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It started, as things often did, with Shepard asking him a question.
“You ever drive across country before?”
When Garrus glanced up from his textbook, she was looking at him upside-down, her head hanging off the edge of the couch in their dorm’s communal lounge. Her hair tickled the floor and her ears turned steadily redder as the blood pooled in her head.
“We drove to Disneyland once when I was a kid,” he said, sticking his pen in his mouth to flip a page.
They seemed like virtually the only people sticking on campus around for the holiday, so Garrus figured he might as well indulge the small-talk.
Shepard made a psh noise. “Disneyland doesn’t count.”
“It was fourteen hours of driving.”
“Yeah, but it’s not a road trip,” she said. “A road trip is packing a bag, hitting the highway and figuring it out along the way.” Her arms were spread like she was picturing the horizon. “I bet we could make it to the coast and back in seven days.”
“We?”
She grinned, upside-down and wolfish. “Well, I don’t have a car.”
Shepard lived on a different floor, but they'd been to enough of the same keg parties for Garrus to recognise that grin. It could make anyone do anything.
He chewed the end of his pen and pretended he hadn’t just lost his place on the page. His car was a hand-me-down – still technically in his dad’s name – and given how the last few days had gone, Garrus wouldn’t put it past Castis to have cancelled his insurance so he couldn’t do anything stupid over spring break. Like go on a road trip with a girl he barely knew.
Shepard swivelled to sit up, cross-legged on the couch, her hair falling haphazardly. “C’mon, Vakarian. You really wanna spend all week holed up in your dorm revising ergonomics?”
“Thermodynamics.”
“Whatever.”
There was something alluring about the idea of taking Castis’s sensible old sedan out for the ride of its life. And it was Saturday morning so seven days meant he’d still have – what – twenty-four hours to revise for the quiz? That was long enough.
So that was how Garrus found himself pulling away from the campus gates with the windows rolled down and the radio blaring, two duffle bags in the back seat and Shepard’s feet on the dashboard.
Even back then, with her thrifted clothes and dirty sneakers, she was cool. The jeans she wore that day had more rips than they had denim, and she shed her too-big army jacket for the vest underneath the minute the sun came out.
It didn’t take her long to find the mixtapes crammed into the glove compartment; longer, though, for her to find a band she recognised,
“You’ve got the weirdest fucking taste, Vakarian,” she said, elbow deep in the dashboard.
But she asked about the bands with what felt like genuine interest and didn’t even seem to mind when he went off on a tangent about early recording tech and eighties house music.
She had this way of talking a lot, he’d noticed, without really telling people anything. She mentioned a stint in a band in high school and he’d heard her singing in the shower occasionally – enough to know she could hold a tune – but he didn’t feel like he knew her any better after three hours in a car than he had at one of those keg parties.
That was, until they landed on an album she liked.
As the first chord peeled away, Garrus realised the bathroom acoustics hadn’t been doing her justice. She had one of those classic rock voices, all power and depth and grit; arena-show presence, raw and honest as the wind thumping through the rolled-down windows, with a clarity that pulled him along like a rip-tide.
“Where the hell did you learn that?” he yelled over the drum solo pounding through the speakers.
“Learn what?” she yelled back, beating on the dashboard like a tom drum.
At some point around the six-hour mark he stopped worrying they’d run out of things to talk about, and by sunset she’d committed nearly half his catalogue to memory.
It was almost enough for Garrus to forgive her god-awful driving.
On the first night, though, the part of him that talks with Castis’s voice still expected to wake up alone with his wallet empty and his car gone. He took the couch, partly out of propriety, but also because he thought he’d be more likely to wake up if she tried to pick his pockets.
But when fingers of dusty sunlight poked their way between the whisper-thin curtains, his keys were still in his pocket and Shepard was singing in the shower, the bright sea-salt smell of her body wash creeping under the door.
On the second night, they got drunk. Really, really drunk.
They stopped at this pokey little motel bar half-tucked under a highway overpass. The shadow of the bridge kept the whole place in darkness, even at four in the afternoon.
Shepard got talking to a couple of women by the pool tables who looked like they might be cousins. Hailey was tall and blonde and seemed, inexplicably, to find Garrus very funny. Alex was the size of a barn.
They only meant to pass the time until the diner next door opened, but shot glasses kept appearing in front of him and Shepard kept making increasingly outrageous bar sports bets: loser gets the next round, winner gets ten dollars, winner gets twenty dollars, and then – worst of all – winner gets to kiss Garrus.
Hailey was pretty good at darts but Garrus, fortunately, was better. He’d wiled away enough Vakarian family parties in front of a board that his aim held after a few drinks.
“Y’know, any other dumbass would’ve lost on purpose,” Shepard muttered out of the corner of her mouth as he wiped the floor with them for the third game in a row.
It’s not that Hailey wasn’t pretty, but Alex had left her purse half-open on a bar stool to go to the bathroom and he was pretty sure he saw a can of pepper spray poking out.
Shepard’s pool hustling game left a little to be desired but, as it turned out, bare-faced confidence and a complete disregard for the rules went a long way. Her aim was really starting to go by the eighth round of shots, though, and Garrus didn’t realise just how drunk he was until he staggered to the bathroom to take a piss.
The dingy fluorescent-lit corridor pitched and rolled beneath him and he found himself standing in front of the bathroom mirror, holding onto the surface of the earth by the sink. A bleary-eyed nineteen year old stared back at him, lanky and tousle-haired, wearing the same faded blue t-shirt he’d worn for the last two days.
Garrus scraped his hair back and his reflection did the same.
He blinked a few times, just to check it really was him in the mirror.
Then he puffed his cheeks. “Fuck, I’m wasted.”
Castis would kill him if ever found out about this.
When he swayed his way back to the bar, he found Shepard setting up for another game.
“Your roomie raised the stakes a little,” Alex said, leaning on the bar with her cheek on her fist, and Hailey cackled so hard she started to hiccup. The purse was still half open, still on the bar stool, and it still had that scary black canister poking out of the top.
“Erm. Shepard?”
Shepard mumbled something. She was standing at the head of the table, chalking the end of her pool cue intently, squinting and swaying slightly on the spot.
“Shepard–”
She heaved a colossal sigh. “Fine, I bet your car.”
The bottom dropped out of Garrus’s stomach.
“You bet my car?!” he squeaked, and Hailey doubled over the back of her chair laughing.
They’d have to get a cab home and after two days of driving… Christ, did fare metres even count that high? Castis was going to really, really kill him.
“Relaaaaaax, Garrus,” Shepard said, head flopped back. “I’m not gonna lose.”
Things went downhill fast after that.
Shepard missed the break by miles and quickly resorted to cheating. She tricked Alex into letting her take two shots she hadn’t earned and argued for a nonsense rule change that made some balls (conveniently, all the ones she had a shot at) worth more points than others. Garrus wasn’t even sure pool balls had points.
There were a brief few minutes when it looked like she might actually pull it off until, as she tried to nudge an extra ball into the pocket with the heel of her cue between turns, Hailey clocked her.
“Hey!” She pointed a swaying finger.
Alex’s gaze snapped up from her drink and before Garrus could even think about moving his legs, she was on top of Shepard.
“You rat,” she snarled, inches from Shepard’s face. “You cheating little rat.”
Garrus appreciated then – probably for the first time – exactly what he’d gotten himself into.
Shepard squared up like a bull terrier, feet planted, eyes unfocused but hard as glass. “Get out of my face.”
“Gimme the keys, squirt.”
“Fuck off.”
Then a lot of things happened very quickly. Alex made a grab for Shepard’s jacket, Shepard pursed her lips and spat, Garrus lunged for the bag – not because he wanted the pepper spray, just to stop anyone maceing them – and Hailey cocked her fist and punched him in the face.
Garrus, who had never been punched in his life, made what he thought was a pretty valiant recovery.
He shook the stars out of his eyes, flicking blood; grabbed Hailey by the arm with one hand and went for Alex’s shirt with the other, yanking her backwards by the collar.
She dropped Shepard with a strangled yelp and rounded on Garrus, nostrils flared like a dragon.
“Run!” he yelled. He was pretty sure the keys were in her pocket. If she could just get to the car–
But instead of doing the sensible thing and bolting, Shepard turned like a cornered rat and leapt. She hooked her arm around Alex’s neck like a wrestler; momentum and alcohol tipped them forward, and they landed in a snarling heap on the sticky floor.
Something told Garrus that wouldn’t be the last time they got kicked out of a bar. Probably not even this week.
“Truce!” Shepard yelled, as the four of them hit the dusty parking lot asphalt. “Truce!”
Garrus staggered to his feet. Hailey pulled herself up by the side mirror of a nearby car. His nose felt too big for his face and when he wiped it on his forearm, it came away bloody.
Alex was hunched on all fours over, wheezing, and for a second he thought Shepard might’ve done some real damage. Then he realised she was laughing.
“You–” She pointed at Shepard, who had rolled over onto her back. “You fight like a fucking raccoon.”
The car, somehow, seemed to have been forgotten.
“Oh.” Hailey was staring at Garrus, her eyes like saucers. “Oh no.”
“He’s fine,” Shepard said, with a wave of her arm. “Pinch it – like this, look–” She demonstrated on her own nose, still lying on her back. “It’ll stop.”
Nothing felt broken, luckily, and Hailey insisted on cleaning him up by way of an apology. He didn’t notice Shepard slipping off but he supposed she must have done, because when the motel door snapped shut, Garrus realised he wasn’t in their room.
There was a single hardshell suitcase open on the floor, a single pair of sneakers by the door, a single coat on the hook at the back of the door, and Hailey had disappeared into the bathroom.
“Uh.” Garrus swallowed and it tasted like pennies. “What about your cousin?”
“Who?”
“Alex.”
The tap was running and the room was swaying gently around him. He thought the fight might’ve sobered him up a little, but maybe not.
“Oh.” Hailey laughed. “I don’t know her.”
Garrus blinked. “What?”
She rounded the doorframe, a damp towel in one hand, and flicked the bathroom light off behind her.
“I met her like ten minutes before you guys came in.”
She sat down on the bed and patted the comforter.
At least Shepard was right about one thing: his nose had stopped bleeding. Hailey held his chin and wiped his face, squinting a little to keep her hand steady. She asked a little about Shepard – where they met, how long they’d known each other – but didn’t seem much interested in anything else.
She did have pretty eyes: big and brown with soft mascara smudges.
“You can take that off if you like,” Hailey said, as he examined the blood-splattered front of his t-shirt.
In the moment it had seemed like a sensible and not-at-all-loaded suggestion. It occurred to Garrus for the first time a few minutes later, as she leaned in to kiss him, that it probably wasn’t. She smelled like tequila, tasted like tequila, and clearly knew much, much more about this than he did.
Garrus woke up the following morning, still in the wrong motel room, with the worst hangover of his life.
As he groped around for his socks in the piercing morning sunshine, he thought that maybe, possibly, there was still a chance he could get out of here with a shred of dignity intact. With any luck, Shepard was too drunk to remember him not coming back. He could slink back into the right room before she woke up. She’d never need to know.
But as he slipped out of Hailey’s room with his sneakers in one hand and his bloody shirt screwed up in the other, Shepard was already waiting by the car.
“There’s my little Casanova,” she said, arms spread. She was wearing a baseball cap and the sunglasses he kept on his dashboard. “How ‘bout I take first shift today? Since you worked soooo hard last night.”
Somehow Garrus’s delicate insides survived a few hours of Shepard’s driving and for all her posturing, she was just as worse for wear. They swapped every few hours and whenever it was Shepard’s turn in the passenger seat, she spent it leaning into the breeze from the cracked-open window like a dog, shielding her eyes from the blazing white cloud cover.
They stopped in the early afternoon, and by then they were both feeling brave enough for something to eat.
Garrus paid for gas (again) and Shepard ambled back to the car a few minutes later with a family-sized bag of salted potato chips, every flavour of Gatorade, two enormous loaded hotdogs and…
A box of condoms.
She tossed the box into his lap and thumped down into the driver’s seat, both hot dogs balanced in the same hand.
“My treat,” she said, with a Cheshire-cat grin. “Y’know – now that you’re sexually active.”
All Garrus could do was splutter, heat rising in his face. “I’m not– that wasn’t–”
But she just patted his thigh and handed him a hotdog. “No motel babies on my watch, Vakarian.”
Garrus started to wonder, as he stuffed the box right to the back of the glove compartment and willed his face to return to a normal colour, if Shepard might have ditched him on purpose last night.
“I’ve gotta say, I’m impressed,” She took an enormous bite of her hot dog and stuck the key in the ignition. “Didn’t think you were the type.”
“For what?”
“Cougars,” she said, through a mouthful of bun and sauce.
Christ, this wasn’t helping. “She was twenty-five, Shepard. Tops.”
“I dunno.” She swallowed like a snake might swallow a mouse. “That leopard print said otherwise.”
Garrus cracked open the red Gatorade and threw the cap at her.
Despite the box of condoms burning a hole in the dashboard, the bar fight seemed to cement something between them. Garrus forgot to sleep with his keys in his pocket that night – though that might’ve had less to do with trust and more to do with the savage hangover – and Shepard started to talk. Really talk.
She told him about the first gig she went to, the first album she bought, every band tee in her wardrobe, the time she and her high school bandmates scaled a twelve-foot wall to get a glimpse of the stage when N7 came to town.
“I know Alec’s the frontman or whatever but c’mon, Anderson’s the real legend,” she said, forearm buried in the bag of chips. “I’d never seen anyone hit a solo like that. It was all we talked about for weeks.”
Whenever Shepard’s high school band came up, she got this wistful look on her face.
“We called ourselves The Tenth Street Reds,” she said with a grin. It was her turn to drive and the sun was hanging low in the sky behind them. “Thought we’d make it big someday; wrote these shitty songs about school and summer and trying to be in love. We thought we knew everything.”
The grin started to slide off her face.
“Longest I’ve ever lived in one place was when I was in The Reds.” She chewed her thumbnail, elbow on the window, one hand on the wheel. “My parents are military. We had to move again in my sophomore year.”
It didn’t really occur to Garrus until much later that night, in the musty darkness of a new motel room, that Shepard had just offered him the first real scraps of her personal life.
“They’re still around though, The Reds,” she added, with a stab at her usual cheer. “Different vocalist. Not sure I like her so much.”
He didn’t think his high school music career had much to offer in comparison; countless hours holed up in his room with a guitar, the open mic night in his hometown that he was never quite brave enough to go for, the recording gear his dad probably regretted buying.
“You recorded stuff?” Shepard said, and Garrus didn’t realise he was braced for scorn until her interest caught him by surprise. Old habits.
“Don’t get excited,” he said. “I was an even shittier drummer when I was fifteen.”
They had to drive late that day. There was a football game on and every motel they tried was booked up.
By midnight, Shepard had dozed off in the passenger seat, knees curled up to her chest, jacket padding her head against the window, so Garrus reached over and dug his favourite Relay 314 tape out of the glove compartment.
It was their first studio-length album; real backyard stuff but it had heart and ambition. Victus stopped making music years ago and got into producing but here, on this album, is where it all started.
Garrus heard it for the first time when he was ten or eleven, and it had felt like learning a brand new language. He taught himself how to isolate audio tracks in some bootlegged software on the family computer that summer so he could take the album apart like a clock; learn what made it tick. Whip-sharp harmonies, distorted keyboard octaves; invisible in the finished track except for the depth they gave everything else, butter-smooth basslines, fractions of white space in the drum track to really let the snare pop.
From the first bar of the first song to the closing chord of the final track, Garrus knew that album like the sound of his own name.
He sang along quietly, drumming light enough on the wheel not to wake Shepard, but halfway down the tracklist when he glanced over his shoulder to merge lanes, he found her awake and watching him, still curled against her jacket.
“When were you gonna tell me you could sing?” she said, her voice scratchy with sleep.
“I told you about the recordings. In high school.”
“Yeah, but…” She rubbed one eye. “I dunno. You downplayed it so much, I figured you used GarageBand or something.”
He chuckles. “Dad would’ve loved that. Less clutter.”
By the time he graduated, his room looked exactly how a recording studio would look if it was run by a teenager: a keyboard and synth pad squashed onto the desk, mic stands on every surface, wires criss-crossing the floor, amps and pedals shoved into corners, guitars on the walls and sitting up on stands. Only the drum kit was relegated to the garage.
“Wait, so–” She shuffled to face him properly. “What can you play?”
He bobs his head. “A little of a lot of things,” he said. “Dad finally let me quit piano lessons when I left middle school but I guess they were useful for something.”
The Vakarians were an extra-curriculars family; mornings and evenings were a rotating door of clubs and practices and meets. By sixteen, Solana was captain of the hockey team and chair of the model UN, and then she got a full ride scholarship to MIT. Garrus was firmly encouraged to try every sport and activity under the sun but music was the only thing that stuck. The first thing he’d felt really good at.
Castis didn’t seem to mind at first; at least until he realised the version of music Garrus liked involved a lot of sitting in his bedroom.
Shepard was quiet and he was just beginning to think she’d fallen asleep again–
“What’s your favourite instrument?”
“You’ll laugh,” Garrus said.
“I won’t.”
Three days ago, he wouldn’t have believed her. Tonight though, as asphalt rushed beneath them and Victus chopped away at his guitar, Garrus didn’t even really hesitate.
“It’s bass.”
Shepard didn’t laugh. But she did grin at him, soft and sleepy in the sliding streetlamp light.
“Of course it is,” she said.
They slept in the car that night, parked on a service road just off the freeway. Shepard showed him how to pin the doors closed using the seatbelts, then they folded the seats as flat as they’d go and covered the windshield with an old towel Garrus found in the trunk.
He lay awake for a long time, listening to her breathing and the distant traffic noise lapping at the windows.
The night after, they showed up with time to kill before check-in, so Shepard dragged him into a thrift store.
Garrus was flipping idly through the dog-eared boxes of cassette tapes – bootlegs with hand-scrawled tracklists, a few N7’s Greatest Hits, Alec Ryder’s doomed solo EP, five copies of the same Blasto! album in various states of tatter – when a whistle cut through the stuffy radio music playing over the speakers.
He couldn’t see Shepard, but he could see the neck of a guitar waving over the haphazard clothing racks.
“Look at these!” Shepard said, once he’d weaved his way to her.
She had a battered acoustic guitar in each hand. One was sunbleached and missing the low E string, the other had squeaky tuning pegs and a clump of gummy, half-peeled stickers by the pickguard.
“Whaddya think?”
Garrus tilted his head. “They look like crap, Shepard.”
But her eyes were shining. “Bet I can haggle them down to ten dollars.”
The gum-chewing cashier didn’t take much persuading. Shepard almost seemed disappointed.
They flipped a coin in the parking lot to decide who had to take the missing string (luck, as ever, was not on Garrus’s side) and they’d barely set foot in their motel room before Shepard plopped down on the bed, cross-legged, and started tuning up.
Garrus had always assumed you needed to really know people before you could make good music with them, and maybe that was why he’d never found himself a band. The best musicians all had this chemistry on stage, like there was a thread running between them; an innate sixth sense for their bandmates which took years of practice. Maybe decades.
But it wasn’t like that with Shepard. With Shepard, It was instant.
They fell into an easy pattern: Garrus on rhythm and harmony, dodging the missing E-string, Shepard on melody and lead guitar, inventing whatever bits of his glove compartment catalogue she couldn’t remember.
It felt like the first time he heard her sing all over again. Garrus doesn’t think she could pass a music theory exam if her life depended on it – she improvised some eighth note triplets and when he asked where she got the idea, she looked at him like he was speaking French – but she just had this feel for music.
He could reach for a harmony on instinct, sense a tempo change before it came, like the smell of rain on the wind; everything just felt so natural, so right. It was more than a thread. It was their every thought and impulse woven together.
Energy seemed to build around them the longer they played, like a wave rolling into shore, and Shepard was grinning like her face might split in half. Like she could feel it too.
They played some Relay 314, some N7 – Shepard took an enthusiastic, imperfect stab at Anderson’s legendary guitar solo – and at some point long after sunset, Garrus found himself telling her about the songs he wrote in high school. Those shitty recordings gathering dust in his parents’ attic.
She played them with the same dog-eared intensity she’d played everything else and somehow, in her hands, they sounded good. They sounded real.
“Can’t believe you wrote these in high school. I’m serious,” she added, when Garrus shrugged. “They’re a thousand times better than anything I wrote with The Reds.”
But their songwriting seemed to work as well as their playing: Shepard suggested a few new chord progressions here and there, Garrus found a spot for a bridge, they sped up the tempo, slowed it right down, scrawled new lyrics on the back of gas station receipts until–
“Uhh, Garrus?”
Shepard was lying on her back on the bed, her guitar across her torso, while Garrus picked idly over an idea for a chorus, cross-legged on the tacky carpet.
“Yeah?”
His hand ached, the pads of his fingers felt warm and raw, like the skin over fresh-healed blisters. He hadn’t thought about most of these songs since he was sixteen but all of a sudden they felt fresh and exciting and–
“Garrus.”
He turned and found Shepard staring at the window by the bed, her head rolled to one side. The chintzy, paper-thin curtains had turned a muddy light-beige colour, and around the edges, just starting to creep along the mottled wallpaper…
“Wait,” he said. It was barely midnight an hour ago. “What time is it?”
Shepard rolled over and reached for Garrus’s watch, discarded on the bedside table.
“Shit,” she said. “Oh, shit.”
“What?”
“It’s 6am.”
They stared at each other, tousle-haired and bleary-eyed. Then they laughed, and they couldn’t seem to stop.
He saw it again, then, as clear as day, as he rolled over onto his back onto the bed beside Shepard: the other Garrus who didn’t say yes to the trip.
The Garrus holed up in his dorm with an engineering textbook, listening to Relay 314 through a set of tinny headphones. The Garrus who would never see Shepard the way she is now, laughing like her sides might split, one arm thrown over her eyes. Her hair was splayed out on the sheet behind her head, all soft and tangled, the too-big neck of her faded pink Blasto! tshirt framing the soft dip and rise of her collarbone.
He didn’t know how much longer they lay there like that, side by side on the musty bed, shaking with laughter. It was never really going to be long enough.
Shepard gave him a half-hearted elbow to the ribs, trying to catch her breath. “Stop, we have to drive like ten hours today.”
“We could stay another night here.” It was a selfish suggestion; out of his mouth before he could stop it. “Hit the road again tomorrow.”
Maybe if they stayed, everything would feel like this forever.
Shepard sighed out the last of her laughter. “Can’t,” she said. “We won’t make it back in time for your quiz.”
“Oh,” he said. “Right.”
That other Garrus was waiting for him at the end of this week, wasn’t he, with a long, monotonous timetable of labs and exams and lectures stretched out in front of him like a prairie.
Maybe Shepard would stop to talk to him at a few more keg parties. Maybe they’d go to a couple of gigs together. Maybe they’d reminisce about their week on the road and Garrus would have to work out how to pretend it hadn’t been the best week of his life.
He meant to get up and sleep on the couch – he really did – but when he woke up a few hours later, with the sun baking the airless little room like clay, he was sprawled on top of the covers beside Shepard. She had her back to him, the outline of her shoulder rising and falling slowly, and he could’ve sworn the fresh blue smell of her body wash had crept into the sheets.
They saw the ocean for the first time that day, just as the sun was beginning to sink back towards the horizon. Shepard grabbed his arm so hard, he nearly swerved into another lane.
“Watch it!”
“Look!” She pointed through the windshield at a glittering slice of grey and gold on the horizon. “Garrus, look!”
That night, they found a bar before they found a motel. Priorities.
It was a tacky, sticky military-themed place on the beachfront with NORMANDY printed above the door in white stencilled army-issue font, but the drinks were cheap and they could see the ocean from the bar. And there was a jukebox.
About the ninth or tenth time Anderson’s solo came around, Shepard took her air-guitar routine onto one of the tables and that was the last straw for the bartender.
“Asshole!” Shepard yelled, as the door snapped shut behind them.
They were, if possible, even more drunk than the last time they’d been kicked out of a bar.
They found the beach more by sound than sight, cackling and bumping each other, waylaid by Shepard getting stuck in her jacket (somehow she had both arms in the same sleeve) and Garrus almost eating shit on the steps down to the beach. Shepard just about stopped laughing long enough to ask if he was ok.
Beyond the light and noise and crowds around the bars, there was a ribbon of pitch dark sand and then, beyond it, the ocean was shimmering gently. The moon swung back and forth in the sky as they walked, like a big silver pendulum, until they flopped down side by side on the sand.
“That guy was such a dick,” Shepard said, the consonants all blurred together.
“You were standing on his table,” Garrus points out. The sand was cool beneath him, crunchy with salt left over by high tide.
They both sighed, and the ocean sighed back. Garrus’s brain felt like it was sloshing gently around inside his skull.
Time had been a weird, slippery thing all week. They might have been lying there on the sand for a minute; they might have been lying there for hours.
“Hey.” Shepard rolled over to face him. “D’you wanna start a band?”
Garrus didn’t say anything. Or maybe he laughed, he wasn't sure. That was another one of those Shepard questions; the ones where he could feel his life fork like a mountain pass.
“I’m not kidding,” she said. “I mean, you felt that too, right? Last night?”
Those shitty guitars. The receipts criss-crossed with notes, folded up safe in his wallet. The first rays of sun through the curtains. His songs in Shepard’s mouth. That sea salt smell.
“This–” She gestured between the two of them. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s something.”
Something. Something was right.
“Not sure two people’s a band,” he said. His mouth felt clumsy, like it belonged to somebody else.
“Well, we’d need a drummer,” she said. “Probably another guitarist – four people’s better than three anyway, right? – and bass is yours if you want it ‘cause nobody else fucking will.”
He could see her better now his eyes had adjusted. She had that look from the thrift store, steely and roguish, and there was a circle of sand printed on the shoulder of her army jacket. Her hair was tacky, swept back from her face.
“Lead vocal’s yours though,” Garrus said. “Whoever else we get.”
Shepard made a psh noise. “You don’t know how good they’re gonna be yet.”
Garrus shrugged and the sand hissed beneath him. “It won’t matter.”
Shepard wasn’t the bashful type – not even close – but for the barest moment her cool, irreverent shine seemed to soften.
“So, you’re in?” she said.
“‘Course I’m in.”
She smiled, all warm and candid, and maybe they were just drunk in a new city but suddenly Garrus had this weird feeling in his chest. Like maybe he should kiss her.
She rolled over onto her back again. The faint light from the bars behind them was sitting in her hair, her profile a muddled silhouette against the glow of the city further along the coast, and it would be so easy – so, so easy – to reach across and–
“This is the most fun I’ve ever had,” Shepard said, almost to herself.
Garrus swallowed. His mouth felt very dry. “What, getting thrown out of a bar?”
“I mean the trip, dummy.”
“Oh,” he said stupidly. “Right. I mean– I’ve had fun too.” And then, using the part of his brain that didn’t know when to shut up, he added, “You were right, it beats revising thermam–”
Shepard barked a laugh and the moment seemed to break; that feeling in his chest rushing backwards like seafoam.
“Thermog– Thermomamics.”
“You’re gonna ace this quiz, Vakarian.”
Garrus blew a raspberry. “You can’t even say it sober.”
“Oh yeah?” Shepard flopped her arms out into a T, sucked in a long breath and yelled, at the top of her lungs, “THERMODYNAMICS!!”
Somewhere further down the beach, a distant voice shouted back, “Fuck yeah!!”
They both dissolved into giggles again and Shepard laughed just like she sang: big and brash, a sound he could feel in his blood.
A band. She wanted to start a band. With him.
“Garrus,” Shepard said as their laughter ebbed away.
“Yeah?”
“I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”
He thought about that moment a lot in the years that followed; the way she said it like she hadn’t just changed his life.
Garrus scrubbed his hands over his face. “Think I saw an iHOP on the corner.”
Shepard groaned. “God, I’d kill for some fucking breakfast food.”
Over two enormous plates of bacon and eggs and pancakes, they’d decide to name their band Normandy after the beachfront bar, and on the drive back to campus, in those last few sun-stained days of their trip, Garrus would convince himself that Shepard was right. What he’d felt in his chest, that night by the ocean, was hunger.
That was all. Just hunger.
And in a way he was right.