Entry Protocol
They’re at Jack’s being stupid.
That’s the official activity.
Penelope is on the rug with his coffee table functioning as a bad desk. Jack is stretched out behind her with a beer, two drinks in and calm in a way that is making her worse.
“I’d watch your morning routine,” she says, stealing his beer off the table and taking a sip without asking.
His brows lift. “Would you?”
“Yes. Because yours would just be, like, put on coffee. Open laptop. Continue being smug in a flannel.”
“That’s not a routine.”
“It is if you’re hot enough.”
He looks at her for one beat too long.
That is the exact moment Abby FaceTimes.
Penelope sees her sister’s name and starts smiling before she even answers, because Abby never calls in a way that suggests normal circumstances.
She swipes up.
The screen fills instantly with steam, darkness, bad lighting, and Abby’s face at a wildly unflattering angle.
“PENNNNYYYYY,” Abby yells.
Penelope jerks the phone back from her ear. “Jesus Christ.”
Tom’s voice appears offscreen, warm and drunk and delighted with himself. “Hey, Pen.”
Abby turns the phone. Tom is chest-deep in black water with wet hair, a beer balanced on a rock beside him, looking exactly like a man who has wandered into the wilderness and decided civilization was a slur.
“We miss you,” Abby says. “Come hang.”
Penelope laughs immediately, because of course this is what it is.
“Are you at a hot spring?”
“We are at a hot spring,” Tom says proudly.
“It’s amazing,” Abby says, in the tone of a woman who has provided no evidence whatsoever. “You want to come out like old times?”
That hits Penelope with such immediate familiarity that she nearly misses Jack going still behind her, listening now.
Of course. Hot springs.
She grins at the phone. “You two are so embarrassingly on-brand.”
“We know,” Abby says. “Come out.”
Penelope glances back at Jack. “I’m with Jack.”
Abby’s whole face lights up harder.
“OHHHH,” she yells. “We love Jack.”
Tom leans into frame. “Bring him.”
Penelope snorts. “You’re both drunk.”
“That's not related,” Tom says.
Abby is already fully committed. “No, seriously. Bring him. It’s amazing. We’re in the best mood. Tom fell a little on the trail, but in, like, a handsome way.”
“I did not,” Tom says.
“You did. It was very butch.”
Jack, from the couch, says, “Hi, Abby. Hi, Tom.”
Abby calls, loud and low, “Hiiii, Jaaaack,” somehow making hello sound like an accusation.
Tom lifts one hand in greeting. “Hey, Darcy.”
Penelope turns enough to see Jack’s face. He’s trying not to laugh at being so instantly drafted into someone else’s drunken wilderness plan, which is making him look maddeningly attractive for reasons she deeply resents.
She looks back at the phone.
“Send me a picture of the surrounding area.”
Abby blinks. “What?”
“The surrounding area,” Penelope repeats. “Ground. Path. General topography. I’m not driving all the way out there so you two can be like, surprise, it’s basically vertical.”
Tom, to Abby: “That’s fair.”
Abby, already moving the phone around too fast, says, “Fine. But you’re being kind of a melt.”
“I’m being a planner.”
“Same thing,” Tom says.
The camera flips and becomes a drunken tour of darkness, sagebrush, one folding chair, two towels, one cooler, a lantern, and finally a shaky pan of the approach: scrubby trail, uneven dirt, a slight incline, rocks but not boulders, one weird little wooden rail.
Penelope narrows her eyes at it like she’s doing military analysis.
“How hot is it?”
Tom says, “Medium to ambitious.”
“That is not a number.”
Abby says, “It feels amazing.”
“That’s even less a number.”
Tom considers it. “A little cooler than a hot tub. Ninety-eight-ish?”
Abby points the phone back at herself. “My skin is thriving.”
“Your skin is drunk,” Penelope says.
“It’s happy.” Then she leans in so close to the camera she becomes mostly nostril and says, “There’s a weird man in board shorts named Keith here, but I’ll scare him off.”
Penelope laughs, then studies the screen one more second. “Send me the pin.”
Tom salutes with the beer. “Done.”
A second later her phone buzzes.
Abby leans toward the camera, steam curling around her face. “Come if you want. Or don’t. But we miss you.”
That softens her immediately. Not because Abby has gotten sentimental. Because she hasn’t. She’s said it the way she always says important things: like they’re both obvious and slightly annoying to have to say out loud.
Tom adds, “No pressure. We’ll be here for a while.”
Penelope nods once. “Okay. I’ll let you know.”
“We love you,” Abby says.
“We love you both,” Tom corrects, pointing vaguely toward where Jack must be in the apartment. “Bring your man.”
Penelope laughs. “Get off my phone.”
Abby blows a kiss. Tom does too, more gravely, like a man sealing a treaty.
Then the call ends.
The apartment goes quiet again.
Penelope looks down at the pin on her screen, then twists around on the rug so she’s facing Jack properly now.
He’s watching her.
Not loaded. Just open. Amused. Waiting.
She holds the phone out. “It’s like thirty-five minutes.”
He takes it and looks at the location, then at the one blurry picture Tom has already texted of the path, which somehow contains three feet, one beer can, and half the moon.
Penelope watches his face.
Then says, “You can say no.”
Jack looks up. “I know.”
“No, like, I mean it.” She tucks one leg under herself. “They are very lovable but not what I’d call operational, and hot springs can get weird fast. So if you don’t want to do this, that is not a problem.”
He studies her for a second. Then the phone. Then her again.
“How old times are we talking?”
Penelope huffs a laugh.
“Pretty old times. When I was thirteen and living with Abby and Tom that year Laurel iced me out for refusing to be Mormon, this was kind of their thing. Random hot springs. Gas-station snacks. Tom pretending he understood geology. Abby taking her top off the second we got there like she was conducting an experiment in freedom.”
“That tracks.”
“It does.” She smiles despite herself. “Honestly, some of my best nights were just the three of us sitting in weird sulfur water in the middle of nowhere while Abby gave me questionable advice with astonishing confidence.”
“Was it good advice?”
“Emotionally, weirdly yes. Legally, not always.”
“That also tracks.”
She looks at him for another second.
“I just don’t want you to feel like you have to do some rugged spontaneity performance because I got sentimental over a drunk hot spring summons.”
He hands the phone back.
“Penelope.”
“What?”
“I’m not doing rugged spontaneity performance.” A beat. “I am, however, interested in getting drunk in a hot spring with your feral sister and her husband.”
She laughs.
“That’s a terrible sentence.”
“It feels accurate.”
She smiles at him, full this time.
“Okay. But if we go and it turns out to be inaccessible in a way that makes me want to commit arson, we’re allowed to leave immediately.”
“That seems fair.”
“And if Abby gets naked too fast, you have to behave like this is normal.”
He gives her a look. “I’ve gathered that for your family, it probably is.”
“That’s actually very respectful.”
“I’m trying.”
She stands, still smiling, and moves toward him. He reaches for her without thinking, catching her at the hips when she gets close enough and drawing her between his knees.
She kisses him once, quick and happy.
“Okay,” she says into his mouth. “But if Abby tries to baptize you into chaos, I’m not intervening.”
Jack nods solemnly.
“Also fair.”
By the time they get there, Jack has had exactly one road beer, and the night has tipped from reasonable to loosened at the edges.
The drive out had been all dark highway and scrub and bad cell service, Penelope in the driver’s seat checking the pin every four minutes like the map might suddenly say, actually no, this is a cult, and Jack in the passenger seat spinning a beer bottle on his knee with the calm competence that makes every plan feel more feasible than it probably is.
“Just for the record,” Penelope had said at one point, staring out at the black desert and the occasional low scatter of lights, “if Keith is still there, you are not allowed to let him call me sweetheart.”
“That seems fair.”
Then, after a beat:
“You’ve gone very quiet.”
Jack had smiled without looking over. “I’m just trying to picture what board shorts say about a person.”
“It says sunburned,” Penelope had said. “And overfamiliar.”
He’d laughed and taken another sip of beer at the stop sign just before the dirt turnoff, and that had been that.
Now the actual hot spring is in front of them, lantern glow and steam rising against the dark, and Keith is nowhere to be seen.
Abby, however, is.
Fully naked.
Of course.
She is standing shin-deep at the edge of the spring with both arms in the air like she has personally summoned geothermal activity out of the earth.
“They’re here!” she yells.
Tom, also naked but with less pageantry about it, is sitting on a flat rock with a beer, looking like a handsome man who wandered accidentally into becoming someone’s woodcut illustration.
He sees their headlights and grins.
“You made it!”
Penelope parks and kills the engine.
For one second, all four of them are just suspended there in the soft dark — steam, night air, Abby’s unapologetic tits, Tom’s wet hair, the low mineral smell of hot water and dirt and sagebrush.
And Penelope, stepping out of the car, starts laughing immediately.
Because it is ridiculous.
Because Abby is naked.
Because Keith is gone.
Because somehow this is still, after all these years, exactly the shape of a perfect night.
“Hi,” Abby says, as though full nudity is the most neutral possible greeting. “Keith left. I barked at him.”
Tom laughs like the memory just slapped him in the face. “Oh my God, you guys. You should have seen his face.”
Jack is laughing while he gets his chair out and looks from the car to the path to the spring in one clean assessment, taking in the uneven dirt, the slight slope, the flat rocks at the edge, the amount of bullshit on offer.
Penelope watches his face.
Tom sees her watching and immediately stands — gracefully enough to be impressive and drunkenly enough to be suspect.
“I did a little reconnaissance,” he says. “There’s one annoying bit near the rail, then it opens up. You want a hand, I’ve got hands.”
Abby, still entirely naked and untroubled, says, “Tom has so many hands right now. Emotionally.”
“I have two,” Tom says. “Physically.”
Jack looks at the path again, then at Tom, then at Penelope.
“This feels survivable.”
Relief hits her so fast it nearly makes her stupid.
“Okay,” she says. “Good.”
Abby points at her. “Pen. Your face.”
“There is no face.”
“Yes. It’s the one where you’ve briefly mistaken planning for romance.”
“That is not what’s happening.”
And then somehow the next five minutes become easy in the way good people can make things easy when nobody’s making a performance out of it.
Tom shines the flashlight on the path. Penelope steadies the cooler and immediately gets told to stop hovering by all three of them in different wording. Abby, from the water, offers useless but very loving commentary like, “That rock’s a bitch,” and, “Watch the little dip by the sage,” and, “Oh god, Tom, watch the wine.”
Jack takes the path balanced on his back wheels in controlled little corrections, with the calm, practiced irritability of a man who has done harder things and knows it. The one road beer has made him just relaxed enough to find the whole scene more amusing than inconvenient, which Penelope clocks immediately and stores for later.
When they reach the edge, the spring is better than the pictures.
The water is black and silver under the moon, steam ghosting low across it, one side ringed by rock, the other opening out toward scrub and sky and darkness. The lantern Abby brought is doing absolutely nothing practical and everything aesthetic. Towels are everywhere. One bag of chips has already gone damp. There is a radio playing something old and warbly from a speaker that sounds like it survived a flood.
Abby spreads her arms with zero self-consciousness about her current state of undress.
“Welcome home.”
Tom looks at Jack. “This is her normal behavior.”
Jack laughs. “I respect it.”
Then he looks at the water.
Then at Penelope.
And because he is exactly himself, even here, even one road beer deep, even at a naked desert hot spring with her chaotic family smiling at him like they’ve been waiting years for him to show up, he says:
“So. What’s the entry protocol?”
She feels that land somewhere useful in her chest.
He says it like this is real. Like he’s here. Like this is not a novelty event or a test he’s passing. Just a place they’ve come, together, and now he would like the relevant information.
Penelope kneels to test the water.
“Water’s hot but not insane,” she says. “Rock there is stable. This side shelves in. Tom, if you say anything inspirational, I’ll bite you.”
Tom puts a hand to his chest. “Hurtful.”
Abby, gloriously steaming, says, “I can’t believe Keith missed this. He had one chance to see Darcy at a moonlit hot spring and he folded.”
Jack smiles without any urgency to hide it.
Then, because apparently tonight is made of tiny mercies, the getting in is also fine.
A little awkward, yes. A little wet-rock, towel-bundle, who-has-what-here, but fine.
Jack pauses at the edge, looks at the rock shelf, then shakes his head when Tom points to the obvious spot.
“Not there,” he says. “That rock’s wet on the left. Here’s better.”
Tom adjusts immediately. “Copy.”
Jack glances at Penelope. “Towel behind me, but don’t grab my arm unless I ask.”
Penelope lifts both hands. “I am made of air.”
“You are visibly not.”
Still, he’s smiling.
Then he does the thing with that calm, irritating competence that makes her stupid: hand placed, a brief controlled shift, his weight moving exactly where he’d decided it would go.
And then Jack is in the water, shoulders dropping half an inch the second the heat takes him, one arm along the rock behind him, beer in hand again, exhaling like his body has decided, all at once, to stop filing complaints.
Once they’re all in, it is perfect. In the least presentable way possible.
Abby is gesturing wildly with a plastic wine glass while telling some story about a woman in Palm Springs who tried to cleanse her aura with cayenne and got arrested in a boutique. Tom is drunk in that mellow, affectionate way where every third sentence is either flirtation or logistics. He keeps touching Abby absentmindedly — shoulder, knee, back — like he’s spent his entire adult life defaulting to her and has no intention of stopping now.
Penelope sits half-turned between them and Jack, beer balanced on the rock, feet drifting under the dark water, and feels something old and familiar unclench in her chest.
This.
This exact stupid shape of things.
Moon overhead. Abby obscene. Tom in love with her at audible volume. Bad speaker. Better beer. A weird little pocket of the world where no one is on their best behavior and everyone is exactly where they’re supposed to be.
She looks at Jack.
He’s watching Abby explain something with both hands and what appears to be zero relationship to science, his mouth already tipped.
“Do we know what she’s saying?” he murmurs to Penelope.
She starts laughing so hard she nearly inhales hot spring.
Abby narrows her eyes. “Pen, get over here.”
“I’m literally three feet away.”
“No, spiritually. Come sit by me.”
Penelope rolls her eyes and shifts closer anyway, because this too is part of the ritual. Abby loops an arm around her with no concern whatsoever for temperature differentials or personal space and kisses the side of her head.
“We missed you,” she says, sudden and simple.
The words catch Penelope without cover.
She leans into Abby for one second before she can get weird about it.
“I know.”
Tom looks over at Jack.
“We used to do this all the time,” he says. “Hot springs, weird roads, no plan. She was thirteen and somehow still the most responsible person there, which was useful because more often than not, she’d have to drive us home.”
Jack barks out a laugh. “At thirteen?”
Penelope groans. “Jesus.”
Abby laughs. “It’s true.”
Jack looks at her then, really looks, and something in his face goes warm in a way that makes Penelope immediately need everyone to become less observant.
So naturally Abby notices.
“Oh my God,” she says. “Look at him.”
“Do not,” Penelope says.
Tom, delighted, says, “Aww, you two.”
“Tom.”
“He’s doing the face.”
Jack lifts his beer. “I don’t know what face this is.”
“The one where you’re realizing what an absolute menace she’s been since puberty,” Abby says.
Jack glances at Penelope. “That does track.”
Penelope points at all three of them. “You are all dead to me.”
Abby leans her wet head on Penelope’s shoulder, a little wine-drunk and so aggressively affectionate it borders on assault.
Then she squints past Penelope at Jack and says, with sudden drunken thoughtfulness, “I like you.”
That quiets things for half a second.
Abby keeps looking at him. “And we never like Penelope’s boyfriends. Ever.”
Tom nods once. “Historically terrible crop.”
Penelope groans. “Oh my God.”
Jack holds his beer up in a tiny salute in that dry, composed way of his that always makes sincerity worse.
“High praise,” he says.
Abby barks out a laugh.
Tom points at him with the beer. “Thank you.”
Penelope smiles into her own beer because suddenly she cannot not.
Because they do love him.
Immediately. Entirely. Without any transitional paperwork.
And because he, one road beer deep in a hot spring under the moon with her drunk sister and brother-in-law talking over each other at him, is not performing comfort or patience or adaptability. He is just here.
Abby, having recovered from sincerity by force of personality, straightens up and says, “Okay. Game.”
“No,” Penelope says instantly.
“Yes,” Tom says.
Jack looks between them. “I feel underbriefed.”
Abby points across the water. “You have to name the most regrettable place you’ve ever made out with someone.”
Tom leans into Jack. “Mine was a ski lift in Mammoth. Very cold. Very snotty.”
Abby lifts a finger. “Mine was a church parking lot during youth group.”
Jack laughs into his beer.
Penelope looks at him. “You don’t have to answer. You’re new.”
He thinks for exactly one second.
Then says, “Behind a Cheesecake Factory.”
All three of them turn to him.
They erupt.
Penelope folds in half. “That is so embarrassing. You’re so American.”
Abby is fully gone now, doubled over in moonlight, and somehow that — that exact image, that exact sound of her and Tom losing their minds while Jack sits in steaming black water looking unfairly pleased with himself — is the moment Penelope knows she’ll remember.
Because it fits.
Because it is so stupid and so alive and so perfectly, accidentally right.
Tom eventually recovers enough to say, “Keith really missed a historic night.”
Abby raises her wine. “To Keith being a pussy.”
Jack lifts his beer.
Penelope looks at him through the steam, at Abby laughing into her cup, at Tom still visibly recovering from the phrase “historic night.”
Perfect, actually.
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