Page 24 of Sanctuary

Hi, Gabe. I’ve been thinking about your offer, and I’d like to talk to you about it properly. I could come to the city, and we could get dinner. Or lunch. Whichever you’d prefer.

Gabe grinned but didn’t really know what she was happiest about: the opportunity to spend time with Lori away from the Sanctuary or the possible chance to restore a Ford Brewster.

“Message from Lori?” Solo hopped up onto the tire machine.

Gabe glared at her, but it was too late to stop the inevitable interrogation, and she couldn’t actually make out any individual questions from the barrage of them.

“I’ll get the cooler from the truck, and you can tell us all about it,” Solo said.

“You asshole.” They were thousands of miles away from the desert where they’d sat together countless days and nights, talking smack and making crazy plans, but nothing had really changed. Gabe headed to the closest inspection pit and sat on the edge with her feet dangling into it.

By the time everyone had joined her, Solo had returned with the Yeti. She placed it behind Gabe and handed out ice-cold beers. “Spill the deets, Jackpot.”

Gabe twisted the top from her bottle and tossed it back into the cooler. “How about we toast our dream garage first?”

“Later,” RB said. “We want to know about Lori, right?”

Her motley crew clinked their bottles together to choruses of “hell, yeah.”

“You’re going to be disappointed. There’s not much to tell.” Gabe took a long pull on her beer, and they all leaned in like she was about to tell a cool ghost story around a campfire.

“I doubt that,” said Lightning. “I might not have seen you for a couple of years, but I doubt you’ve lost your ability with the ladies.”

“I can’t be that charming; you never fell for it.” Gabe ran her finger over the screen-printed label on her bottle, wishing it had the old-fashioned paper kind so she could peel it off. Someone had once told her that was a sign of sexual frustration, and in this case, they would’ve been one hundred percent right.

Lightning winked. “That’s because you were already my ride or die. Stop stalling and tell us about Lori. We are talking about the same Lori who’s looking after Max, right?”

Gabe nodded. “But there really is nothing to tell in that department.” She opened the gallery on her phone, scrolled to the photo she’d taken on Sunday, and handed it to Lightning. “That’s what she was messaging about. When we were walking Max, I saw that in one of her buildings.”

“Oh. My. God.” Lightning passed the phone to Solo.

“You’re shitting me?” Solo handed the cell to RB, and it made the rounds back to Gabe. “What’s the story, Jackpot? Does she want us to restore it? Man, the paint job I could do on that. The Brewster paint formula was like a state secret, you know? I’d have to do some research to see if we can get it made. It’d have to be black.” Solo caught hold of Gabe’s arm. “She doesn’t want some pimp my ride drag car paint job, does she? I couldn’t do that. Not for any amount of money.”

“Cool your jets, Solo,” Gabe said. “Like I said, that’s what the text was about. She wants to set up a time to talk about it.”

“You mean, like a date?” RB winked.

“No, I definitely don’t mean that.”

RB frowned. “Have you lost your touch? Or is she just straight?”

Gabe tsked. “Wow. Did you seriously just one-eighty the singularly most overused phrase in a deluded hetero guy’s vocab?”

“Think of it as reclaiming language used against us,” RB said. “Get on with your story and answer the question.”

“No, she isn’t straight, but I don’t know any more than that. She’s recently divorced and hasn’t gotten over it yet. So she’s not ready or willing to explore anything with me.”

Solo tsked and clinked her bottle to Gabe’s. “Bad luck, buddy. Good for you to put yourself out there for the rejection though. How’d it feel?”

“You make it sound like I’ve never been reject?—”

“You haven’t, to my knowledge,” Solo said. “When we were on base, you didn’t go home alone any time you needed a little something.”

“Then you’re misremembering.” Gabe drained her beer then wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “It sometimes took me two or three ‘no, thank yous’ to get to that.”

“Then we’re all misremembering.” Woody raised her bottle, and everyone did the same. “You were our mentor on more than just the battlefield.”

Gabe shook her head and accepted the adulation. If she had any charm, she hoped it might eventually work on Lori—when Lori was ready.

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