talk to me,” Jason said.
“And you think them walking in as I pin you on the floor is dignified?” Sam asked.
“Like that’s even close to what would happen. You just don’t want them to show up as I finish hog-tying you.”
“Not even if you drugged me.”
“Oh yeah, big boy? You gonna back that up?”
<><><>
It took a while, but they finally found a convenience store that sold pints of ice cream and they headed back to the hotel. Alexander turned up the radio and Samantha absently started singing to it. He turned it up louder and joined her. By the time they got to the hotel, they were three songs in and singing at the top of their lungs. He parked and waited for the end of the song to turn the car off. They sat looking out the front window for a minute in quiet. She laughed.
“What do you want to bet they’re going round two?” she asked.
“I wouldn’t take a bet against you about the two of them,” he said. “Not ever.”
“Good call,” she said, grinning as she unlocked the door. Sam and Jason sat on their respective beds, looking innocently in opposite directions. The room was wrecked.
“Uh huh,” she said. “Who won?”
“The neighbors came and complained,” Jason said. “We called it a draw.”
“Uh huh.” She pulled his ice cream out of the bag and threw it at him. Sam came and took his and they settled in in front of the television, finding an overplayed action movie first, and then a terrible horror she’d never seen before, after that. Apparently it was a childhood favorite for Sam and Jason. She rolled her eyes at Alexander as Jason quoted yet another line.
She stole ice cream from Jason and Sam frequently, feeling the fizzy social contentment she had known once or twice in high school, sitting up with her sister and her sister’s friends, eating, watching movies, laughing. She leaned against Alexander and he picked his arm up so she could sit against his chest. By the end of the second movie, she was feeling drifty.
“I think that’s it for me,” Alexander said as they hit the credits. She started to sit up, and for a moment he held her down with the arm wrapped around her waist, turning his face into her hair. She put her head back and closed her eyes, then drew a breath and sat up again. He let her go.
“You’re going to Wilmington with us?” Jason asked. Alexander stood wiped his hands on his pants. Samantha grabbed the empty ice cream container, then snagged Sam’s, finding a few lumpy spoonfuls left. She went and sat on the bed to finish it.
“Yeah. Call me when you guys head out.”
“You want to get breakfast?” Jason asked.
“Sounds good.”
Alexander looked at her.
“You’re staying here?”
“Oh. Uh. Yeah.”
He nodded, looking from Sam to Jason.
“Okay. Cool. I’ll see you guys in the morning.”
Samantha hopped up and followed him to the door. She started to say something, and he grinned crookedly at her.
“You don’t owe me an explanation,” he said. He put a hand behind her head and kissed her, lips to lips. Affectionate, but not demonstrative. She smiled.
“I’ll see you in the morning.”
She nodded.
“See you.”
She closed the door.
“That was surprisingly understanding,” Jason said. She looked at Sam. He had panged jealousy a few times, but had managed to maintain simply aloof most of the night.
“He’s fun,” Sam said. “Seems like a nice guy.”
“Where you sleeping, Sweetheart?” Jason asked. She jerked her chin at the couch. He shrugged. “Up to you.”
She looked at Sam.
“You want to work for half an hour?”
“I’m beat,” he said. “It’s late. Can we take a night off?”
She put her hand on her stomach. She had eaten too much, and had been most of the way asleep when the movie ended. She nodded.
“Sure.”
She went to the bathroom to change into her sleeping clothe
s, heavy sweats for sleeping without a blanket, then went back into the main room and curled up on the couch. The spare pillows from each bed were already there and Sam was already in bed. Jason passed her going into the bathroom to brush his teeth.
“Night,” she said, snuggling into the pillows and the remaining scent of Alexander.
“Sleep well,” Jason called.
“Night,” Sam murmured.
<><><>
They got a late breakfast at a grungy diner the next morning and Samantha was giving Alexander directions in the parking lot as Sam and Jason waited. She ran back across the parking lot and knocked on Sam’s window.
“You guys mind if I just ride with him?” she asked. “We’ll follow you.”
Sam looked at Jason.
“I don’t care,” Jason said. “Do what makes you happy.”
“We’ll stay close,” she said to Sam. He sighed.
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
She grabbed his wrist and squeezed it, then made a shrill noise through her nose and ran back across the parking lot. Jason started the car.
“I think the kids call that a ‘squee’,” he said. Sam snorted. “I don’t recall you ever making her squee.”
Sam looked harder out the window as Jason started out of the diner parking lot.
“That bother you?” Jason asked.
“Shut up,” Sam said. “That sounds dirty, anyway.”
They drove for a while in silence.
“He makes her act like an idiot,” Sam said.
“What? Clapping her hands and hopping up and down? Eating ice cream and watching dumb movies until four in the morning? Dancing? Which part exactly is the idiot part?”
“You can’t tell me you can’t see it,” Sam said.
“It bothers you, then. How she’s acting?” Jason asked. Sam didn’t sense the trap in time.
“Fine. Yes. It bothers me.”
“Says the one who spent all night and all day in Caroline’s room,” Jason said. It was intended to be a smack, and it landed exactly how his brother meant it. “You’ve been pouting all morning. And all last night,” Jason said. “She’s happy. You’re happy. Let it be.”
“She’s so… Like it’s not even a big deal.”
Jason sighed. Sam saw him shift to lean his head on his fist as he merged onto the interstate.
“You didn’t see her face when we got home that night, Sam,” Jason said. He drew a breath. “You didn’t see her face.”
Sam sighed.
“I know.” He paused, looking in the side mirror at the old Camry that Alexander drove. They were singing. Laughing. He could feel it as if he were in the back seat, listening. She caught him watching over the bond and sent him love. She loved him, and she was trying to give him a shot at getting away. Settling into something else. He nodded. “I get it.”
Jason looked over at him.
“Been a while since it’s really been just you and me,” he said. “You even remember what we talk about when there isn’t a girl in the back seat?”
“I think we fought about cartoons a lot,” Sam said.
“That sounds like us.”
“Jason?”
“Hmm?”
“What do you want to be when you grow up?”
<><><>
They settled into a comfortable routine in the little house on the beach in North Carolina. In the early mornings, Sam and Jason would train on the packed sand, most mornings with the practice swords, once hand-to-hand, and once with a rolling pin and a clothes hanger. He had thought the clothes hanger looked like the loser, so he had picked the rolling pin when she had offered him the choice, and she had run circles around him with the wire loop, grabbing his wrist, hooking his elbow, once planting the point of the hanger squarely against his neck from behind.
“You’re dead,” she said. “Fourcount and you’re down, tencount and you’re gone. Bled out. Got it?”
He had nodded and they had gone on. He continued to get faster, and damn if he wasn’t getting stronger, too, but she was always a dozen steps ahead of him faster and lightyears ahead of him in strategy.
“Where did you learn that?” he asked one morning, bent over his knees panting.
“I told you,” she said.
“Angels fight like that?”
She smiled.
“Angels don’t synthesize subterfuge very well.”
He pulled his head up and cocked an eyebrow at her.
“They don’t cheat. They encouraged me to come up with any way I could think of to cheat, because they don’t get to train with humans much. We’re the closest to demons most angels are ever going to get. The classic tactics I learned from them. The tricks I learned from eighty-five years of trying to outwit them.”
He coughed and spat on the sand.
“That’s actually really cool.”
“Thank you.”
“You were heaven’s badass.”
“I wouldn’t say it like that,” she said. He grinned at the sand.
“Of course not. You’re too much of a goody-goody to actually admit you’re a badass, but you are.”
She snorted.
“You have one more round in you?”
“Always,” he said, standing back up over his feet and putting his sword out in front of him.
An hour or so after sunrise, Sam would bring coffee out onto the porch facing the ocean and they would sit with him, watching the women running their morning workouts, staring at the waves. Even Jason didn’t feel the need to fill the air up with words, mostly, and when he did try to spark conversation about this runner or that one, Sam and Samantha would refuse to rise to the bait.
They just sat.
Alexander would ring the doorbell an hour or so later, depending on how late he had been out with Samantha the previous night, and they would sit in the kitchen while Samantha cooked. Sam swore she really did enjoy it as much as she said. Alexander was decent carrying conversations about sports. None of them cared about politics much. He told stories about growing up in a first-generation immigrant home in Kansas. Sam and Jason talked about North Carolina, carefully editing the family stories to the normal ones. Samantha talked about the mountains as if they were gods.
After breakfast, they would go back out on the beach, swimming, walking, people-watching. In Jason’s case, flirting. They’d walk to town for lunch, then Samantha would go back to the house for a nap and Alexander would disappear for a few hours.
Sam mostly kept track of Simon at this point, but Jason pulled the computer one afternoon and gave Simon the details he had about Alexander.
Just check him out, he had said.
Looking for anything specific? Simon had asked.
Any reason you wouldn’t let your sister date him Jason told him.
Sam’s with him?
Sam doesn’t roll that way Jason said.
Ha. Sam the girl?
She is until you give me a reason otherwise Jason said. Keep this between us. Samberly would take it the wrong way, and Sam doesn’t lie to her.
You got it.
Dinner, they grilled out on the back porch, then they would go out drinking. The bars there on the coast were over-themed tourist traps, but the waitresses wore skimpy clothing and had big smiles. Jason chafed at the no-going-home-with-strange-women rule, but Sam and Samantha were adamant.
Sam and Jason would go home and go to bed when the bars started to close. Samantha and Alexander kept decidedly less rational hours. Some mornings, Jason would get up for his workout to find her sitting, drinking coffee at the kitchen table, and he would wonder if she had yet been to bed.
Late in the week, Caroline came and spent the night with Sam. That night, Samantha made Jason stay out with herself and Alexander.
“I’m not a baby,” he said.
“How would you feel if Brandt snagged you and we had to give up our week off to come looking for you?” she asked, glancing to make sure Alexander hadn’t come back with drinks yet.
&
nbsp; “Oh, I’m sure I’d feel terrible,” Jason said. She nodded.
“Yeah. You remember that.”
He grinned.
“I haven’t stayed out all night since I was a teenager.”
“You lose all of your living-hard points if I outlast you,” she said. Alexander put mugs of beer in front of Samantha and Jason.
“She’s right,” he said. “If your technical support and her physicist boyfriend out-party you, you’re officially the old-lady neighbor yelling for the kids to turn the music down.”
“Tech support?” Jason said. She shrugged. “Boyfriend?” She grinned and shrugged again. “Huh.”
They bar-hopped until the last one closed. Samantha and Alexander danced where the opportunity presented itself, then they asked the college crowd getting kicked out of the last bar with them where they were headed next. Alexander scored them an invitation to a beach party, which turned out to be a bonfire on a private beach. Jason lay in the flickering light of the huge fire, kissing a skinny blond girl who answered to Xena.
“Like the warrior princess,” she said when she handed him the first beer.
“Is that your real name?”
She laughed.
“No.”
Six beers later, he’d lost most of his clothes - she’d never had many to speak of - and they lay in a tangle of blankets and sand. Samantha and Alexander were dancing down the beach.
“You ever have sex in the ocean?” Xena asked.
“A few times,” he said. She laughed and stood, dragging him down to the water, out past the water-volleyball players, past multiple skinny-dippers and a few couples who seemed to be similarly engaged.
He wondered later if Samantha and Alexander had been spending every night like this. And why he had let Sam drag him back to the house.
Alexander dropped them off at the house after sunrise, and Samantha poured him a cup of coffee. He shook his head.
“I’m going to bed.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“You think this isn’t part of training?”
“Seriously? I…” He considered the easiest way to put her on her heels and make her let him go to bed. “You may not know it, but all a guy wants to do after as much sex as I have just had is to go to bed.”
“Tell me something that matters,” she said, handing him a mug and heading out the back door. He groaned and followed.