Page 14 of Dirty Fighter

6

Jason

“Dude, just breathe,” Ben Boerboom coaxes through the line as I stalk across the clearing. “Zamboni’s a sensitive. He’s picking up your bad vibes from here.”

I screwed this up so badly, my bad vibes are probably causing ripples around the globe.

Okay, Boomer probably isn’t the first guy most people would call in a crisis. He’s a little over the top and doesn’t exactly present as a good listener. But for as reactive as the guy is, he’s even more loyal. And when you get past the splashy surface… he’s deep and thoughtful and one of the best friends I’ve got.

So yeah, when Rowan realized that she was well and truly locked out of Dad’s room, I called him and word-vomited all my sins from the last few hours and maybe months without taking a breath.

“I’m chill.”

“Lies, dude. Thought we were better than that.”

My head drops. “How about this… I can almost imagine a time when I might get there again?”

“That works. So you locked her out of her room. And she left.” He makes one of those Boomer thinking noises, then, “I get why you feel like a dick about your part in this, and not to actually be a dick… but isn’t her leaving, like, the best-case scenario?”

At this point, I’m not actually sure it would be. “She didn’t leave, leave. Not the island.”

I showed her the broken key.

She stared. Then she asked how many bedrooms were in the cabin.

I told her three.

And when she asked how many were accessible without this key… I told her.

One. At least, without breaking a window.

She turned beet red, threw her palm up, all, STOP before I could say anything else, and then rage-walked out the door.

He coughs. “She’s still there? Static, on a scale of one to a thousand, like, how mad is she?”

I stop at the top of the stairs, watching from above as Rowan furiously paces the length of the dock, occasionally stopping to glare and— yep, there it is —flip me off for a five count before continuing on her hostile way.

“Mmm, about what you’d expect.”

He sucks the loudest breath in history and then starts shouting, “Get off the island! What, do you have a death wish?”

Okay, so maybe this is why Boomer isn’t the first guy people think to call in a crisis. “Funny, funny.”

“I’m not laughing, man. From the way Wexler and those guys tell it, that sister of yours handed you an ass-kicking something fierce…”

I rub my neck, but tension has already moved in and unpacked. “She’s not my sister.”

“… And that was just for sneaking up on her. What do you think she’s going to do after that ‘key-dangling’ bullshit you pulled? And now, she’s stuck sharing a room with you!”

“Boomer.”

“Yeah, yeah. Not your sister. Got it.”

Just the girl I had it bad for in high school, who happened to be the daughter of the manipulative troll my dad decided to marry.

“Good thing too. If she was your sister, that whole bed-sharing thing… squick.”

“Boomer.”