“Well?” Evie prodded Grip’s arm.
“Bugger off.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“It’s not like I don’t have options. I’m choosing not to exercise them.”
“I’m still worried. Abstinence is not you.”
He stood and fired off a series of shots at the place he thought Isaac was hiding. This game was going to go on forever and he was hungry. “You’ve been gone a while.”
Evie squeaked. “This isn’t new?”
Nope. He’d watched Evie and Jay reconnect, three years ago, almost not make it and then decide they were it for each other. He wanted that. So much feeling for another person you were made greater for it. And he wasn’t going to find something like that the way he’d been living.
In all the years of having fun with random people who were up for it, there were none who were still in his life and few he remembered. And of those there was only one who remained in his memory from when he was too young and full of doubt to know what he’d found and let go so cavalierly.
He could still picture her waist-length ink-dark hair, so black it was almost blue, her exaggerated makeup and lithe little body. She was smart and fun and addictively sexy. What he remembered most was that she’d gotten him talking, gotten him thinking.
That was the night he realized he was doing what he loved and was fucking lucky for it. He quit being half in and gave everything he had to the band, sucking it up when Jay left, when the Tices were hard to take. Philly had been right, you don’t quit when you’re doing what you love, you find a way to make the twenty percent that sucked work. Like Jay and Evie.
Yeah, he probably romanticized some of that, all of it, rose-colored glasses and all. It was a long time ago and they were both drinking, partying hard, but in his head, Philly was extraordinary.
And he’d grown out of ordinary.
“So date, like normal people do,” Evie said.
He’d tried that. Didn’t stick. “Ask Jay how hard it was to date when he was touring.” When he was one of the most famous rockers in the world and single.
“He didn’t date because he was pining for me.”
Grip leaned around Evie to look at Jay. “How, mate? How do you put up with her?”
“Love is a sickness, and it got me fatal,” Jay said, and then he swore as a pink splatter smashed across his chest and he really was dead, and it was two on two.
“Good lyric,” Evie said, getting to her feet. “We need to end this.”
Five minutes later, on the run, she shot Isaac, then Oscar shot her while she was doing a victory dance. And then there were two.
“Come out and face the music, you traitor separatist,” Oscar taunted.
“Don’t worry, Oz, this way I’ll be good for a loan when all your investments in Snuggie futures go bust.”
“Fuck you, and the farty nag you rode in on that always comes last.”
Oi, that was low. Grip stepped on a branch and in the heartbeat after it cracked, a paintball landed to his right. He dove left and then hoofed it in a wide circle, making a shitload of a noise and aware Oscar was giving chase, thrashing through the bush behind him.
This was a last-stand kind of play and he needed a diversion. He ducked behind a rock formation that looked like a big scoop of rainbow ice-cream and then lobbed a handful of loose stones to Oscar’s right. It made him turn, put his back to Grip and mouth off, which was good cover for sneaking up behind him.
He’d be an arsehole if he shot Oscar point-blank, but then he was tired of being disrespected for his choices and that was one way to settle an argument.
He hit Oscar from too close.
And they all learned something. Being shot point-blank in your armor-plated back hurt like love.
FIVE
The serious expression on Grip’s face made Mena want to reach across the small meeting room table, smooth her hand across his forehead and tell him everything was going to be okay.
And then she really wouldn’t be able to wash her hand.
If he’d consent to accepting other forms of comfort—my quarterly bonus for a hug—her year would be made.
She’d been half consumed with worry about this meeting. Not the content, but the lie of it. Meanwhile, her less ethical half had been looking forward to the frisson of excitement from being in the same room with Grip.
Over the last week, she’d made a naughty fantasy out of their first meeting where what they’d done under the table wasn’t innocent and what they did on the table was fuel for a good dozen self-directed orgasms.
In the fantasy, he called her Philly, even though she looked like she does now, not frumpy, thank you very much, Vera, but classy and competent. He looked like he does now too, but shirtless and barefoot, hair a finger-combed artful mess, wearing jeans that were ripped at the knees and low on his hips. His skin was gleaming and taut and the tattoo that wove up his torso from his hip, across his shoulder and all the way down his arm was dangerous.
She stalked into the room and he undressed her with his eyes: slowly, deliberately, with heat. She ignored him. He told her he’d been looking for her all his life and he was coming apart, desperate for her. That no one else could do it for him. She stopped ignoring him then, her hips rolling, her back flexing on her bed, no longer able to pretend to be aloof even in her head.
Fantasy Grip tore her shirt open, popping buttons, her skirt miraculously gone. He paused briefly
