appreciative little smile curving her lips.
“I don’t know what I would do right now without you in my corner, cheering me on.”
“I do,” I said, and she cocked her head.
“Oh, yeah?”
“You’d manage just fine without me, it would take a while, but you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for. You’d get through.”
She came over to me and put her hands on my shoulders, straddling my lap and her lips against mine.
“I’m glad I don’t,” she whispered.
“Don’t what?” I asked softly.
“Have to muddle through without you. I can’t imagine what it’d be like, but I can imagine it would be very uncomfortable and unpleasant.”
“Baby, your whole life is about to change,” I murmured, smiling, looking into those beautiful green eyes of hers.
She smiled back and said, “I like the sound of that.”
“What you staring at, boy?” I looked down then up from the bales of hay I was stacking in the lower part of the barn, part of getting ready for winter and over to my pops.
“I want Aspen to come live here,” I said without any preamble. “I was thinking about turning the upstairs loft into a sort of studio for her, was thinking about what it would take to run better electricity out here and where to put her kilns and shit to where we could plug ‘em in and they would actually work.”
“Not out here,” my dad said with a dubious laugh. “One malfunction and the whole barn could go up. I think upstairs could work as storage, but as for a studio space?” He looked thoughtful. “Could always build one out back of the house, out near the tree line. One of them she-shed deals. Kilns could go up against the back of the house on the outside, wouldn’t take much to put the plug in out there for ‘em.”
“No complaints?” I asked. “No telling me I’m nuts or that it’s a crazy idea?”
My dad shook his head, and heaved a big sigh, leaning on his pitchfork he’d been using to lay down new straw in the birthing stalls.
“I like her,” he said with a shrug. “She’s one of us.”
I nodded slowly. The first was my father talking, the second? Vyking. Club brother, through and through.
“Guess there’s only one thing left to do,” I said.
“Ahhh, uh-uh,” he said. “There’s gonna be a metric fuckton of shit to do around here to make this place ready for her arts and crafts.”
“Guess we better get on it, then.”
He laughed at me. “Ha, ha, fuck you. I’m happy to have her around, but I ain’t up for all that.”
“Fine,” I said. “Can you at least call around for me for the relevant work dudes to get some of this shit done? I don’t know shit else about electrical.”
“Now that,” he said pitching a forkful of straw, “I can do.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Aspen…
“Thank you for doing this for me,” I murmured and looked around my mostly emptied shop. Today was the day. A rainy November morning outside the front windows matched a little how I was feeling on the inside about closing down and moving all of this stuff out to Fen’s barn.
I missed the farm. I hadn’t been in a couple of weeks and I was looking forward to the lush green pastures, the old wooden shake house, and the welcome sound of the bleating goats.
“Hey.” Fen’s voice snapped me out of my reverie and I dragged my eyes from the leaden gray outside and the falling rain.
“Hey,” I said softly, smiling.
“You doing okay?” he asked.
“Yeah! Yeah, why?”
“You just seem a little out of it, that’s all.”
“Just saying goodbye, I guess.” I sighed unhappily. “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”
He hooked a hand behind my neck and pressed his lips to my forehead.
“Ain’t gotta worry about any of that right now,” he said and I put my arms around him and cuddled into his chest.
“I know,” I murmured, but I did. I still felt so… detached. Like everything was up in the air, and I didn’t like the feeling. I had always been one to crave roots. Maybe it was a byproduct of my name? Aspen was a kind of tree, after all…
“I got you, baby girl,” he murmured and kissed the top of my hair.
“And I am so grateful for it,” I murmured.
The U-Haul pulled up out front, blotting out the rain bouncing in the street and I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
Fenris had asked the club to help with the move promising