Page 367 of Power Play

“It’s plastic,” Rider answered.

“Exactly. Unregulated.”

Cade and Easton started a pool game while I sat at the bar with a glass of tequila and watched my friends turn the basement into the trip I’d intended to give them. The alcohol loosened something inside me without making any part of Charm disappear. She remained beneath every laugh.

When Easton missed an easy shot, I remembered Charm bending over this table in a dress while I stood behind her and showed her how to hold the cue. The memory had never happened, but I’d pictured it so clearly while booking the lodge that it felt stolen anyway.

I drank while Cade scratched and Rider told him Bliss had ruined his hand-eye coordination. The master suite waited upstairs, filled with every plan I’d been stupid enough to make, and I drank again.

Briggs shoved an air-hockey paddle into my hand and demanded that I restore his honor. I beat Rider by one point, lost to Easton, then accused the table of racism when Cade beat me twice.

“It’s black,” Cade said.

“Internalized oppression.”

Rider nearly fell against the wall laughing.

The tequila kept coming. Cade made me drink water between shots, and Easton pushed a plate of food toward me whenever I stopped moving. They knew exactly how reckless it was to get drunk before the most important game of my life, but they also knew my ego, El Cuchillo was going to do whatever the fuck he wanted tonight. Their choices were to leave me alone with it or stay close enough to make sure I didn’t do something worse.

Briggs stayed beside me without hovering, watching me closely enough to step in if he needed to. Rider cut up hard enough to keep the room from sinking every time my silence lasted too long. Cade monitored the water, Easton monitored the food, and none of them let me disappear upstairs or stumble outside alone.

They supported me without asking me to feel better or pretending they could control me. I didn’t forget Charm for a second. I let myself get drunk enough that remembering her became blurry around the edges. I was fucked up, depressed, and pissed off beneath music loud enough to shake the floor, but I wasn’t alone inside any of it.

Sometime after midnight, my bladder forced me off the barstool. The floor shifted beneath my feet.

Briggs looked over from the pool table. “Need assistance?”

“I’m going to piss.”

“I repeat the question.”

“I’ll drown you in the color-changing pool.”

“That sounded rehearsed.”

I gave him the middle finger and continued down the hallway. One shoulder caught against the wall when my knee protested, but I corrected my balance and found the bathroom without giving Briggs the satisfaction of helping me.

After taking care of business, I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror. The bruise beneath my eye had turned nearly black. My hair stuck out beneath my backward cap, and exhaustion and alcohol had softened the focus of my stare without touching the cold behind it.

Charm had loved this face. She’d loved the tattoos, the anger, the Spanish, and the Chicano bad boy her father would never approve of, so long as loving me remained something she could do behind a locked door. Whatever feelings she had for me had always come with conditions, and I’d been too fucking gone for her to see them until her father forced her to choose.

I shut off the bathroom light and stepped into the hallway.

Someone stood near the stairs, her strawberry-blond hair catching beneath the dim wall sconce. My body recognized her before my mind could reject the sight. Charm held an overnight bag against her chest, and she froze the second she saw me.

Every instinct inside me slowed while every wound grew meaner.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

Her fingers tightened around the bag. “I left this upstairs.”

“The girls are next door.”

“I know. They’re in the hot tub. I was going to bed and realized my toiletries and pajamas were still in here.”

“You crossed the hard limit for pajamas?”

“I asked Briggs.”