Quaranteam - Book Two (Ch. 10)

"What's your headcount at for guests?"

"Basically the same as an outdoor festival?" Andy said, rolling his eyes. "I think we've capped attendance at two thousand people, although we still aren't entirely sure if we're being crazy optimistic or if everyone's just going to pass if they can't bring their entire Team with them. We're allowing a handful of people to bring their full Teams, but we've suggested to most people only showing up with a few of them, more for their own sanity than for our convenience."

"We'd love for everyone to come, sis," Piper said as she stepped over to join in on the conversation, sliding her arm around Andy's shoulders almost protectively. "But we get not everyone's feeling comfortable traveling yet, and learning to move this many people at once? It's a challenge." Piper turned Andy's head up so she could lean her head down and kiss him. "My sister's not giving you too much shit, is she?"

"Just the right amount," Andy said with a chuckle, thinking to himself that June had been lovely, but her husband had been borderline antagonistic.

"Hey Dec. Good to see you again."

"Pipes," Declan responded quietly.

"So I take it you two are a pre-DuoHalo match?" Andy asked. He really hadn't had much time to talk to Piper's sister over the preceding month, and he now had so many partners with so many details that nobody expected him to remember much of anything. He and June had gotten along fantastically the one conversation he remembered, though, and he wasn't sure how June and her husband could be so very different.

"Married ten years last April."

"Kids?"

"Two daughters, Natalie and Abigail, 8 and 5," June said with a smile. "They're both running around here somewhere. I think our partner Esparanza's keeping tabs on them."

"She is," Piper confirmed. "They wanted to play 'Cling To Auntie Piper's Legs' for a while, so I obliged them."

Andy smiled back a bit more comfortably at that, as both girls were safely within the pre-DuoHalo zone, and clearly still alive. He remembered Piper telling him that June had been married before DuoHalo, and that she was sort of acting as queen bee of their household while new women were added to the mix. "Glad to hear they're keeping old traditions alive."

"It's best that way, don't you think?" Declan said. "Sticking to old traditions, the way things used to be?"

Andy's head turned a little bit, his eyes narrowing. "I'm more of a forward-thinking guy myself. Traditions usually hold people back from evolving."

"Moving too far forward too fast is what gets people into trouble," Declan said. "All this focus on identity politics, it's all walking away from family values, good Christian family values."

"Well, I'm not a Christian," Andy said with a devilish smirk. "I'm an atheist. But knowing right from wrong isn't based on any religion - that's simply treating others as you want them to treat you. And you know who complains about identity politics? People whose identities haven't ever been threatened. It's easy to claim people should stop talking about how their oppressed when they've never been oppressed."

"Is this the point of the conversation where you call me racist?" Declan said.

"I dunno," Andy shot back. "Are you a racist?"

"The facts are the facts, Andy," Declan said, his temper starting to flair a little. "If there's a crime committed in America, it's far more likely to have been committed by a person of color."

"No, if there's someone arrested in America, they're more likely to be a person of color," Andy corrected. "That's not even close to the same thing. And considering how much more damage white collar crimes do to society, it's surprising how few white-collar criminals get arrested or do hard time. And funny how all the white-collar criminals are white skinned too."

"We have a legal system in this country for a reason, Andy," Declan said, his voice starting to get raised a bit. Now Andy knew exactly where the tension had been coming from.

"Sure, for the wealthy to abuse as they see fit, and to ensure they don't ever see the inside of a jail cell," Andy countered. "If you want to convince me you believe in equal justice, I want to see you demanding the death penalty for the bankers who've repeatedly and illegally crashed the economy."

"How soon before you're thinking about having kids, sis?" June asked, trying to pull the conversation away from politics. "I know the government's leaning pretty hard on this 'Repopulate the country' plan of theirs, and the tax breaks they're offering are a little crazy, but I know you want to go and do the Olympics again."

Piper nodded, nudging Andy in the ribs, as if trying to get him to back down a little. "We're going to go and lock in a second gold medal, but after that, I'm probably going to start trying. Well, we're going to start trying," she said with a soft giggle. "There are days where I can tell Andy is completely over all these gorgeous women having sex with him."

"Can you blame him?" Ash said as she moved to slide in against Andy's other side. "It's basically two to three a day, at his level. Most people have smaller scales than Andy, but Andy's a giver and he's always putting other people over himself. Some people think it's a flaw, but we think it's what makes him the most special man we've ever met. Anyway, I need to borrow him for a bit to help me rescue Em and Sarah from your father, Piper. I think he's been talking to her about Dahlia Hairtrigger since we got here, and Em's doing her absolute best to stay polite, but she's really really tired of talking about it. Think you can lend me a hand, babe?"

"No problem, love," Andy said. "Excuse me."

Andy and Ash pulled away and slowly made their way across the room. It was a busy party, but he could see Niko, Lexi and Melody were stationed in a triangular pattern, so that each of them was covering the entrances and exits, and he knew they wouldn't let anything happen to him. But that didn't include protecting Emily from overly enthusiastic fans. But as they approached, Andy was a little surprised, as both Emily and Sarah were laughing, with wide smiles on their faces.

"I thought you said we needed to rescue Emily," Andy whispered to Ash.

"No no, we just needed an excuse to make Piper, her sister and her sister's husband spend some time alone chatting, so that we know they're okay," Ash said. "So, we wanted to pull you away from them. June's beau has been a little short-tempered with Piper about you. Declan's not convinced that Piper isn't stuck in Stockholm Syndrome, and the two of them have been fighting about it. June and Dec keep bickering, and so Piper wanted to help. We wanted you to have a little bit of time talking to Dec first so he could see you truly do love Piper. Dec's just having a hard time wrapping his head around this, around all of this, no matter what June thinks. We're going to let'em hash it out."

"I shouldn't--?"

Ash shook her head. "Let'em talk through it. Piper'll make him come around, or at least back down. Family knows family best. And once Piper's had enough time to smack some sense into her sister's husband, she'll be back over again. Even if Dec doesn't like you, he needs to learn to respect you, and that you're not going anywhere, no matter how much of a fuss he puts up."

"Andrew!" Em said, a laugh rolling from her lips. "I was just telling Piper's father here about the time we turned half a dozen cats loose on the set of the third Daggerfall Academy film. We got in so much trouble, but it was so, so, so worth it, to see all of those old, stodgy actors scrambling to catch felines who were starting to demolish the carefully constructed sets."

"You were a hellraiser as a child, weren't you, Em?" Andy said, joining in the laughter.

"Still am, thank you very much!"

"We're not going to let you have any animals on the Neon Stonehenge set, Ems, otherwise the director's going to throw a shitfit," Sarah said with a giggle.

"I've not read any of your books, Andrew," Piper's father, "but if Em here's going to be in it, I'm going to have to start in on them, I guess. I do hear they're... a bit more adult, though?"

Andy laughed, shrugging a little bit. "I leave the sex on the page, Mr. Brown, and figure that my audience is grown up enough to handle it. But I never let it get in the way of a good story."

As the conversation carried on, Andy noticed something he'd not had a chance to really see before - his partners were being territorial, almost possessive of him. During the entire party, at least one fiancée had been pressed against his side all the time, and they'd been making sure it was clear he was with them, as if they didn't want anyone to entertain the idea they might be able to draw Andy's eye away, something he thought was patently ridiculous, but then it occurred to him that the girls might not have even known they were doing it. They'd been having conversations and always making sure to establish their place with Andy first and foremost, and almost immediately dropping in the fact that they were a closed Team right afterwards.

He didn't mind.

By the time they were leaving the party, it seemed like Piper and June had smoothed things over, or at least established what was and wasn't fair game for conversations, and how he and Declan could navigate not killing one another.

Declan wasn't really that bad; he was just misguided. Andy'd known a lot of people just like him growing up. It was hard getting people to look past what they'd been taught and get them to understand systemic fundamental underpinnings that could lead them to bad conclusions. They'd been taught to follow the basic logic - cops arrest criminals, and if most criminals cops arrested weren't white, then most criminals must be not-white. But usually they didn't stop to see the bigger picture, how large scale criminals often weren't punished because they used their wealth to protect them from consequences, which let them continue to commit crimes.

His entire life, underpinning anything he'd ever written, Andy was always writing about systems, how easy it was for a pattern to become a system and for a system to just blend into the background until people didn't even notice they were doing it. Malice was rarely intended, but confronting systems was hard, because people often felt like they were being judged, and Andy was just as guilty of coming across overly harsh as anyone. He and Declan were never going to see eye-to-eye, but they didn't have to be at each other's throats about it the whole time either.

The signing back up in Jacksonville was much smaller than the one in New York had been, but the fans were no less enthusiastic, and the reading portion of the event had gone over especially well. Piper's parents had come up from Gainesville for a short dinner after the signing, and before Andy knew it, he was back at the airport already, climbing back into his private jet.

While his encounters on the jet so far had been slightly on the wilder side, Niko and Ash had wanted to keep it as soft and tender as they could, almost like a reminder of how the early days had been (excepting, of course, Lauren's absence), and while Niko certainly got off with Andy, the cuddling they did afterwards was far more important.

On the drive from the airport to the hotel, Andy made it a point to check in with Melody, to be sure that she was taking her new situation okay, and it seemed like she'd mostly made peace with it. She'd thought about it and realized that as long as she either said thank you or texted him thank you first thing, she'd probably be okay in managing the compulsion, and thinking about how much worse it could've been had made the whole thing much easier to swallow.

When they made it to the hotel, Andy was already starting to get nervous about tomorrow. It would be the first time he'd seen his nephew since his brother's passing, and out of all the things that scared Andy, that scared him the most. The ladies were trying to be optimistic, trying to keep Andy's spirits up, but everyone sort of understood the weight he was carrying around with him.

His partners were also nervous, but for entirely different reasons. Tomorrow they were also going to meet Andy's mom (and the Team she'd been saddled up with), and other than Fiona, none of them were entirely sure what to expect. She'd been hospitalized for months, but had been released a few weeks ago, and hadn't really been in a state to talk to any of them, even over the phone. But she'd insisted that she get a chance to meet all of Andy's soon-to-be wives in advance of the wedding. Apparently after getting imprinted a week ago, her health had completely rebounded and she felt like she was in the best shape of her life. Andy knew they'd all do fine, though.

With all that weighing on them, they were glad to have one giant bed they could all crawl into and pile on top of one another in a sea of arms and legs, Ash snuggled in against his left, Piper tucked in on his right.

Right before he was about to fall asleep, Ash whispered quietly into his ear, "Wonder if any of your old flames are going to be at the signing tomorrow. Won't that be fun to show off for them." That certainly woke him up for a little bit longer, but eventually he drifted off to sleep, realizing that if he could make it through tomorrow, everything else would seem easy by comparison.