A picture came through this time, showing a plate of toast and a coffee cup.
Lisa: I’m having breakfast. I can’t keep up with all the youngsters’ new vocabulary these days.
Splice snorted. She was a cheeky little thing.
Splice: 29 is hardly young.
Lisa: You’ll always be younger than me.
Splice had so many thoughts about how she’d enjoyed his youthful self. But he reckoned she’d stop replying to him if he got saucy right off the bat.
Contacting her wasn’t even about flirting. That was the truth.
But flirting had always been Splice’s second language, and if he wanted to reconnect with Lisa, he’d have to curb that habit.
It was true: those old clichés about her not being like other women. She was the one woman who’d always been able to put him in his place, and he’d fucking loved it.
Reconnect, first.
And then?
He’d see what then.
Splice: My skateboarding days are behind me now.
Lisa: Don’t give up, champ. Maybe try an electric scooter to keep your bones in the juvenile game.
Oh, sweetheart. She was saying stuff that made him want to say something naughty back, but he bit his cheek and stopped himself.
Right then, Tomb climbed out from under the car, oil streaked over his cheeks and hands. He spotted Splice and came over.
“When did you get here?”
“Just now. I was about to hang Mouse from the rafters, so I came over before I broke the brother-on-brother laws.”
Tomb scoffed. “What did he do today?”
“Running his mouth, as usual.”
“You rarely bite.”
That was true. He was usually the one leading the charge for ribbing any brother.
“You wanna give me a hand?”
“Nah, I gotta head over to the car wash soon. What’s for dinner at your place? Am I inviting myself over?”
“I’ll grill some shit.”
“Cool. Add some shit for me.”
While Tomb talked, Splice glanced at his phone, reviewing the notes he’d made on all of Lisa’s ideal man qualities. He’d intended to delete it, but since that night, he must have looked at her wish list a hundred times, cementing it to memory.
His eyes scanned it, and he chuckled, seeing “No gray eyes.”
It wasn’t as though he could pluck out his eyeballs. And sticking contacts into them was out; he was a squeamish motherfucker about putting anything near his eyes.
He rolled with his instant idea and typed a text.
