would alter what’s real for me now. I don’t look back that way. I can’t. I only can look forward and hope you, Kane, and the rest of the entire fucking insanity he and Sionn have dragged us into will be there for the ride. And I’m good with that. I don’t want to live my life any other way. Especially since I found a really good happy with all of you in it.”
Never Go Full Nerf
THE SESSION at The Sound ran long. Sionn and Damien dropped them off before speeding away in the Challenger, going for a late afternoon cruise down the coast. Miki didn’t expect to see them again. Or least not for the rest of the weekend. Their afternoon drives usually ended up with them finding a hotel room somewhere along the way and spending a few days by themselves. Sure enough, as soon as Miki got his key into the lock, he got a text from Damien telling him they’d be back on Monday.
Kane had instituted a not-to-be-broken rule of closing the garage doors, so Miki didn’t know Kane was home until he saw his cop’s car keys sitting in the porcelain ramen bowl on the front table. Dude’s toenails clicked in a rapid scramble from the kitchen, and the terrier bolted out toward him, careening around the dining room table set up between the peninsula and the living space. The dog skidded to a stop before he plowed into Miki, and he crouched down, grateful for Dude’s consideration. Scratching the terrier’s ears, Miki toed off his Converses, then nudged them to the side of the table, where eventually, Kane would point them out and ask if he’d meant to leave them there.
“I leave them there all the time,” he informed the dog. “That’s how I know where to find them again.”
Living with other people was sometimes difficult, especially when those other people had been raised to be much more civilized than he was. There were all kinds of household rules everyone seemed to know but him, and while he’d picked a few up living with Damien over the years, it apparently hadn’t been enough. Laundry was easy enough to do, but Miki pretty much had two baskets, one for dirty clothes and one for clean. The closet was a place to hang leather jackets and guitar straps, and the dresser the interior designer put in the master suite never made it downstairs to the room he’d claimed as his bedroom following the accident.
Kane changed all of that. He and his brothers spent one Saturday morning rearranging furniture, only to stand there dumbfounded when Miki asked if anyone told him to do so. The brothers snuck out so he and Kane could have a glorious high-volume fight about boundaries, space, and change.
The sex afterward had been great, and Kane took another step closer to understanding Miki’s need to control his own space. Although, he did admit, the bedroom did look a hell of a lot better, and it now had enough storage and bookshelves to fit all of their crap.
He still had a hard time remembering to fold his clothes and put them way away, but Kane agreed, so long as it worked for Miki, he wasn’t going to insist on a traditional dresser. Not like Miki did anything traditionally anyway.
“Where’s your other guy?” Miki asked Dude. “Is he off with one of his brothers or—”
There was what looked like a large blue-and-orange plastic machine gun sitting on the couch with a note taped to it. Two round canisters much like the one at the front of the gun sat next to it, as well as a pair of clear protective glasses like the ones he’d seen Kane use in his woodworking shop. Frowning, Miki picked up the note and read it, then looked down at his dog.
“So let me get this straight, he wants me to play a game of Nerf darts? To actually hunt him down through the house and shoot at him with these things?” Miki picked up the plastic toy, surprised at its heft. It seemed simple enough to operate, and the note told him to leave the canisters there, as backup ammunition for when they’d run out of their first one. “Okay, so not only am I to shoot him with these, if I run out of darts, I’m supposed to make it back here and reload?
“The guy shoots guns for a living,” he explained to the dog. “Yeah, to be