February 12th, 2:35 PM

      "C'mon, Ash, give me my bra," Briar said, reaching across his chest as he held the item out of her reach.

      "I dunno about that, I kind of like you this way," he teased, dangling the bit of fabric from his fingers.

      After their first night together, they had woken up and realized how incredibly careless they had been by leaving themselves naked and vulnerable to anyone, or anything, who might make an appearance. So they had decided to confine their amorous activities to the daylight hours, when it would be more difficult for anyone to arrive unnoticed, and to continue to sleep fully clothed, with coats and shoes within easy reach.

      Still holding out her hand, she stated, "I'm sure you do, but just in case you don't remember, Liz and Carmine are supposed to be here in a little while to bring supplies. And giving someone a peep show isn't on my to-do list today."

      He relented, dropping the garment into her hand and reaching for his jeans, which lay in a heap next to the bed. "Yeah, I remember," he mumbled as he swung his legs over the side of the mattress. "And I have to say, their timing sucks."

      Briar chuckled and reached out to smooth down his hair, replying, "Well, at least they didn't show up while I was 'buns up and kneeling', as Steven Tyler would say."

      Offering a wry smile in acknowledgement of her statement, Ashley stepped into his jeans and fastened them, then retrieved his shirt from the headboard of the bed, pulling it on and padding barefoot to the small bathroom. He picked up his hairbrush and worked the tangles out of his shoulder-length hair before moving into the living room, followed just a few seconds later by Briar, who reached out and smacked his rear as she passed.

      "Hey, what was that for?" he questioned.

      "I just couldn't resist," she retorted. "That's what happens when you have an ass that someone could bounce quarters off of." Then she burst into a fit of giggles as a deep flush colored his cheeks. "Dude, you're blushing!"

      He didn't reply, and she walked back to him and slid her arms around his waist. "Hey, I'm sorry if I embarrassed you, but that can't be anything you haven't heard before."

      "No, I'm not embarrassed, exactly," he murmured, nuzzling his face into her hair. "I've just never been good at knowing how to respond to compliments, at least not in person. I mean, it's pretty easy to banter back and forth with people on Twitter and stuff like that, but face to face I sort of freeze up sometimes."

      As Briar started to respond to his statement, she was interrupted by a knock on the door, and called out, "Who is it?"

      "It's Liz, guys!" they heard from the porch. "We brought your stuff."

      Ashley moved to the kitchen window and peered outside before going to unlock the door, opening it to admit Liz and a young man he had never seen before. He turned to Briar with an inquiring look and she shrugged, indicating that she wasn't familiar with him, either. They entered the house, and Liz said, "Hi there, you two. This is my oldest son Kevin, he's home on leave from the Army. Kev, this is Briar and Ashley."

      "Nice to meet you," Kevin stated as he walked to the kitchen table and set down the bags he was carrying, then reached out to take the others from Liz. "I kind of feel like I already know you, Briar, since I've heard so much about you from Cody. And I'm familiar with some of your music, Ashley. My platoon actually had a couple of y'all's songs on the playlist we used to get ourselves pumped up before we went out on a patrol."

      "Where were you stationed?" Ashley inquired, as he started to remove items from the bags.

      "I just finished a tour in Afghanistan, and I've got a month here at home before I go to a base in Germany," the young soldier replied, as he carried one of the bags to the freezer, and began placing the contents inside. "I'll probably be there for at least a year, maybe longer if I decide to re-enlist."

      "Where's Carmine today?" Briar asked, as she and Liz placed groceries into the cabinets. "I thought he was coming with you to check on the propane tank."

      "He's in town right now, he had to go pick Bella and Sam up at school early. Apparently, there's some sort of a nasty stomach bug going around, and they seem to have picked it up," Liz explained. "He took them to the doctor, so I decided to have Kevin help me today, instead of waiting for Carmine to get home. That way, there's less chance of passing it on to you, since you guys can't get out to the doctor if you get sick."

      Both Ashley and Briar turned their heads to look at Liz as the words left her mouth, and noticing their startled expressions, she assured them, "It's all right, I explained things to him on the way out, he knows not to say anything to anybody."

      "Nobody's gonna hear anything from me," Kevin informed them. "I didn't get a security clearance by being a blabbermouth." He then turned to glance at Briar, and added, "Besides, Cody and Uncle Wiley have said more than once that they consider you part of the family, so I'm gonna do the same. And in this family, we look out for our own."

      They finished putting away the groceries, then Kevin went outside to check on the propane levels while Liz took a few minutes to look over the sweater that Briar was working on. He returned, and informed them that they still had enough fuel to last for at least a week, barring an unexpected cold snap, and that he and Carmine would come back later in the week and refill the tank. They chatted for a few more minutes, then Liz received a text informing her that Carmine was on his way home with the kids, so they said their goodbyes and headed home. 

      Once they were alone, Briar put a CD into the stereo as Ashley flung himself into the couch, and as the sounds of The Eagles "Take It Easy" filled the room, he motioned for her to join him. She dropped down next to him, pillowing her cheek on his chest as he draped an arm across her waist, idly tracing the waistband of her leggings with his fingertips. They lay in silence for several minutes, until Ashley quietly asked, "What's wrong, Tink?"

      "Why do you think that something's wrong?"

      "Because you're being quieter than usual, and you feel a little tense," he replied. "But if you don't want to talk about it, that's cool."

      After a few seconds, she sighed, and said, "Nothing's wrong, exactly, I was just thinking about what Kevin said earlier, about how he was willing to just accept what Wiley and Cody said about me, and how their family looks out for their own."

      He looked at her curiously, and inquired, "Is there something wrong with that?"

      "No, it's just..." The sentence trailed off as she searched her brain for the words that she wanted. After a moment, she propped herself up, looking down into Ashley's face, and said, "It's just weird, I guess. Someone I just met today is willing to accept me, or I guess both of us, at face value, when my own flesh-and-blood relatives have never been willing to do that."

      "I know you've said that you don't really get along with your folks that well, but are they really that bad?" he asked.

      She was silent for several seconds, then she responded, "You're actually close with your family, so I'm guessing that you've never gotten lectures on how much of a disappointment you are to them, and complaints about how every damn thing you do is making them look bad to their so-called friends."

      "Not even a little bit. They've always been incredibly supportive of whatever I wanted to do, and they've made it pretty clear to some of the folks in my hometown that they're not interested in hearing any sort of negativity about my career or my lifestyle."

      She abruptly sat up, startling him by pulling her shirt over her head and tossing it to the floor. Shifting her body so that she was seated on the edge of the couch next to him, she lifted a hand and indicated the fairy tattoo below her collarbone. He sat up and leaned forward, actually studying it closely for the first time, realizing that the fairy was somewhat bohemian in appearance, with stylized butterfly wings in a riot of tye-dye styled colors, purple-streaked black hair held back with a bright green headband, and a lovely face with an Oriental cast to the features. The fairy also held a peace sign in its hands, embossed with a set of digits, which read "S. B. B.  6/6/86 - 5/23/13"

      "Your cousin?" Ashley inquired, as he traced the writing with a fingertip.

     Briar nodded, saying, "Yeah. Sylvia Beatrice Baxter. My Uncle Derek insisted on naming her after his grandma, so of course Priscilla had to throw my grandmother's name in the middle. She always hated it, especially since when we were kids, my idiot brother went around calling her "Beezus", after a character in the Ramona Quimby books. After her funeral, I took one of my favorite pictures of her to LA Ink, where I could be sure that they knew what they were doing, and had this done. She was always sort of a hippie-chick type, and fairies amuse me, so we came up with this"

      "Was she adopted?"

      "No, my Uncle Derek was half-Vietnamese. Which, to my stupid family's way of thinking, was a strike against him, along with the fact that he didn't come from an old New Orleans family, or a rich one," she related. "He came from a typical middle-class family in Illinois, and worked full-time to put himself through college, which was where he met my dad's sister. From what I heard, my grandparents nearly blew a fuse when they started dating, but when Miss Priss got pregnant, of course they had to get married. He managed to graduate and get a good job, and he busted his butt for her and Sylvia, but between her stuck-up social-climbing personality and my grandmother's constant nagging, they split up when Sylvia was twelve. He died in a plane crash a couple of months after her sixteenth birthday, and that's pretty much when she started unraveling. She felt like he was the only grown-up that actually gave a damn about her, since her mom was basically just running around to parties with her new husband, trying to boost his political career, and didn't really bother with her."

      "I've known some people like that myself," Ashley responded. "They feel overlooked, or unwanted, and they start acting out to get attention. Because I guess if someone is lonely enough, even a negative reaction is better than being ignored."

      "Yeah, unfortunately you're right. She was always so pretty that guys were trailing around after her since elementary school, and I guess she thought that if she slept with them, they'd like her. Then once she started using, it was the easiest way to make money to buy more drugs. And it was such a waste, because she was smart, and talented, and she could have done just about anything she wanted to do. Our family basically cut her off when she turned eighteen, and she moved out here for basically the same reason I did; to get the hell away from them."

      "Don't you ever go back to visit?" he asked.

      "I did a few times, but I haven't been since the Thanksgiving after she died. I got into a big blowout with my grandmother, and I haven't been back or spoken to her since," she replied. "I occasionally hear from my mom, and I talk to my sister-in-law once or twice a month to keep updated on my niece and nephew, but I haven't spoken to my brother in over a year, or to my dad since right after the explosion."

      "Do you mind if I ask what you guys fought about?" he queried. "If it's private, that's cool, but I'm just having a hard time getting my head around the idea of not speaking to your grandma. I talk to mine at least once a week, or at least I did until we had to go off the grid."

      She gave a snort of sarcastic laughter, and said, "Because she made it abundantly clear during Thanksgiving dinner that I was an even bigger disappointment to the family than Sylvia was. She started off by complaining about my hair, which somehow convinced her that I had become a lesbian, which would have just scandalized the ladies from the garden club and the Historical Society. And then she decided that I needed a lecture about how 'inappropriate' my career is, or that I had one in the first place, instead of staying there to marry some pedigreed jackass from their social circle and being a good little debutante."

      Ashley gazed at her for a moment, and reached out to stroke her hair, saying, "Okay, I grant that your grandma sounds like a meddling old bat, but is that really bad enough to stop speaking?"

      "No, I've been used to that shit for years," she told him. "If it was just that, I would've just blown her off like usual. What totally pissed me off was when she said, and I quote, 'We expected this sort of thing from your cousin, considering what sort of background her father came from. I will admit that Derek was rather easy on the eyes, but Priscilla should have had enough sense to realize that being eye-candy is no substitute for decent breeding. You actually come from a good, established, American bloodline, so from you I expected better.' So I got up from the table, walked around, emptied the gravy boat over her head, and told her that if she was an example of so-called good breeding, I wanted no part of it, because she was an overbearing, self-important, backstabbing racist bitch, and I left."

      He gaped at her, his expression one of complete astonishment, and finally muttered, "Wow! Just... wow! How the fuck do people think like that? Especially about their own flesh and blood?"

      "Your guess would be as good as mine. But after that, my grandfather told me that I wasn't welcome back in the house until I apologized, so my next visit will be when they start offering ice-skating lessons in Hell. So, maybe that explains why Kevin's statement just sort of struck me as odd."

      He slid an arm around her and laid back down, pulling her against his chest. "Yeah, it does, unfortunately," he said. "It sucks that you had to put up with that for so long, but then again, if you hadn't you might not be you."

      She gave him a puzzled look, and he went on, saying, "What I mean is that your personality, and your goals and beliefs might not be what they are now. You were brought up to think that this kind of thing was normal, but you had the brains, and the courage, to realize that you didn't want to be like them, and took charge of your own life, and I admire that. You turned out to be an intelligent, thoughtful, confident, incredibly sexy woman, and you got to that point by deciding to think for yourself, and not just accepting what you were told. That's something a lot of people can't do, and you should be proud of that."

      Briar raised her head and looked down at him, then placed a soft kiss on his lips. "Thanks, Ash," she whispered. "I really needed to hear that."

      "Anytime, Tink."

      She then gave him a mischievous grin, and slid her hand under his shirt, lightly grazing his muscular chest with her fingernails. "Incredibly sexy, huh? Y'know, we've still got a couple of hours before dinnertime, so do you think that you might be willing to demonstrate your sincerity? I suddenly feel the need for a bit of reassurance."

      Offering a rather devilish smile of his own as he reached for the clasp of her bra, he rolled them both off of the couch onto the fake-fur rug spread across the floor. "A demonstration, huh?" he murmured. "If you want it, you've got it."