“Uncle Vic, Mommy says dinner is ready.” Vic didn’t move, so his nephew tugged harder. “Uncle Vic! Uncle Vic! Dinner!”
When Vic still didn’t move, his nephew leaned over to see Vic’s face. That’s when Vic unleashed his fangs and gave a low-volume roar.
Igor squealed and laughed, trying to quickly get off Vic so he could make a run for it.
Flipping onto his back, Vic caught his nephew around the waist and tossed him up in the air.
Igor laughed while kicking his legs and swinging his arms until his mother yelled up the stairs, “Would you two stop fooling around and get down here for dinner? Now!”
Grinning, Vic stood, tossing the boy over his shoulder and taking him downstairs to the kitchen. He plopped Igor in a chair, adding a few phone books so the boy could feel as tall as he would likely be one day, and looked around.
“Where’s Livy?”
“Outside,” his sister said, putting big bowls of food out for them. “Staring off into the distance like she’s analyzing all the ills of the world.” Ira shook her head. “These artists. So moody.”
Vic stared at his sister a moment before asking, “So how’s your husband?”
Ira, eyes narrowing, put her hand over her son’s face so she could give Vic the finger without guilt.
Chuckling, Vic headed outside to the backyard, but stopped when he saw Shen walk into his kitchen.
“Are you staying?” Vic asked.
“You’re not going to cruelly send me off to a hotel now are you? All alone?”
Then Shen fluttered his eyes in a way that Vic was entirely not comfortable with.
“Don’t do that,” Vic muttered before walking out the back door to find Livy.
As his sister had said, she was sitting on one of the benches in his backyard, her body almost lost in one of his leather jackets—and staring up at the sky.
Vic sat down next to her, grimacing when the bench creaked ominously.
Slowly, eyes wide, Livy looked over at him.
“It’s not my fault. It’s this weak full-human furniture.”
“Why do you have full-human furniture when you are far from full-human?”
A little embarrassed, Vic shrugged. “It came with the place.”
“Did all the furniture come with the place?”
“No.”
“Did you choose the furniture?” When Vic didn’t answer, Livy said, “Your sister. That’s what I thought.”
“What? It’s too girly?”
“No. Not at all. It’s big and comfortable and damn sturdy. But it was carefully purchased and placed, and I don’t see you doing that with furniture. You’re a ‘whatever is lying around is what I’ll use’ kind of guy.”
“And you know this because . . . ?”
“I’m the same way. If I ever invest in a house, Toni will probably design it for me.” Livy thought a moment and added, “Or Kyle. He’s very choosy about home decoration. Pretty much redesigned his parents’ place when he was ten. He did a fabulous job.”
“He’s just a kid.”
“He’s brilliant. And a little evil. But I think that’s what I like about him.”
“So what’s going on?” Vic asked when she went silent again. “You seem moodier than normal. Is it your father?”
“No.”
“Your cousin?”
Livy rolled her eyes and gave a snort of disgust, but she didn’t say anything else and Vic had a feeling that wasn’t it either.
“Work?”
And that’s when Livy gave a long—rather dramatic, for Livy—sigh, and looked back up at the sky.
Vic noticed that Livy didn’t have her camera. She always had some camera on her, from a small, silent Leica to her big, digital, SLR Nikon rig that made her look like a hardcore photojournalist. But lately, Livy didn’t seem to have anything but the camera on her phone—which she never used for photography for “very specific moral reasons.”
Vic didn’t know what that meant, but what he did know was that the work he’d seen from her was amazing. And disturbing. And kind of freaky. Then again, so was Mapplethorpe . . . but honestly, Vic was more an Ansel Adams man. Shots of beautiful vistas in dramatic black-and-white were more his speed. Odd things done with whips . . . not so much.
Still, Vic knew how much Livy’s work meant to her.
“Don’t you have a show coming up?” he asked.
Livy, her legs pulled up on the bench, used her arms to turn her body toward him. “How do you know about my show?”
“You sent me an invitation.”
“I did?” Livy looked off, then nodded. “Toni. She probably sent out the invitations.” Suddenly, Livy shook her head. “I’ve got nothing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean . . . I’ve got nothin’. I am creatively drained. I’m dead inside.”
“You always seem dead inside.”
“I’m not. I’m just quiet.”
“Maybe you need to do something different. Get away from everything. Do you get a paid vacation from the team?”
“I never needed a break before. Creativity just poured from me like sweat from a long-distance runner. But now there’s nothing. It’s over.”
“Or,” Vic reasoned, “you can stop being a drama queen and just take a break to see if that helps.”
“Yeah. That’s an option, too.”
“See?”
“Then again . . .”
Vic sighed. “Then again what?”
“When will I have the time? Now that I’m doing a goddamn wedding.”
“You’re doing a wedding?”
“Looks like it.”
“Why, if you don’t want to? Unless it’s family.”
“Not family. Just a pathetic weakness for cash.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Blayne asked me to shoot her wedding. To get her off my back, I texted her an outrageous sum that no one in their right mind would pay.”
“I don’t think Blayne’s been in her right mind since birth.”
“I didn’t even include a price breakdown and I demanded half in advance.”
“And she still said yes.”
“Of course she said yes!” an exasperated Livy exploded. “Because she’s Blayne and is marrying a man who clearly has no control over her.”
“You could still say no.”
“And then you know what will happen?”
“She’ll make you sad with her tears of pain?”
“More like I’ll rip her face off because of her goddamn tears of pain.”
“That will cause awkward times on your derby team.”
“Don’t care. But Toni will care because the Smith Pack loves Blayne. And that matters now that Toni is with Ricky Lee.”
“Your life is very complex.”
Livy burrowed deeper into Vic’s jacket, looking way more adorable than she had a right to. “I know.”
“So you’re feeling like a sellout?” Vic asked.
Livy briefly wondered if she could permanently live in this jacket. It smelled good and made her feel surprisingly warm in the bracing East Coast cold. “Yes. Besides, what idiot would turn down that kind of cash?” She peeked over the collar of the jacket to look directly at Vic. “It’s an ungodly amount of money. Un. God. Ly.”
“But didn’t Da Vinci work for royals? And the Church?”
“Huh?”
“Renaissance painters, the good ones, were commissioned to paint royals all the time. Bach and Mozart wrote music for royals.”