Beyond Happily Ever After: Blank Canvas (Beyond #6.6)

Caution: this story is
not meant to stand alone
. The
Beyond Happily Ever After
 stories are vignettes and outtakes showing the O'Kanes in their daily lives, in between the adventures and often after their happy endings. These stories were written exclusively for readers and fans of the series, and will probably not make very much sense to anyone not familiar with the characters. The stories are also available for free at 
kitrocha.com
.

If you know all of that and bought this story anyway...thank you for your support! 

There are a lot of different ways to take care of the people you claimed as your own. In this short story, Cruz has a surprise for Ace that results in a road trip, a hot night with Rachel, and a new hope for their future.
 

Length:
6,300 words
Characters:
Ace, Cruz & Rachel
Timeline:
Set between
Beyond Innocence
 and
Beyond Ruin
. 

Ace had never been more than a dozen miles past the outer boundaries of the sectors before. Hell, he'd rarely been outside of Sector Four, except for those tense, uncomfortable years when his job had been to charm the panties off the rich ladies in Eden.

They'd left the sectors behind hours ago. Eden wasn't even visible in the rearview mirror—though that probably wasn't distance. No, the only goddamn thing in their rear view was a string of almost identical giant hills and baby mountains, but Cruz had been maneuvering around and between them like he had a map lasered on the backs of his eyelids.

“We're getting close,” Cruz murmured as he nodded ahead of them. The mountains gave way to something more familiar on their left—abandoned buildings with caved-in ceilings and trees growing through them. Bent signs leaned precariously next to the cracked road, too rusted to give a hint about where they were or where they were going.

“Close to where, though?” Rachel leaned forward from the back seat, then braced one hand on Ace's shoulder and climbed over to settle between them. “You haven't told us anything.”

Cruz's lips twitched. “That's how surprises work.”

Ace shifted to make room for Rachel and then ruined it by dragging her close to his side. “I think he's developing a sense of humor, Rae.”

“An
evil
one,” she agreed. She nudged Cruz's thigh with her knee, then traced one of the tattoos flowing down his arm with her thumb. “At least give us a hint. Surprises work that way, too.”

If anything was likely to get him to open up, it was Rachel giving him big eyes and coaxing touches. But Cruz's smile only grew as he steered the car around a giant crack in the road. “I'm taking you to a ghost town.”

Ace snorted and jerked his thumb toward the window, where the size of the abandoned buildings had gone from one and two stories to four and five. “That's not a hint. We're already
in
one.”

And it was true. Cars sat abandoned and rusted out in some of the lots, but most were stripped bare, with tires and even doors missing. Windows were shattered, the strewn glass catching the slanting afternoon light as Cruz wove them deeper and deeper into town.

Rachel stared. “It's worse than Three ever was.”

“Eden's fault.” Cruz turned off the wide street onto a narrower side road cluttered with garbage and more shattered glass. “The city that used to be here depended on water from a river, but the Base diverted it right after the Flares in order to irrigate the communes. Some people held on here for five, even ten years. But now it's just scavengers.”

That sounded like Eden, all right. Use whatever they could get their hands on, and fuck whoever else needed it. Ace cuddled Rachel a little closer just to make himself feel better.

And then he teased Cruz, because that made him feel better, too. “Are we there yet?”

“Ace—”

“Are we there yet?”

Cruz made that hot-as-fuck little frustrated growly noise, and Ace hid a smile against Rachel's hair. She laughed, a muffled noise that she covered with a cough.

Then her hand fell on his knee, slid up his thigh. “Behave,” she whispered.

“Why?” Ace retorted, covering her hand and inching it higher. That might get their lover moving—Cruz hated not being able to watch when Rachel got her fingers around his dick. “He loves growling at me.”

“Mm-hmm.” She stilled her hand. “But he needs to concentrate on driving.”

“It'll be worth the wait,” Cruz murmured. Then, because he
was
getting evil, he laid his arm across Rachel's shoulders and curled his fingers around the back of Ace's neck. Not rough, but firm, and his thumb made little circles on Ace's skin that held all kinds of filthy promise.

Didn't mean he had to give in easy. Especially with Rachel's fingers so close to his dick, which was already the kind of hard that made him less interested in ghost towns and surprises and more interested in how roomy the back seat of their borrowed car was—or how much fun they could have in the tight quarters.

Before he could suggest they find out, Cruz steered the car around another block onto an open street lined by houses instead of businesses—or maybe houses that
had
been businesses, as picturesque as any nostalgic artwork featuring pre-Flare suburbs and their too-perfect Main Streets.

Of course, the crap art Eden churned out glorifying the good old days didn't have ivy growing up over the roofs or trees poking through living room windows, but that had always been the ugly truth of those too-perfect neighborhoods—how quickly they went to hell when shit got real.

Cruz passed a few before turning into a parking lot in front of a towering gray building that looked like it had been designed by an architect tripping on some of Five's best drugs. Pieces were crammed together at odd angles he could only assume were meant to be artistic, and he couldn't tell which of the jagged gaps in the upper floors were dramatic embellishment and which were straight up broken off by wind and rain.

Cruz parked the car in front of a massive steel door and released Ace. “Wait here.”

He slipped from the car, and Ace frowned as he watched him pull a key from his pocket and set to work on a set of chains. “I give up. What the hell can be in there?”

Rachel eyed him solemnly, her eyes twinkling. “Our surprise, I'm guessing.”

“Brat.” He kissed her nose. And
only
her nose, even with Cruz's unspoken promise thrumming in his veins. Because it would be so much better when it was all three of them. “He's gonna be so smug that we didn't figure it out.”

But Cruz wasn't smug when he returned to the car. The steel doors had given way to a steep decline into a cavernous parking garage, and he was all business as he navigated the empty space, the car's headlights bouncing off bare concrete.

Even worse
. Smug Cruz was hot. All-Business Cruz was a goddamn volcano of dirty, sexy danger. And both Ace and Rachel were helpless when he parked and started prowling around, locking up and double-checking the empty guard room, every movement swift and efficient, a soldier assessing his surroundings with obsessive thoroughness.

Ace imagined it might get old someday. When they were seventy-five, maybe. Or already dead.

When Cruz stalked back toward them, Ace adjusted his estimate. It would take a few centuries in hell before Lorenzo Cruz stopped turning him the fuck on when his growly, protective warrior instincts were running hot.

“Upstairs,” was all he said, but he smiled at Ace before taking Rachel's hand.

Rachel trailed her fingers over the chipped white paint as they made their way up the stairs to the main level. But her eyes went wide and she gasped as she opened the door.

They were in a huge lobby filled with sculptures. A fucking
maze
of sculptures under a drooping banner with fading letters that declared, SCULPTURE: A CELEBRATION OF FIVE CENTURIES. Marble busts gave way to fantastical creations of welded iron, which bled into found-object masterpieces made from bottle caps and random bits of pre-Flare tech.

Each had a dusty card crediting the artist and describing the piece, which was when it hit Ace with a swiftness that stole his breath: he was in an art museum. An honest-to-God pre-Flare museum full of
art
—not the stilted, soulless bullshit popular in Eden, but pieces crafted in the unbroken world that had spawned his own, by artists hundreds of years dead and dozens of years forgotten.

Cruz's surprise. Not for
them
, whatever he'd said. For Ace, because this was as close as a sector brat artist could come to a religious experience.

For the first time in his life, Ace was utterly fucking speechless.

“It's beautiful,” Rachel murmured. And that word was probably enough for her, for most people. Art could make them feel all sorts of things, but mostly it was nice to look at.

It didn't steal their breath, not like this.

Rachel was already wandering toward a curved, sloping piece carved out of solid wood, but Ace couldn't get his feet to move. There was so
much
of it here, with more doors on either side of the lobby, and how many floors above them? The sun had been past its zenith when they'd come in. That gave them a few hours, at
most
, before they had to head back to the sectors.

A few hours to take in a lifetime's worth of art. How the fuck did he choose? Where did he
start
?

“Shh.” Cruz slid his arms around his waist, his chest hot against Ace's back. “Take a breath, lover.”

Guilt crashed in on him, swift and mean. Cruz had offered him a magical present, and Ace was rewarding him with a panic attack. “It's amazing. It's the best surprise in the world, man. I just—”

“I know.” Just that, but the knowing warmth said more. It said
I know you
, a sentiment proven by the words that followed, whispered against Ace's ear. “I arranged things with Dallas already. You can explore for as long as you want. We have dinner and a cozy place to sleep upstairs.” His voice dropped to a suggestive rumble. “Even flashlights if you want to stare at art all night long.”

So, he was offering Ace the impossible choice between art and dirty hot sex. Nah, who was he kidding? He was Ace fucking Santana. He was going to get both.

Cruz hadn't been exaggerating—their bed for the night was damn cozy.

The top floor of the museum had a damn-near panoramic view of the distant mountains and the setting sun through what Ace had assumed to be miraculously unbroken windows. It had turned out to be some sort of tough-as-shit polycarbonate that would probably survive the next couple of apocalypses intact.

The tough-as-shit part was probably what soothed Cruz about the relative security. He hadn't taken chances with anything else. The doors were barricaded and probably booby-trapped, and Cruz had unloaded a small armory of weapons onto one of the tables before sitting down to share their picnic dinner.

The security was all Cruz. The cozy part—Ace detected a specific flair in the nest of pilfered blankets piled high on a sturdy mattress. Cruz's flashlights and glowstrips had been replaced by candles, an entire damn table of them that reflected off the windows and created a second galaxy of flickering stars. Not to mention their dinner basket, which had been filled with some of Lili's most decadent, sumptuous specialties.

Ace would bet his favorite paint collection that Lex had been here, or at least acted as co-conspirator.

Rachel peered over at the painting he'd taken from downstairs and propped up against the wall. She nibbled the corner of a fluffy pastry stuffed with cheese and seasoned chicken as she tilted her head, squinted, then finally traced her fingertips lightly over the rough surface. “I like it, but I think I prefer the one with all the little dots.”

“It's a technique called pointillism,” Ace supplied, then washed his own pastry down with the rest of his wine. That was a Lex touch too, he'd wager, and it was fair enough. If there was any time to be sipping Sector One's finest vintage, it was after scoring your very own Monet. “Not a bad metaphor for the O'Kanes, you know. All those little dots add up to something amazing when you take a step back.”