Free Cold Fusion by Olivia Rigal

show.”
    “Anything special about tonight?” I ask Slider before he turns around.  
    “No, business as usual. I think they’re out of town this week. We gotta figure this shit out before they get their asses back here.”
    I watch them walk away. Sally tries to catch Slider’s hand as she did while walking out of the church, but he hides it in his pocket. She turns to stick out her tongue at him. I see his shoulders shake. Laughter?  
    I kickstart my engine and wonder why relationships are so complicated: Sally and Slider, Lisa and Brian.
    Crap, I gotta call Lisa and find a way to see Brian for a bit.  

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

    “I hate this stupid rain,” Brian says as he runs under the pier.
    “Yeah, it sucks.”  
    We look at each other the way people do when they haven’t seen a loved one for a long time to ascertain that everything is fine. It hasn’t been that long, just a few weeks, but Brian and I have never been separated for more than a week.
    Even in the summers when his father used to take him to live with him, I would hang out with him at the Iron Tornadoes club house. That was our secret—we never even told Lisa. As a kid, she would have told Uncle Tony, and later, when she had learned to hold her tongue, neither Brian nor I wanted to let her loose in that crowd. Had she known then, she would have argued about the double standard and all that women’s lib stuff.
    “I saw you at All Saints the other day,” Brian says. “Are you feeling nostalgic about Father Francis?”
    “Nah, the old bastard has retired anyway. They have a new principal now, someone with more modern ideas about education.”  
    We sit in the sand with our backs to the large wooden post, and Brian hands me a beer can. I open it and savor the freshness. I’ve been waiting for him for a while, and it’s hot and muggy. A normal Floridian spring day.
    “You didn’t answer my question,” he says.
    “I was picking up a kid.”
    “Anything I should know about?”
    “Maybe, maybe not. I’m not sure. He’s ten, and his mother just died of an overdose. His aunt is in the process of adopting him, but she’s in college, and she’s got finals this week, so you know…”
    “No, I don’t,” Brian says. “Which one do you care about: the kid or the auntie?”
    “I like them both,” I answer without having to think about it.  
    “Figures.” Brian’s wearing an insolent smirk. He’s been waiting for me to fall the way he’s fallen for my sister, and I thought it would never happen.  
    “He’s a nice kid. He never knew his dad, and now he’s lost his mother too,” I explain.
    “Oh, so a darker version of your childhood?”
    I laugh ’cause Brian’s reflection is funny. “Darker for sure. The kid’s from Haiti.”  
    Brian smiles.  
    “But there’s another similarity,” I say. “You remember how weird it was for me to look at Tony? Well, Toussaint must be living the same shit ’cause he’s being adopted by his mother’s twin.”
    “What about her?”
    “Nice girl,” I say and shrug.
    “Girl?”
    “Girl, woman, don’t get technical on me. She’s twenty-five.”
    “So her sister was a mom at fifteen?” Brian notes. “High-school sweetheart love baby?”
    “Don’t think so. I don’t know the specifics, but the other night, she said something that led me to believe her sister never knew who the father was.”
    “This doesn’t sound good. I hope at least it was consensual. There’s this one girl I met from another chapter. She got pregnant after falling to rival gang rape and never even wanted to look at the kid.”
    “What happened to the baby?” I ask.
    “It turned out for the best. The old lady of the president of a West Coast chapter couldn’t have a kid, so they adopted it. The girl says that one of the things that helped her get over her nightmares was the kick of knowing the son of a Knight was being raised as an Iron Tornado.”
    “Bittersweet revenge, I guess.”
    “So you got