"I have never been this tired and hungry at the same time in my entire life," Nick announced as he shoved the key card into the hotel room door later that night. He opened the door and stumbled in, followed by Amanda and Bree. As he turned the corner from the hall into the microscopic bedroom, he dropped the duffle bag and ran forward. Nick threw himself across the room onto the hotel bed and snuggled against it. "Oh my God a mattress," he groaned, closing his eyes.
Amanda almost tripped over the dropped duffle bag he'd left in the middle of the walking space. She kicked it aside and dropped her own next to it. "Don't be a bed hog," she commanded, laughing at his sprawled out frame.
"Can't move. Muscles non functioning." Nick just laid there.
Amanda crossed over to the bed and pushed Nick's leg over. "Moooove, jackass." She crawled onto the mattress beside him and shoved his arm away. He let it land, floppy, against his chest.
Bree followed suit, crawling onto the other bed. She curled the pillow under her head, "This feels really good," she agreed, closing her eyes, too.
The room fell into silence as all three of them dozed. The alarm clock on the nightstand between the beds glowed red, announcing the time to be 6:45. None of them moved. When the clock was glowing 6:57 and they'd been silent that entire time, a loud grumbling erupted from Nick's stomach, breaking the silence.
"Jesus, Carter," Amanda groaned.
"It was my stomach," Nick defended himself, "I did not flattulate." Bree cracked up into the pillow at the word, her eyes still closed. Only Nick would use that word.
"You're so gross," Amanda said, but even her voice broke from trying to repress laughter. She shoved his shoulder. "Get away from me, you gross boy."
Nick laughed and rolled away, jumping to his feet. "I'm starving," he said.
"Good, go get food then," Amanda waved her hand at him dismissively.
"Okay," Nick agreed, grinning wickedly down at her, "I'll get Taco Bell. With extra, extra beans and --"
"No," Amanda laughed, "No, no beans."
"Whyyyyyy?" Nick demanded, laughing, too.
"Because we have to live with you and your lethal ass," Amanda answered.
Bree giggle-snorted into the pillow.
"Then you better come with me to get food," Nick said, "Cos if I go alone I am so coming back with Mexican."
They'd gone and gotten food - pizza from a shop across the street from the hotel and Nick had jokingly asked the waiter if they had a bean pizza, which the waiter had spent fifteen minutes asking about out back before apologizing that they didn't. "What would you have done if he'd figured out a way to do that for you?" Amanda demanded of Nick.
"Ordered it I guess," Nick answered, shrugging, just thankful that the chef hadn't been feeling particularly creative that night.
When they'd returned to the hotel room, it was nearly nine o'clock, and they melted into their beds, the lights off and TV on, a rerun of some TV show flashing across the screen. Nick propped his head up with his arm and Amanda lay next to him, a good three inches between them, like a gap that time had created and neither of them was really sure how to bridge. But the gap was only three inches now, Amanda reminded herself, not 3,000 miles as it had been.
Bree rolled out of bed, "I'm gonna take a shower," she announced, and she disappeared into the bathroom, carrying her duffle bag with her.
"I sniffed the duffle bag," Nick confessed. "When she came to Los Angeles and I recognized it. I put it in my trunk and while she was getting in the car, I bent down and I pressed my face in it and I sniffed her duffle bag."
Amanda looked up at him. "Did it still smell like Brian?" she asked.
Nick nodded.
They fell silent again and Amanda licked her lips, sucking up courage, and then rolled and wrapped her arm around his chest, tucking her legs against the concave of his waist and pressing her cheek into his shoulder and her nose against his neck. He didn't move. She kissed his skin lightly and settled in against him.
After a long pause of getting used to the sensation of her being close to him again, Nick reached down and ran his hand along her arm. That's when he noticed it. They'd had sex in the bedroom in Colorado in the dark and, other than that, she'd been wearing sweatshirts and sweaters all along. Tonight was the first time he'd seen her with short sleeves with the room even partially illuminated. He reached over and turned on the bedside lamp, and turned her arm to study the tattoo that ran along the inside of her right forearm.
It was a floral vine that started just above the veins in her wrist and trailed toward her elbow and in a delicate script that mimicked the vines, was the name Steve. Nick licked his lips, staring at the name. It was her ex-husband's name. He knew this because he'd called the house they lived in a few times and Steve himself had answered and Nick had pretended each time to be a telemarketer from a medical billing company and been abruptly hung up on. A couple times, Amanda had answered and, too scared to say anything else, Nick had stammered through the medical biller spiel. He didn't know if Amanda knew it was him or not.
"Do you miss him?" Nick asked, running his thumb over the name on her skin.
"No," Amanda answered.
Nick studied the tattoo. "Why do you still have his name on you?" he asked.
Amanda shifted to show Nick his own tattoo on his left forearm, where Paris Hilton's name had once been. "Old habits die hard," she either said it or read it, he wasn't sure which. He leaned his cheek ahead her forehead. "I let him tell me I wasn't good enough," she said quietly.
"What do you mean?" Nick asked. They both stared at each other's tattoos.
"He slept around a lot," Amanda said, "And I pretended not to know."
"You deserve better than that," Nick argued.
Amanda sighed, "I spent all my life trying to gain my father's approval, then sixteen years trying to regain yours..."
Nick's voice was low, "I'm sorry," he said.
"I know you are," Amanda answered.
"I just didn't know how to handle it then, you know?" he asked, "Brian was the closest thing to family that I ever had. You know how jacked up my actual family is..."
"I know."
Nick stared up at the ceiling. "You're the only person I feel like really understands that when I say that," he said, smiling sadly. "You have like the exact same family practically."
"Minus all the sibling drama," she answered.
Nick thought about the similarities between him and Amanda, trying to get their parents love, struggling with losing a sibling, and the aftermath of the loss. They'd both lost Brian together; there was now, and always would be, a colossal void where Brian had been. Maybe, he thought, the reason they'd fought so much in those months and years following Brian's death because they were so similar. Neither knew how to deal with the other because they both needed the same thing and neither of them had it to give.
"You get me," Nick declared.
Amanda snuggled into him again. The shower turned off in the bathroom. He put his arm around her and held her close. "I really wanna sniff the bag, too," Amanda whispered.
Nick smiled. "Do it," he said, "You gotta breathe really deep though, or else it just smells like Brian put on fruity perfume."
Amanda laughed.
It was seven in the morning and the instructor working at the office at Sky Jump! pulled into the lot and parked the car. He got out and was unlocking the door when two police cruisers came up the dusty driveway. The instructor stood at the door, confusion registering on his face. The cops parked their cars and wallked across the lot to him. "Excuse me, my name is Officer O'Ryan and I'm with the Nebraska State Police Department... Do you work at this establishment?" asked one of the cops, holding out his badge.
"Yes..." answered the instructor, confused.
"We have a couple questions for you," said Officer O'Ryan.
Nick had parked the car on the side of the highway, despite the laws saying not to do so, and they'd stood on the grass beneath the sign that read Welcome to Kentucky as they crossed the stateline. Bree was now sitting on the grass beside him, Amanda on the other side of him. They each held a sandwich and a bag of chips rested on Amanda's lap that they'd been passing around between them.
"Did you call my grandparents?" Bree asked. "Do they know we're coming?"
"Not exactly," Nick replied.
"What if they don't want me there?" Bree asked.
"They'll want you there," Nick answered.
Bree stared at her sandwich, picking at it ever so slightly only because Nick was insisting that she eat. She was sick to her stomach picturing their arrival in Lexington, which was mere minutes away, and imagining what it would be like to see her grandparents for the first time. It'd been so long, she wondered if they even remembered that she existed. She would understand, of course, she told herself, if they had no idea who she was. After all, why should they? They'd never met her, and to be honest, for all she knew, they didn't even know that she existed. Maybe it wasn't so much a case of needing to remember she existed so much as knowing she did in the first place.
She could remember Baylee talking about gram and gramps Littrell and she'd asked him once, when he was a teenager and she was very little, why it was that he had a gram and gramps Littrell and she didn't, and he'd said it was because their mom had a fight with gram when she was born. She'd never dared to ask any more questions of anyone, instead she'd harbored the secret fear that her grandmother hadn't wanted her to exist, that maybe they'd fought because of her, maybe the chasm between her father's family and Leighanne had grown because she was the wedge that separated them.
There were times in her life when Bree felt like the wedge between a lot of things - the very biggest being the wedge between the past and the future for her family. Before Bree there was Brian, and after there was only Bree. When she was really small, she could remember looks of resentment and snide remarks even from Baylee, who had eventually grown to be her fiercest protector, but still... she could understand why, when he was younger, Baylee had resented her. As a child, you don't see that dad was sick and dying of cancer. As a child you see one day he was there and the next he wasn't and very shortly thereafter there's a replacement, with looks so strikingly similar to his father's. Bree respected Baylee very much for his ability to overcome that resentment. She was afraid that her mother still struggled with it.
Bree sniffled, the thoughts rolling through her mind causing tears to well in her eyes. She hadn't realized she was crying. Nick wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her into him, resting his chin on her head. She listened to his heart beating and wrapped her arms around him.
"It's okay," he said, "They'll be happy to see you."
Jackie had prepared the guest bedroom in preparation for Baylee. She'd been humming all morning and into the afternoon. Harold Sr. had walked shakily out to the porch and stationed himself out front, staring out to the end of the driveway. "He's driving," he'd told Jackie earlier, "You're crazy for getting ready too soon, he won't be here today." And yet he found himself watching like a hawk for motion at the end of the drive, like an old yellow dog, waiting for its master.
Jackie had started the pot roast early enough it would be ready that night if she needed it to be, or could continue cooking to become beef stew instead the next day. Just in case by some miracle Baylee drove from Orlando to Lexington soon enough that she would need it.
It was dusk, the sun slowly expiring behind the trees at the far western edge of the Littrell property, and Harold Sr. had just given up and gone inside the house and begun bolting the locks on the door one at a time, when the headlights pierced the dark at the end of the driveway. He stopped shifting the locks, staring out at the vehicle. "JACKIE!" he shouted, "JACKIE HE'S HERE!"
Like she'd been waiting for him to speak the words, Jackie was almost instantly at Harold Sr.'s elbow. "He's here," she breathed, her heart shimmering in her chest like crazy. She scrabbled with the lower locks as Harold Sr. undid the uppers, and the door flew open and Jackie hurried out before Harold Sr. could manuever around the door. She dashed down the steps to the walkway and was headed for the car that was just turning off in the middle of the gravel driveway.
Nick got out of the car first and Jackie slowed to a stop.
He ran around the nose of the car. "Jackie," he said and she stared at him with wide, confused eyes. "It's me, Nick Carter..."
But Jackie wasn't looking at him, she was looking past him, at the car. Nick turned. Bree and Amanda had climbed out; Bree was standing beside her open back door, staring across the driveway, her hair hanging loosely around her face, framing her jaw and her nose. In the dying light, her features were highlighted, her eyes burning brilliantly as she stared wide-eyed as she had been since they'd crossed the Kentucky state line.
"Brianna," gasped Jackie, stepping around Nick. She went straight to Bree and stood before her. Bree stared up at Jackie and Jackie stared down at Bree and her hand slowly rose up and touched the side of Bree's face, her jaw dropped. "Ohhh," she whisper-gasped. She pulled Bree into a bone-crushing hug.
Harold Sr. stood at the edge of the porch, a look of wonder on his face. He looked at Nick. "Well. You aren't Baylee," he observed.
