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Albie, the guy from two houses down, clapped his hands once, explaining the rules of the game. As if they didn’t already know.
Jimmy and Sam stepped up for the first throw, keeping eye contact the whole time. Of course, she missed. He made it.
And with that, the reign of Jimmy and Albie began.
Sam and Mike were down by four cups when she dared to touch his elbow. “Sorry I’m no good at this.”
He leaned down, saying, “But shouldn’t you be?” Between the heat of his breath and the softness of his voice, she shivered involuntarily. The kind of shiver that started with a flip of the stomach and ended with a flutter between her legs. “You’ve been in college for how many years now?”
Sam tried not to preen at the fact that he knew she was still in school. “I’m in my last year. But I didn’t major in partying like that one over there,” she said, motioning to Jimmy with her ball as he made crude gestures to throw her off her game. It didn’t take much. Her ball hopped in and out of the corner cup. “It’s amazing he molds the minds of future generations.”
“I know. It’s unbelievable that underneath all that…”
“Absurdity. Idiocy. Immaturity,” she supplied, and Mike extended his hand toward his brother.
“Yeah. Underneathallthat is a pretty good brain.” He glanced down at her, saying something, but at the other end of the table, Albie sank one, and Sam picked up the cup.
“What?” she asked. He had spoken so softly, she couldn’t quite hear over Jimmy’s and Albie’s cheering.
“You’re getting a doctorate, right?” he asked. When she nodded, he added, “In what?”
“Psychology with a concentration on health and nutrition.” She finally looked up to find him staring at her. It was distracting. So much so that neither one of them noticed when Jimmy missed and the ball landed at Sam’s feet.
“Hey, you two.” Albie snapped his fingers a couple of times. “Your turn.”
She picked up the ball and miraculously made it.
“Nice,” Mike said, taking his turn, but he missed, hitting the rim of a corner cup.
Feeling brave, she grabbed his bicep. “Don’t worry. I’ll carry this team.”
He glanced down at her hand on his arm then back at her face. She noted a tiny scar above his top lip and one bisecting his right eyebrow. The few freckles on the bridge of his nose, the one thing left over from childhood. And finally, when her eyes rounded back up to his, a sea of endless dark brown that she thought she could get lost in, she lowered her voice. “No man gets left behind.”
He smiled, a big whopper of a grin, and she went hot all over as he said, “Semper fi.”
“Oorah!” Jimmy shouted from the other end of the table. Mike repeated it, and just like that, a wall came down, his smiles coming easier as the game went on, offering high fives to Sam whenever one of them made it in.
It wasn’t long before Jimmy sank the last cup, ending the game.
Sam placed her cup on the table. “All right, I think that’s it for me.”
“Really?” Mike turned to her, his voice swaying more toward disappointment than surprise.
Jimmy booed her, refilling the cups on their end, but she pointed at the now-empty backyard. “Everyone else went to bed.”
Albie dismissed the thought. “It’s Darwinism. Only the strong survive.”
“Yeah, you want to be the one to regress the evolution of humankind, Samantha Kohler?” Jimmy added.
She rolled her eyes then turned to Mike, who offered her a boyish smile with the lift of his shoulder. “One more game?”
He could have asked her to jump through flaming hoops, and she still would’ve said, “Okay.”
* * *
One buzz after another,Sam’s cell phone wouldn’t stop, and she blindly searched for it without opening her eyes. She’d learned early in her undergraduate college career that she wasn’t a good drinker, and after a night of partying, it was best to sleep with one leg off the bed. Last night was no exception.
Finally feeling her phone wedged under her pillow, she swiped at her eyes and rolled over. She’d missed lots of messages from the 4whoresmen. She replied to them without reading.I’m hungover. Do I need to read all these? Give me the summary.
