Page 11 of Five

I blow out a giant breath of air and lean back against the ragged brick wall. Fucker.

“Oh, and Princess?” he asks, turning around as he walks backwards, smiling like the devil on a Sunday afternoon. “Just give in next time. You’ll get what you want so much quicker if you just admit I’m the boss.”

And then he turns, slips into the alley between buildings, and disappears.

Fucker!

“You’re not the boss of me!” I scream.

“Am too!” he yells back.

I’m frustrated. I’m horny. And I’m smiling.

Whatever. There are worse things in this world than having Five Aston boss you around.

Besides, I was crossing my fingers when I made that promise. So joke’s on him.

Chapter Four - Five

“Well?” Oliver asks as I walk up to the car. He’s grinning like he won and leaning against the hood like this ride belongs to him. “Did you make her happy?”

“I’m halfway there,” I say. I’m smiling, so Oliver’s smiling too. But I can’t stand for his insubordination, so I gotta make an example out of him. I open up the driver’s side door, get in, and then click the doors locked before Oliver can walk around and get in his side.

“Hey!” Oliver says. “What the hell?”

I pull my door closed, start the engine, and roll the passenger window down two inches to say, “This team only has one boss, kid. Me. So you can walk home.”

He flips me off, but I’m already pulling away.

I don’t want to think about Oliver Shrike. I want to think about his delicious princess of a sister.

She’s not the reason I came home. Obviously, I thought she was staying back east like she’s been for a couple years. And I wasn’t really gonna stop off in New York to look her up. Now? No. But I really was gonna make this the year we reconnected. Christmas was the plan. Another perfect Christmas Eve like the one we had just before I left for Oxford.

You know what they say about the best-laid plans.

But bright side… she’s here in FoCo where I can keep an eye on her. Maybe I could stay all summer? Would she stay all summer too, if I came back tonight and asked?

I think so.

Don’t get ahead of yourself, Five. You’ve got a meeting in Denver for a reason.

Right.

And that whole Snowflake thing kinda gets to me. Right in my cold, black heart. God, we had such good times with that pony.

She was a tiny thing. The smallest Shetland I’ve ever laid eyes on, now that I think back with a grown-up mentality. But when we were little, she was every bit a knight’s steed. My steed. I was the knight. Literally.

Ron the Bombshell turned into Ron the Momshell after she had kids. She is all mom, all the time. Even though I’ve seen the off-limits photographs of her all painted up in Spencer’s office and her talent as a tattoo artist is on display on Spencer’s body, I could never reconcile in my head these two versions of her.

Ronnie made the best birthday cakes. For all of us kids. She threw all the parties and made all the Halloween costumes.

And that is my first real memory of me and my princess.

Halloween.

I was five and Rory was four. Momshell made me a knight’s costume and Rory was a princess every year, so no surprise there. But this was the first year we really took Halloween seriously. We waited for it. We sat under that old buckeye dreaming about it. It was the first year I started holding her hand everywhere we went. It was the first year I stopped calling her Rory and started calling her Princess. It was a whole bunch of firsts. And even though I’ve known Rory Shrike since she was born, it was the first year we started making memories together.

Snowflake was young then. Rory’s first pony. She’d just started learning to ride. And on that Halloween night we trick-or-treated riding around downtown Fort Collins on a perfectly-groomed white pony dressed up in every detail as a princess and her knight.