Chapter 8

CHAPTER 8

" I t'll be okay," Penny promised over her shoulder to Ashley, who was following her with a slightly stunned expression. "The charity event and the family reunion both getting dumped on you is a lot. Are you okay?"

"I have no idea," Ashley admitted. "I could kill Laurie, but I probably can't kill my entire extended family."

"I mean, it'd have to be a whole Jonestown kind of thing," Penny agreed. "There are too many of them to knock off one at a time. Oh good, there's Gwen, right where I left her. Well, she wasn't in Bill's lap when I left them, but…" Her bandmate and her boyfriend were in one of the pub's booths, and if Gwen wasn't actually quite in Bill's lap, it was pretty close. "Okay, you two, cut it out, stop being gross, we have an emergency." She slid into the other half of the booth, gesturing for Ashley to join her, and felt a little thrill of delight as Ashley's arm brushed hers when they sat down.

That was full-on goofy crush material, being excited over little touches like that, and she had more important things to think about right then. Gwen turned worried attention to them, although her worry faded as Penny outlined the situation. "Oh. That kind of emergency. I thought you meant an emergency -emergency. Yeah, of course, we can do a pick-up gig or something if we need to call out the Fits for their volunteer services. I can get Ripley to come play second guitar if we want it to be more than just us. Do you need company driving back to Denver?"

Penny, watching Bill's face fall even though he tried to hide it, smiled at her lead singer. "Nah, G, you just got back to this dude. I'm not gonna steal you away from him tonight. There's usually some dudes at the warehouse district who will help a lil' tiny lady like myself move heavy stuff, and I can do any Fits recruiting on the drive, if I need to."

"Is that safe?" Ashley asked worriedly. "Texting and driving?"

"I've got a good voice to text thing set up," Penny promised. "Oh, but let me give you my number so you can text about how many volunteers we might need."

She took Ashley's phone, putting her number in as Gwen, dryly, said, "Or I could wrangle the Fits, if we need them. I'll be right here and able to get the word from the horse's mouth." She nodded at Ashley.

Bill muttered, "Bear's mouth," which made Gwen laugh and, from the sudden sharp movement, made Ashley kick him under the table. He looked credibly injured, although he was about six and a half feet tall and Penny wasn't sure anything less than a bulldozer hitting him in the shins could hurt him.

"Well, now you've got my number anyway," she said, giving Ashley's phone back. "If it turns out everybody's a total idiot, you can call me and we'll run away to Peru together."

"Do we have to wait for everybody to prove they're idiots, or could we just make a break for it?" Ashley scooted out of the booth when Penny, laughing, nudged her.

"You could just leave it all up to your cousins while we ran," she suggested. "But if we're gonna, you should tell me now so I don't have to drive to Denver first."

"You'd have to drive to Denver anyway," Gwen pointed out. "You can't get a flight to Peru from Renaissance."

"Then I wouldn't have to wait for Ashley to drive there, too! We could just go together!"

"I can't," Ashley said regretfully. "I can't even just drive with you tonight. We're supposed to be crazy busy for the rest of the night."

"Well, next time," Penny said, and meant it. "I'll be back by eleven tomorrow morning, maybe a bit earlier. Don't do anything I wouldn't do," she said to the three of them in general, and headed out to Denver with Ashley Torben's warm voice and the memory of her leaning presence fresh in her mind. It kept her company on the whole long drive.

Driving three hours back and forth to Denver in a day was one thing, Penny decided the next morning as she pulled back into the Thunder Bear Pub parking lot. But she and Gwen had driven from Denver the previous afternoon, too, so she'd spent about ten out of the past twenty-four hours in a car, and that was a bit much. Her butt was numb. Her toes were cold. She'd slept well the previous night, but she also wanted a long nap and a massage. Alternately, anything to get the blood flowing would be good.

Just as she parked, just as she had that thought, Ashley Torben walked out of the pub, talking on her phone. Penny's heart thumped and she gave a breathy little laugh. Yeah, that would get the blood flowing for sure. She'd never seen Ashley dressed up: the pub manager wore jeans and a bulky sweater right now, one that looked like it had maybe been hand-knit. Her hair was in a ponytail again, a fluffy dark golden mass that haloed around her head. She spoke with animation, her free hand waving in the air and her expression going irritated and amused by the moment. She hung up as Penny got out of the van, said something to the sky, then squinted toward Penny before a wide smile split her face and she called, "You're back! Was the drive okay?"

"Yup, but I need to do about a hundred squats because my ass is like a wood block right now. Laurie—Laurie? Was it Laurie who said he'd clean up the parking lot? He's done a good job." When Penny had left the night before, there'd been snow packed to ice all over the parking lot, and small banks of snow everywhere. Now it was scraped down to the asphalt, with— "Are those space heaters?"

There were about twenty of them, all remarkably large and all spaced evenly around the parking lot, with long extension cords running back to the pub. Ashley, wryly exasperated, said, "They are. He apparently borrowed them from Faire folk who use them in the spring and fall when the weather starts to get cold. His logic was that if he aimed them at the parking lot, any ice melt would dry up instead of re-freezing. I'm pretty sure it's a terrible waste of electricity, but it's also working, and since I don't want to be liable if anybody slips on ice tonight, I don't have a better idea."

"They'll be perfect for keeping the tents warm, too. How are you holding up with the unexpected additions to the schedule?" Penny hauled the back of the van open and gestured inside as Ashley came around to look. The guys at the warehouse had helped her load hundreds of square feet worth of festival tents into the van, and now she had every intention of letting Ashley's large cousins do all the heavy lifting of unloading it. "Think this will do?"

"I have no idea," Ashley said, mystified. "I've never seen festival tents lying down before."

"Really." Penny grinned. "I'll have to lie down in one with you."

A blush ran up Ashley's jaw and she cast Penny a startled glance. Penny, grinning even more widely, said, "Sorry. Sorry? We are doing the flirting thing, aren't we? Or was that leaning over me last night thing just messing with me?"

"No," Ashley said, still obviously startled. "No, I wasn't messing with you. Not if you meant it about liking my voice."

"Oh, I meant it."

A little smile crept over the tall woman's mouth. "So, yes. Yes, we're doing the flirting thing."

"That's the best news I've heard in at least a month, and let me tell you, this past month has had a lot of good news." Penny let herself lean toward Ashley a little, feeling the other woman's warmth, then gave a huge sigh. "Now that we've got the flirting thing established, I'm afraid we might have to put it aside until we've got this whole event of yours?—"

"Not mine!" Ashley objected strenuously, which made Penny laugh.

"Yeah, true, not yours. Okay, until we've got this whole event of Laurie's dealt with. It's actually going to go fine, you know that, right?" She glanced up—so very far up—at Ashley's slightly tense expression, and bumped her hip against hers. "Honestly, it's going to be fine. The other event venue people have most of the staff they need lined up, you said in text last night that you were able to call a few of your own people in for overtime, and the Fits will show up to work crowd control and keep parking and accessibility under control. It's going to be fine."

"You know, Gwen did this to Bill, too. Swept in and fixed everything when it was going to hell for him."

"Please." Penny sniffed. "I did a ton of that fixing."

Ashley smiled again, tentatively. "Yeah. What's that about? Is it the Sixty Pix's secret super power? You can turn any disaster into a hit concert? Hey!" Her voice lifted suddenly and she waved some of her cousins down. "Come be useful! This van needs unloading!"

One of them—a dude, but most of them seemed to be—waved from the other side of the parking lot, indicating he'd heard and they'd be there in a minute. Ashley turned to lean against the inside floor of the van a little and mumbled, "Sorry, I interrupted whatever you were going to say."

"By hailing strong men to do heavy lifting instead of me doing it, so I approve." Penny leaned against the van with her. "We've played so many crazy venues over the past ten years or so that we've just gotten really, really good at reacting on the fly, I think. Things are always going wrong and it's great if there's a team in place to fix it, but it's not like we've been selling out stadium tours."

"Yet," Ashley said warmly.

To her surprise, Penny felt her face heat up. She hunched her shoulders and smiled at the cold ground. "Yet. I hope. But the point is a big professional venue is going to have a sound team, a tech team, in place to make everything work smoothly. We haven't had that kind of support, so we've gotten really good at figuring it out and making it happen on our own. If we start getting real support we'll probably lose our minds and be horrible divas who shout at people for doing the work around us wrong because we're so used to doing it ourselves."

"I doubt that. It's probably more likely you'll get in the way because you want to help and you'll be so nice about it people will feel bad about telling you no."

Penny pursed her lips. "That actually sounds really likely, yeah. I guess we'll just have to get so big and famous we can't possibly be available to help because we'll get mugged if we're out laying speaker wires or something."

Ashley laughed and tried twice to find a response to that before she could really talk. "On one hand, that sounds great for you, but on the other, people wanting to mug you is bad!"

"Maybe I'll employ a tall Amazonian bodyguard. It's working pretty well for Gwen."

"Bill isn't Amazonian," Ashley pointed out with amusement.

"No, he's…well, whatever the male equivalent of Amazonian is, but you know what I mean. How are you doing with all the chaos?" Penny asked again. Ashley's cousins were collecting at the other side of the parking lot, with Laurie, whose hair was still in the intricate braids, now gesturing and giving orders. The group of large men finally nodded and headed toward the van, so Penny stood up, and Ashley moved away with her.

"I'm less freaked out than I was last night," Ashley admitted. "You're pretty reassuring, and having these tents available makes all the difference."

"Me. Reassuring." Penny laughed. "I think large solid presences are reassuring. I probably qualify as solid, but not large. Here, guys." She went forward again to explain how the tents went together, not because it was difficult, but because it was faster to show them than to let them figure it out. Within a few minutes, there were half-erected tent poles with fabric vinyl walls—or something, Penny didn't actually know what the tent material itself was—flopping between them.

"We got this," Laurie announced to Ashley. "We'll get them set up and I'll come in to find you and get your okay on the layout and everything, okay?"

"You should get my okay on the layout before you have it set up, or you might have to move everything," Ashley protested.

Penny put her hand on Ashley's arm. "There are an incredibly limited number of ways they can put them up, so they're not going to have to move anything. In the meantime, it's eleven in the morning and I, for one, haven't eaten anything except a bad cup of coffee and a worse doughnut from a gas station just outside of Denver. So unless you're actually supposed to be at work right now, I think instead of worrying about how they lay the whole thing out, you should probably take me over to that diner down the street and feed me."

Ashley blinked at her. "I haven't eaten either…"

"I didn't think so." Penny, feeling smug at guessing right, slid her arm through Ashley's. "So. Breakfast, and then we'll come back and admire all the heavy lifting your big strong handsome cousins have done."

Ashley, bemused, said, "Okay," and Penny led her off toward the diner.