Page 8 of Base Block

“Hell, no! Do I look like that?” he demanded, turning on me incredulously. “I’m twenty-five. How old are you?”

“What do you think?”

He scratched his chin. “It’s hard to tell. You could be between eighteen and thirty.”

“That’s true,” I agreed, nodding.

“You’re not going to give me an answer?”

“I’m also twenty-five.”

“We’re learning more about each other,” he said. He reached over to my side of the car, like he’d done before. Once again, I didn’t flinch away and it was a good thing because he only wanted to shake my hand. “Callum Frazier,” he said.

“Rainey Desjardins,” I answered.

“Your name is as fancy as your job. Entourage,” he said, putting an accent on it. “How’d you get started in that, anyway?”

“My story’s a lot like yours.”

“Oh, yeah?” he asked. “You got involved in a gang and almost went to prison?”

“I meant the other parts.”

He let that go. “Why would your boss take off and leave you? Were you in some kind of money dispute?”

Was that the reason? “Damian does owe me,” I mused. At the end of our trip, which Millie called a “junket,” he was supposed to have given me and Sage five thousand each. But I knew that the financial situation had been getting a little tight. Sales of his new album weren’t going that well, despite all the clubbing and promoting we’d been doing. Last night—or was it the night before? Anyway, our first event in Indianapolis had been at a party that his label had sponsored with him as the host, and not too many people had shown up. He had been plenty pissed off, although he had tried to hide it, and Millie had been worried. We hadn’t stayed there for very long before bouncing off to another location and then we’d ended the evening at 20 Grand. When I thought of the place, I remembered purple lights but I also remembered a hand creeping up my thigh…no, that had been in the car, and Damian had laughed.

Callum was still talking about money. “Does that guy owe you enough that leaving you behind makes sense? You can still track him down once you’re home and get him to pay.”

I thought about going to the oversized door of the big house where I’d lived in Los Angeles and pounding on it, demanding my money. “He had given me cash along the way. It was in my purse that disappeared from the club.”

“That’s why you don’t have a phone. Or a wallet?” he guessed, and I nodded, although that part wasn’t true. I’d had cash in my bag but no actual wallet, like other people did with credit cards and old gift cards and faded receipts.

“Do you have a contract for the entourage?” he asked. “Any kind of guarantee?”

“No. So it’s really no harm, no foul for them to leave me here. Is that a football term?”

“Foul? Sure,” he answered. He seemed ready to continue asking me about Damian and working for him, but I didn’t want that.

I talked more about football instead. “Do you play a specific—what’s it called, a position?”

“I do. I’m on the offensive line,” he told me. “I guess you never did a lot of sports yourself.”

“No, but I go to the gym a lot.” Damian liked us toned but also skinny. I was hungry now because it had been a while since I’d eaten, but I was able to deal with it because I was used to the gnawing feeling in my stomach and the dizziness that signaled a lack of food. He’d had Millie watch me and Sage and report to him on our diets. “I could run so fast from that dog because of Pilates and spin.”

“There are a couple of strays in my neighborhood and it’s bad enough that I called about them. No one seems to care.”

“I would have cared if it had bitten me.” I rubbed my leg, remembering the pain and the pressure when a dog wouldn’t let go.

“They’re scared of me,” he remarked.

I didn’t blame them. It was probably good for a football person to be so large, so tall and oversized. He looked as if he also got to the gym a lot, like he’d done this morning—had that been this morning? I considered, and yes, it had been. It was when he’d given me the orange juice bottle that I still carried in my hand.

“What do you do on the offensive line?” I asked.

For the rest of the way to his house, he explained his job to me. He was one of the guys who stood in front of the quarterback to protect him. Callum had to block the defense so his quarterback had time to throw the ball, and he had to push those defenders out of the way so that the running players on his team could move down the field. He had to be strong and heavy, but also quick to react and agile. “In terms of how fast I could get away from a dog, though? I don’t like my chances,” he told me.

“Your job sounds pretty fun,” I noted.