“Right, give it up.”
This coming from Rix took his attention from the sky and his kids to the man at his side, where Rix was sitting in a camp chair in front of the carefully contained campfire they’d built.
Duncan and Tom were sitting across from them.
They were back in New Mexico, shooting the final segments for the video.
They’d already done Prescott and California, and Chloe had come with them to both, including the latter, but when they were there, she’d insisted he stay with her in town at her favorite hotel, the Chateau Marmont.
This he’d done.
And that hotel was the shit.
Elegant and almost painfully cool.
Very Chloe.
Though, during the day, instead of hitting things in the city, she and Genny had gone hiking with them to watch the segments being filmed.
This was the last bit they had to do, and for this one, the women had stayed home.
It was not lost on Judge that this was his woman’s decision for a reason (and maybe her mother’s too).
The men had decided to camp, and it wasn’t that Chloe didn’t want to camp. She’d told him she was down with that idea (even if she’d never done it before, though she had slipped in, “Have you ever glamped, chéri?” so he had a feeling he was going to have to ease her into the hardcore stuff).
No, it was that she wanted him to bond with her two dads.
“Give what up?” Tom asked.
“Not you, Duncan,” Rix said, talking to Tom but nodding to their boss. “You call him Bowie. Chloe and Harvey do too. What gives with that?”
At this question, Judge straightened in his chair because he was keen to know this too.
He’d asked Chloe about it, but she’d only said, “That’s Bowie’s and Bowie’s alone to give.”
Which only made him more curious.
However, Judge had noticed that Tom had also started calling him that.
He didn’t in the beginning.
But after the Cali shoot, he did.
There was something meaningful in that.
Judge sensed it was like the coffee mug thing with the Pierce-Swan-Holloways.
It meant you were in.
And make no mistake, Judge wanted to be in.
He knew his assumption was true when Tom was the first to speak, and he did it in a shutting-this-down tone.
“I think that’s—”
“It’s okay, Tom,” Duncan said low.
Tom had moved to protect whatever this was for Duncan.
But Duncan’s gaze was on Judge.
Judge glanced at Tom and saw him smiling at the fire.
Yep.
Whatever this was, if you had it, it meant you were in.
Duncan announced, “When I was a kid, my dad made me kill a deer.”
Both Judge and Rix sat even straighter in their chairs, because unlike Duncan, who did not partake of the hobby, but approved of hunting for game control, under the tight supervision of licensing and quotas, neither Rix nor Judge did.
In a big way.
They were both anti-gun and anti-hunting.
Vehemently.
So this was a shock.
“I didn’t want to do it,” Duncan went on.
Okay then, that wasn’t a shock.
“My dad thought it was a rite of passage for a man,” he continued. “And I later had sons. I would learn there are a variety of rites of passage for boys, and undoubtedly for girls. But making a child kill a living being he does not have any interesting in killing is not one of them.”
Everyone around that campfire was silent and Tom was no longer smiling.
“I got a doe on the first shot,” Duncan carried on. “And Dad made me gut her with a bowie knife where she lay. She was beautiful. She was also still warm with life.”
“Jesus, fuck,” Rix muttered, not hiding his revulsion.
“It marked me,” Duncan declared.
It would. It was marking Judge and he hadn’t even been there.
“I’m sorry, man,” Judge said, totally getting that, but not understanding why Duncan would allow himself to be called Bowie by his loved ones if this was the story behind it.
“I went to Genny after it,” Duncan kept going.
When that came out, Judge glanced between Duncan and Tom, and he felt his skin prickle when he saw it.
Tom had his head turned, was staring at Duncan, and it was all there to read in his expression that was lit by firelight.
The understanding.
The amity.
Judge would never fully comprehend the foundation of it because he’d never put Tom through asking about it.
Maybe it was knowing who Genny was and how she could be that person for a man, or a boy, even when she was a girl.
Maybe it was getting why Duncan went to her, the depths of emotion he must have felt for her, though they were much younger. And knowing from that them being together was somehow meant to be, even if that meant Tom and Genny weren’t.
Maybe it was both.
But it was there.
And Judge respected it a fuck of a lot, because a man had to love a woman in a serious way if he could settle into the knowledge she had who she needed, she had what was meant to be, and that was not him.