Rare (30 page)

He plucked his infant niece from my arms before he even said hello. I rolled my eyes and passed her over. The baby had been perfectly content with me, but the way she burrowed into him left me under no illusions of my place on her list. His chest was her favorite place to be. I could hardly blame her for that. Ash was my rock. Sometimes the chiseled planes of his chest were the only things that made sense.

Ash wrapped his arms around the bundle of light in his arms. He was amazing with that baby. His was the first face she’d ever seen, and she’d seen him every day of her life since.

Yeah, that’s right. Ash, the baby whisperer. Who knew? None of us, until the kid made an unexpected and complicated arrival on our kitchen floor four months ago. With Danni in all kinds of trouble and Joe out of town, I’d had no choice but to dump the newborn baby in Ash’s arms and hope he didn’t drop her. He hadn’t, and by the time Danni was well enough to take her daughter back, they’d forged an unbreakable bond. That little girl loved him almost as much as he loved her.

A warm hand on my arm broke my slightly misty-eyed stare. Ash tilted his head to the side and offered me a lopsided grin. “I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

“I wasn’t sure you wanted me to,” I countered dryly.

I cast my eyes around the arts festival. Despite his anonymous fame on the underground scene, Ash was often still reluctant to show his work. I’d taken his reticence in the run up to the festival to mean he wasn’t that keen on sharing, but in the end, my curiosity had gotten the better of me. The stage he’d designed for Danni to play her piano from was the biggest project he’d ever done, and I
really
wanted to see it.

He took my hand and led me away from the tattoo display stands, past the kids’ workshops and food carts all the way to the music tent. There was a lot going on—big crowds and bands tuning up—but as I’d become used to since Ash’s work began appearing in public, the biggest cluster of people was utterly silent. I didn’t have to look to know they were staring in awe at Ash’s piece, but once I’d left him and pushed my way through, it wasn’t long before I became one of them.

The piece was
awesome
. When Ash had been homeless on the streets of Philadelphia, he’d scratched out a living by creating chalk-drawn murals on the sidewalk. I’d only ever seen grainy photos of his work back then, but recently, Danni had used her voodoo magic to persuade him to go back to his original medium.

Perhaps it helped that he’d recently visited the city he was so deeply connected to.

When Danni discovered she was pregnant, she and Joe had decided to get married almost immediately. Their wedding had taken place a week later in her home city: the city where they’d met. Walking the streets of Philadelphia with Ash was something else. He showed me everywhere he could remember—the good and the bad. He showed me the spot where he drew for Chinese tourists, and the bridge that had sheltered him on cold winter nights. He even took me to the rehab center where he’d kicked his heroin habit. It was shocking and enlightening for me, but it seemed to give him some closure. I wasn’t surprised when we got back to Chicago and he picked up a stick of chalk for the first time in years. It seemed he’d come full circle and was now ready to go back to the start.

The results were stunning. I’d never seen anything like the graphic images he produced clandestinely across the city. I stared at his latest creation. It felt strange to know I was one of only three people who knew who’d drawn it. Even Ted didn’t know he was harboring the city’s most mysterious street artist. Sometimes I thought it was a shame that no one knew the work was Ash’s, but in reality I knew anonymity suited him much better. He could put his work on show without scrutiny, especially when the subject matter was something as personal as the image in front of me.

It had been a while since he’d reproduced the baby girl he’d drawn since childhood. Comparisons with photographs Danni’s father had were inconclusive, but I still believed it was her, and despite his reticence on the subject, the subtle tributes to her in the scene splashed across the stage led me to believe that Ash did too. The glitter of the diamond in her nose, the pale-gold flash of her hair, even the numbers that made up the life and death of their birth mother were there.

Like most of his chalk work, the piece Ash had produced on the concrete surrounding Danni’s white piano was a riot of color. It was a stark contrast to the dark, edgy tattoos he designed. It was like the street art tapped into a different part of his brain. He told me once the images were like dreams, fantasies, almost, but as I stared at the smiling baby in her mystical setting of stars and unicorns, it struck me that perhaps this piece was closer to reality than he thought. The way he’d drawn her, it was like she was the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. Damn. I knew he’d grown to love his sister, but I hadn’t known he felt quite like that.

I tore myself away and found him by the entrance of the tent. He was waving a tiny set of bells in front of the baby’s face. She looked suitably unimpressed. I slid my arm around him and put my chin on his shoulder, grinning at the baby.

“Hey, little lady. Is Uncle Ash being a dork again?”

Ash rolled his eyes, leaning back into me in a way that made me feel like the luckiest man alive. “Are you ever going to call her by her real name?”

“Nope.” And I meant it. Who the hell called their child
Cosmo
? It was the stupidest name I’d ever heard.

“What did you think of the piece?”

“I loved it. How did you get the piano to look like it was floating on water?”

He shrugged like it was no big thing. “Danni gave me a lens to look through. By the time I was finished, I could hardly walk straight.”

“Well, it worked. I felt like I was standing on the edge of a pond.”

“Really?”

From the spark in his eyes, I could tell that had been his intention. I planted a quick kiss on his cheek. “Really. It’s awesome. She’ll love it.”

Ash kept his possessive hold on the baby while we walked back to the area where he was working on Ted’s tattoo displays. Most of Ted’s workforce had turned out to promote the studios. They all greeted Ash as we passed them, and it still struck me as funny that none of them knew the main attraction of the day had been created by one of their own. None of them knew he’d spent the past week hiding under a tarpaulin in the dead of night, scratching out an image of such depth and beauty.

I waited while Ash said good-bye to his niece and reluctantly handed her back to me. He would be tied up at the festival until the evening, but I was taking the baby home to her father. Joe had been away for a few days, and I knew he’d be pining for his daughter. The kid had that effect on people. I had her all to myself every other Friday, and she spent half her life with Ash, but I still missed her when she wasn’t around. She’d definitely inherited those pesky, mesmerizing Fagin genes.

Later that night, I went home to an empty apartment and got ready for work. After months fearing I’d never work again, the bone-crushing headache that had been my constant companion had finally faded. I could see clearly again, like a veil of misery lifted, and everything looked brighter. My newfound clarity had helped me make some important decisions, and though I’d never made it back to the fire department, it had been my choice to quit. After completing the nurse/medic bridge training I’d looked up months before the accident, I’d landed a bonehead job at a private clinic.

It was hard to turn my back on emergency medicine. I didn’t miss the hours, or the horrors I’d seen, but I did mourn the buzz of adrenaline that came with it. Agency work in the city’s worst ERs was the obvious solution for that. I picked my own hours and worked when I wanted to work. Three night shifts a month kept my skills up and helped ease the inevitable guilt I felt about jumping ship to the cushy world of private healthcare. The extra time I got to spend with Ash helped too—when I could tear him away from his sister, at least. Somehow, in the months I’d spent recovering from the accident, I’d missed them becoming inseparable.

Seeing Ash and Danni together was amazing. She was something else, something incredible, and she brought Ash to life in ways I’d never considered. They were both artists, creative souls, and the buzz of energy she brought to his life was magical. Joe and I often found ourselves staring at the two of them in awe. We were both ordinary guys; how the hell did we get so lucky? The only downside was the stinky-assed greyhound taking up residence on my couch. Damn thing didn’t know how to share.

I got myself together and made my way across the city to the ER. It was an
average night shift. Though nursing was a different system of care than life as a medic, the cases that rolled through the door were the same. Heart attacks, car wrecks, crazy-ass junkies. I felt right at home working the triage desk. The only down point of the night was when an ambulance came through with a crew I used to know well. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t sting when one of them put his head down and walked right by me. It made me angry too. The job had nearly
killed me—it
had
killed Tim—and that self-righteous motherfucker thought he could judge me for making my life better? Perhaps the guy’s reticence had more to do with my domestic situation, but I didn’t care much about that either. It would be a brave soul who tried to use Ash as a stick to beat me with. Brave and stupid.

In the early hours of the morning, a bachelor party gone wrong burst through the hospital’s main entrance. The sight of the groom with his head split open took me back to a similar incident at Joe’s bachelor party. That night stood out in my mind for a number of reasons. Some were obvious, like the drunken fall Joe and Charlie had taken from the podium in the strip club, and Danni’s wrath when she’d seen the two-inch gash in Joe’s forehead, but others were less so.

Being in a club full of naked, dancing women had been a new experience for Ash. We were both bisexual, so I was expecting him to at least look, but he didn’t. Until one of the strippers chased us out of the club and jumped him, I hadn’t realized how much his outlook on life had changed. It was another turning point for us, sexually, at least, but that was a story for another day.

I left the hospital at dawn. The sun hovered above the clouds, just bright enough to make my eyes hurt. I crossed the street with my head down. I didn’t see Ash until I’d walked into him.

“Whoa, there, old man. Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

He steadied me with his hands, laughing. My glare softened as his infectious grin spread through me. “Home, I kinda thought that’s where I’d find you. What are you doing here? It’s like, six in the morning.”

“Seven, actually,” he corrected. “I went home with Danni last night, and Cosmo kept me up. I figured I’d come get you and we could go to bed together.”

Sounded like heaven to me.

I fell into step beside him and caught sight of an envelope poking from his jacket pocket. “What’s that?”

He pulled it out and passed it over. “Some pictures Danni took at your mom’s place last week.”

He tried to hide his smirk. My refusal to have pictures of my own face all over the apartment was a long-running bone of contention between us, and Danni really took it to heart. Photography was her passion, and she was as good at capturing the essence of people with her camera as Ash was with his pencil. Every other week she tried to change my mind with some epic shot of me and Ash together. I suppose she figured if anything could sway me, it was the image of his face. She was right, and every time I nearly caved. Only the amusement I found in her frustration stopped me.

Today was no different. The photo was of the two of us sitting on the steps of Maggie’s building. I was on the step above Ash, and he was leaning back into me—a position I could’ve only dreamed of when I first met him. I had my head ducked down and he’d tilted his back. With my hand on his chest and him cupping my chin, it looked like we were about to share a fuck-hot kiss.

I embraced the warm feeling in my bones and laughed. “How does she do that? I was thinking of jumping you that day. Good thing I didn’t.”

“You can ask her later. They’re coming for dinner, remember?”

Of course I did. It was a rare night that we didn’t eat with what had become our own eclectic brand of family. Between Joe, Danni, my mom, the baby, and the freakin’ dog, there was always someone around. It was nice, and it was something Ash had never known before.

I passed him the photo and bumped his shoulder. “You should send that to Ellie. She loves that shit.”

Ash said nothing, and I let it go. Ellie’s decision to remain in California was a sore subject. Ash understood her need for some time to explore her sexuality away from the scrutiny of her tight-knit family, who had returned to Chicago, but he missed her. And he felt guilty for finding solace in his relationship with Danni, especially since the two women seemed to rub each other the wrong way. I found the notion ridiculous, but what did I know? I’d never had two chicks fighting to be my sister. I was stuck with Heidi, and despite Ash’s best efforts to convince me otherwise, I still thought she was a self-centered bitch. Heidi could kiss my ass, and I wasn’t about to spend the rest of my life feeling bad about it.

I did call her kid from time to time, though. If the accident had reinforced anything, it was that life was too short to wait for things to fix themselves. I wasn’t interested in trying to make Heidi a better person—been there, fucked it up already—but seeing Ash with his niece reminded me why I’d kept in touch with Liam in the first place. He was family, and he deserved a shot at being loved. Lord knew he wasn’t going to get that from his mom.

Ash had been shocked when he found out that Heidi had tried to dump her kid on Maggie before she came looking for me. Despite everything he’d been through, his blossoming relationship with his own family had restored his faith in human nature, and Heidi’s cold callousness was beyond comprehension to him. It wasn’t to me. One way or another, I was almost certain Liam would become my responsibility eventually. Maybe that was why I’d never told Ash he existed, like some weird kind of denial. Who knew? I’d reached the stage where I didn’t care. The past was the past.