Laurie Torben wasdefinitelygetting under Briana’s skin.
Her goat had a moment’s shocked response to that, something both imaginative and horrific, akin to a fairy tale of swans or selkies switching skins with humans and crawling under the skins to do that. Briana, feebly, said,Not like that,and got a sensation of enormous relief from the nanny goat. It also left Bree wondering where exactly the phrase ‘getting under my skin’ came from, but she was moderately afraid of looking it up.
Which somehow triggered a memory of something she’d been trying to remember a week ago, and she suddenly blurted, “Meg!”
Laurie, quite reasonably, looked baffled. “Meg…?”
Briana put a hand over her face, mumbling, “The fourth March sister.”
“The fo…mar…Oh.” Laurie hadn’t even been the person she’d had that conversation with, but he laughed. “Jo, Amy, Beth, and Meg. Right. The fourth March sister. Why…?”
“I was telling Doll about your name,” Briana said, still mumbling into her hand, though she then dropped it to smilecrookedly at Laurie. “And I couldn’t remember Meg’s name. It just came to me.”
A shred of hope came into Laurie’s eyes. And maybe a tiny touch of teasing, too. “Oh, so you were talking about me?”
“Yes, I was talking about you to my best friend, what about it?” Briana didn’t manage to sound quite as acidic as she meant to, then found herself struggling not to smile more widely. “And I’m sort of impressed you knew what I meant by ‘the fourth March sister.’ Have you actually readLittle Women?”
The teasing left Laurie’s expression, replaced by offended indignation. “Of course I have. And I like 1994 film adaptation best.”
“Oh my God. Do you have a preferredPride and Prejudice?”
“I’m a nineties boy for that too, sorry not sorry, but Colin Firth could get it.”
“What! No sexy hand flex for you?”
“I can do better things with my ha—” Laurie snapped his mouth shut and Briana was totally unable to stop a big, unexpected laugh.
“Dammit. I walked into that, didn’t I?”
Laurie made a show of zipping his lips and Briana had a brief, not-entirely-horrifying impulse to pop up on her toes to kiss those zipped lips. She didn’t, but did smile again. “Yeah. I did. Okay. Should we, I don’t know, maybe get back to work cleaning up…?”
Not thatshehad been cleaning up at all, but Laurie had at least already been here, like he had a task in mind. He now glanced around before sighing. “Honestly I don’t know what I think I’m accomplishing here. I had this idea I could dig it all out, maybe, but I’m starting to realize that’s a job for heavy equipment and specialized knowledge. It’s not like there’s much to rescue from the tavern. The kegs are metal, so they’re either fine or punctured, and everything else is going to be broken.”
“Will the shakeup be bad for the beer?”
“I haven’t ever tried opening a keg that’s been through a landslide.” Laurie gave her a brief smile. “No, it should be okay. It’ll have settled.”
“New brew,” Briana offered tentatively. “Landslide Ale? No, that’s tacky. People have died.” Her heart contracted at the memory. “And others are hurt. Do you know any of them well?”
“Yeah.” Laurie was quiet for long enough that Briana thought he might not say anything else, but then he shook his head and gestured, a suggestion that maybe they should walk. She fell into step beside him as he said, “One of the guys who died was in my high school class. I got him involved in Faire.”
“Oh. Oh, God.”
“Yeah. We didn’t stay close, but I can’t help thinking he wouldn’t have even been here if…”
“If what, you’d made different choices fifteen years ago?” Briana shook her head. “No, that’s too long ago to carry the weight now, Laurie. I’m really sorry, though.”
“What about you? Do you know anybody well?”
“No, it’s…it’s kind of funny, it kind of turns out the only Faire people I know at all well are the ones who work with the smithy. I grew up in Boulder and moved down here when I finished trade school.”
“Yeah? How come?”
“Because I have five younger siblings and was tired of taking care of them. And the climbing is good in Renaissance, and it’s a smaller town, deeper in the mountains, than Boulder, so I figured there’d be more space to get away with shifting. I didn’t know it was a haven until I got here. I got involved with the Faire because I was already a welder and heard about Damien’s smithy, and…” She waved her hand in the air. “The rest is kind of history.”
“So most of your community is blacksmiths and rock climbers, and you didn’t want to get too involved in the Faire’s social circles because I was part of them.”
Briana sucked her front teeth, then shrugged. “Yeah, pretty much. The first few years I was here I was more involved, but…yeah. Anyway, so I don’t know any of them really well. It doesn’t make it any less awful.”
