Daron's Guitar Chronicles Volume 12

974 Steam

Steam

"Put her in with me," Courtney said when we got to the motel.We'd stopped for a real dinner, maybe to get the taste of a ten-hour long fight out of our mouths. Claire had been unnaturally quiet during the meal. She also had eaten very little. "I've got two beds and I'm leaving in like two days anyway."

"You are?" We really hadn't discussed Courtney's travel plans. Or maybe we had and I didn't remember. "You'll be all right?"

"Sure. I travel by myself all the time."

"I mean, with Claire in with you."

"We'll be fine, big brother," she said, and went to help Claire with her hastily packed suitcase.

I was still feeling shell-shocked from all the arguing and yelling and I hadn't even been directly involved in any of it. Thank goodness, I suppose? I felt like I'd been on the deck of a ship all day, being lashed with rain and wind until I was stiff and sore.

Which might have been why when Ziggy suggested I take a hot bath it made sense to me. He started the tub filling while I figured out how to get out of my clothes. Yeah, I was kind of out of it by then.

The water was just a teensy bit too hot, which was perfect actually? Better than a teensy bit too cold, of course. He had made it into a bubble bath somehow and I got in at one end and slid my legs under the foam. I don't take a lot of baths because I think a lot of the time I get bored too quickly. I sit there feeling like I don't know what I'm supposed to do when what I'm supposed to do is just sit there. But just sitting there was about all I could manage.

"I guess it really never occurred to me how much they actually all hate each other now," I said aloud. Ziggy didn't answer and I realized he wasn't there. A few minutes later I heard the door open and he came in.

A few minutes after that he brought me a mug of hot cocoa. He had one for himself, too, and he got undressed and got into the water with me. It was not a huge tub, but we compact pretty well.

I must have been giving him and the hot chocolate a look as he handed it to me. "What?" he asked, then answered his own question. "It's Christmastime."

"Do we usually have hot cocoa in the tub at Christmas?"

"We do now." He smirked. I seemed to recall a similar scene in his apartment except it was something harder than cocoa we were drinking. "I made some for your mom and Court, too."

That made me smile. "Where did you get it?"

"I've been squirreling one or two packages a day away from the breakfast buffet." He shrugged.

"You know, I bet there are people who think that's no way for a millionaire to act."

"You disapprove?"

"Not at all!" I was completely charmed by the thought Ziggy was sneaking hot chocolate into his luggage for just such an emergency. "I just bet some folks would think it was weird."

"No doubt." He finished his cocoa and set the mug on the floor outside the tub. "Some things aren't a matter of money so much as... maximization of resources."

"I am certainly not complaining." I sipped mine and tried to remember what I wanted to tell him while he was gone. Right. "Am I just really slow on the uptake? Or was it not as obvious before today that they all hate each other."

"Oh, your two older sisters definitely have a love/hate thing going on, and really, that's your mother's whole way of being. She doesn't have or understand love without the hate flipside being part of it."