Chapter Eleven

December 16 th , 2020

Andy hadn’t had the heart to tell any of the girls when they’d crashed the night before that they weren’t technically sleeping in his home state of Ohio. In her effort to avoid them staying at a place with Covington in the name, Niko had missed that the Embassy Suites RiverCenter by Hilton Cincinnati wasn’t actually in Cincinnati. Or Ohio. Oh, sure, it was in the greater Cincinnati area, but it was across the Ohio River. In Kentucky. In a town called, sadly, Covington. Thankfully, his partners had all sort of laughed it off in the morning while they were getting ready.

Melody had tried sending Andy a text when she first woke up, thanking him for taking her in, and when he opened his eyes, generally the last one to get out of bed, he saw her grinning, standing over him. “You’re a big-dicked bastard, you know that?” she said, and then turned to high five Piper. “Fuck yeah, that worked!” Andy hadn’t seen the text when she said that, so he was momentarily confused until Piper showed him his phone.

“Melody sent you a text message as soon as she got up, babe, but we had your phone in silent mode so it wouldn’t wake you,” Piper told him. “So, as long as she sends you a message while you’re asleep, it’s pretty easy sailing for everyone in dealing with that. We just wanted to test it without causing too much of a fuss.”

“Hey, anything that makes your lives easier, you know I’m all for,” Andy said, as Lexi and Niko wheeled in a few carts from the hallway that contained plenty of breakfast options for them to all have, Andy delighted to see an entire decanter full of pineapple juice. Sometimes the girls made special requests, and Andy’s only request was that he always wanted to have either pineapple juice or orange juice for breakfast, never ever grapefruit juice, or, as he described it, squint in a glass.

As breakfast was starting to wind down, Andy asked Piper to phone up her sister, so that he could talk to Declan. He hadn’t liked how they’d left things the day before. “Dec? Hey, it’s Andy. Look man, I feel like we sort of got off on the wrong foot yesterday, and I’m afraid I probably came across looking like a bit of an asshole, which was never my intention.”

“Yeah, well, me too, Andy,” Dec sighed on the other end of the line. “You know how it is. Politics flare up and tempers kick up and suddenly we’re at each other’s throats for no real reason. I did a bit of reading while you were gone, and you’re right, we aren’t tackling white collar crime as much as we probably Avrupa yakası travesti oughta be. I voted for Trump ’cause he promised to drain the swamp, but you know, it’s swampier in DC now than it’s ever been. Nothing got done the whole time he was there and that fucker still raised my taxes and spit in my eye. Fool me once and all that. Wouldn’t have voted for him a second time, even if he’d lived. Wouldn’t have voted for Biden neither, but I mean, Trump fucking stared into an eclipse and decided he knew more about hurricanes than the weather people, so he just changed a map with a sharpie and thought nobody would notice. Fuck that guy. I’m glad he’s dead. He’s not one of us. He was fucking rich. That’s the problem. I sort of realized, we gotta be looking at rich and poor before anything else. I’m tryin’ not to think about it in terms of race, but in terms of economic status, and, hoo boy, does that turn a bunch’a shit on its head.”

“And I’m sorry I bit at the racist comment,” Andy sighed. “I should’ve known better, because I really don’t think you’re racist – I just think systemic problems get ignored a lot by people who think they’re looking at one set of data and think they have the whole picture. It tends to make people look racist when they just occasionally act racist, and most of the time, they don’t even realize they’re doing it, otherwise they’d stop and think about it some. We question each other and suddenly we’re both shouting like a bunch of drunken idiots.” He laughed a little. “We gotta find some better way to get past these entrenched habits of ours to get our hackles up the minute we’re questioned, y’know?”

“You find a way to do it,” Declan laughed in response, “you let me know and I’m pretty sure we can make a fortune off of teaching it to people. Anyway, you’re not a vegetarian, and you weren’t bitching about my Garth Brooks t-shirt, so I’m certain we can find somewhere in the middle to make it work, even if we don’t see eye-to-eye on a bunch of stuff.”

Andy grinned. “They can have my cheesesteak when they pry it from my cold dead hands, Declan. Glad we were able to talk through it and not end on a bad note. You decide if you’re coming up for the wedding yet?”

“Yeah, I think it’ll just be me and June coming up for it while the kids and the rest of the partners stay home. We’re filling out the RSVP card right now and we’ll have it off to you in the mail, so maybe it’ll even be waiting for you by the time you get back home.”

“Sounds great, Dec. We’ll look forward to seeing Avrupa yakası travestileri you in January then.”

“Cover your ass out there, Andy,” Declan said. “We got unreasonable folks on both sides of the aisle, your camp and mine. Never take your eye off the ball.”

“You got it, man.” Andy ended the call, handing the phone back to Piper. He looked over at Alexis, who was basically playing schedule keeper for the whole trip, which was good, because Andy was pretty sure he’d have gotten lost down the rabbit hole for logistical planning. “What’s our schedule for the next few days look like?”

“We’re going to meet up with your mom and your nephew early in the afternoon at the house you grew up in, the book signing in the afternoon, then we’re flying up to Chicago to meet Fiona’s family. Crash the night there, then the next day we fly up to Pierre, South Dakota, driving down to the Rosebud Reservation to meet Niko’s mom for lunch, then driving back up to Pierre, and flying from Pierre to Denver, where we’re crashing for the night,” Alexis told him. “Going to be a very busy few days for us, but tomorrow’s got lots of travel time you can write during, and the day after’s pretty lax as well with just the book signing and then the flight up to Seattle, but that’s a three-hour flight, whereas everything we’ve got today is just a couple hours here and there. Plus you can sleep in again.”

“How far from the Rosebud Reservation is Pierre?” Andy asked, gathering up his things, making sure all his various little electronics were tucked into his satchel bag.

“A couple of hours each way.”

“Can’t we fly straight there?”

Alexis sighed. “Yeah, we can, I suppose. Rosebud does have its own airport – Rosebud Sioux Tribal Airport – but it’s not exactly what I would call a security-rich environment.”

“How big is Rosebud as a city?” Andy asked, a smile on his face.

“Like, barely a thousand people?”

“Think we can afford to be a little laxer and just fly straight there instead?” he laughed. “We didn’t tell anyone we were going there, it’s not on the public schedule and it’s remote enough that you should be able to see any threats coming a mile away. Besides, Niko’ll be on her home turf.”

Alexis chuckled, nodding. “Yeah, okay. I’ll get the flight plan updated, but either me or Melody stays with the plane the whole time.”

“Why not both of us?” Melody asked.

“Because Niko’s going to be home again, so she won’t be as critically sharp as she normally is, and that means either Travesti avrupa yakası you or me’s gonna be on full security detail,” Alexis said. “No offense, Neeks.”

“None taken,” Niko replied, doing one final sweep of the hotel room, making sure nobody had left anything behind. “It’s totally fair to say I won’t be on my A game back on the rez. Place is going to bring up a lot of old memories, even as tiny as it is. But anything out of the ordinary there will stand out like a sore thumb.”

“You mean us,” Moira joked.

“I do, indeed, mean us.”

“Any reason we’re not doing a bookstore signing tomorrow in Chicago?” Ash asked Andy.

He sighed, having been hoping to dodge this particular bit of conversation. “You’re gonna make me get into it, aren’t you?”

Suddenly, all the women turned to look at Andy. “Oooooo! There’s gossip!” Sarah cackled. “Andy’s got an unkind word to say about somebody!”

He shook his head, rolling his eyes a little bit. “I did a book signing at Myopic Books a couple of years ago, but they’ve got a hard-and-fast total no-cell-phone policy for the whole store, and I had my cell on me there and it rang during the Q I’m so jealous. Three different famous women, hm?” Virginia asked, putting on her glasses, as she smiled, looking over at Piper, Em and Sarah. “Two actresses and an athlete. Quite a lot of celebrity for one household. There aren’t jealousy problems between the three of you, are there?”

Sarah giggled, taking Emily’s hand in her own. “Well, Em and I sort of came as a prepacked deal, so there’s never any fucking jealousy between the two of us, well, no serious jealousy,” the tall redhead laughed. “And we’ve all bonded with Piper super fucking well.”

“You’re not bothered by my son being a bit out of shape, Piper?” Virginia asked the volleyball player, who had opted not to sit down, but was looking at all the pictures of Andy when he was younger on the wall. “You’re very fit and he’s, well, he’s my son and he’s always preferred writing to exercise.”

“Not at all, ma’am,” Piper said. “I couldn’t really talk about it during the television interview, but Andy pulled me out of the toughest situation of my life, and the first thing he did afterwards was apologize for not being able to do more.” She was starting to tear up a little bit, thinking about it. “I still have the letter he wrote me, and I’m going to carry that with me every day for the rest of my days. I don’t say this lightly, Mrs. Rook, but I’d kill someone to keep your son safe. He saved me. SAVED ME. Maybe I’ll try and get him to lose a few pounds around the mid-section, but even if he doesn’t, I am going to love him with all my heart until the last breath leaves either my dying lungs or his.” She placed her hand on Andy’s shoulder and gave it a firm squeeze, so he reached up to hold her hand for a moment. “I’m sort of hoping we’ll go together.”