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trista
I’d taken up spending my days next to the pool while Jersey did everything under the sun to avoid being around me. He’d spent another week sleeping on the couch in the living room, when he slept at all. Ever since I’d told him about Bryson and his family, he really did more wandering around the house aimlessly than anything else. Even in the middle of the night, I could hear him pacing up and down the hallway. I thought maybe he was working up the nerve to come into the bedroom the first couple of nights that it happened, and then I ended up a sobbing mess by the time the sun came up when he never actually made it through the door.
* * *
I was nearly asleep in my lounge chair while Utah was definitely asleep on the float in the water. The sound of very light footsteps had me cracking an eye open in the bright sunlight for just a second.
“Still no luck on the Jersey front?” Memphis asked, dropping into the lounge chair beside mine. The instant splashing around in the pool had a laugh bursting out of me in about half a second. Utah was about to drown just at the sound of her voice. She didn’t even seem to notice his outrageous struggle while she pulled the oversized Volbeat T-shirt over her head and about sent the poor man into cardiac arrest. The bikini she had on was even smaller than the one I was wearing, but she was no bigger than a twig while I was curvy in just about every way. She was covered in tattoos that were every bit as black as her hair. Both ears had numerous piercings, she had two tiny hoops through her left nostril, and her belly button had a tiny revolver dangling from it.
“You’d better have a solid six layers of sunscreen on, my friend,” I said. She truly had the palest skin I’d ever seen on a human. How she hadn’t burst into flame like a vampire the moment that her shirt came off was mind-blowing.
“I seriously never would’ve guessed that Indiana could be this hot and have this much sunshine,” she said and laid back in the chair.
“I’m not used to seeing you without Indy anymore. Everything okay?”
“Just needed a minute away from it,” she said and closed her eyes. “He’s been trying to dig into the backgrounds of some of the other Executioners to see what put them into the business. To see if we could find any leverage to sway some of the others to our side of it. We’ve had to do some messed up jobs with some messed up people, but this part — it’s hard.”
“Our side of it,” I repeated. “It sounds like you’re gearing up for war.”
“That’s how it feels, too.”
“What brought you guys into Nate’s business?” I asked and looked from Memphis to the man in the water, who still hadn’t remembered how to breathe correctly. His gaze shifted from me to her for just a second before he moved to the edge of the pool to lift himself out of the water.
“And that’s my cue to leave you girls to it,” he said and went for the towel he’d laid on the chair next to me.
“You don’t have to leave,” Memphis said and laughed. “Nobody’s going to make you answer.”
“Something tells me you already have the answer anyway, Angel.”
She didn’t say anything, but she watched every step that he took back toward that house.
“Do you?” I asked.
She shook her head. “I haven’t even tried to look into him or Indy. Were those scars on his back?”
“You’ll sit here and notice imperfections in his skin but can’t risk feeling too close to the pretty, muscly man who won’t stop staring at you by looking into his background?” I asked and laughed.
“I don’t think he’s staring at me, Trista,” she said and motioned down the front of her body. “Not when all that’s going on right beside me.” She waved her hand at me dismissively with that one, and I cackled at her.
“Why is that funny?” She asked.
“He thinks I’m a crazy person.”
“You are a crazy person,” she interjected quickly.
“Okay, well, I’ll be ignoring that to preserve this friendship. He’s got absolutely no interest in me, Memphis. He doesn’t even know how to use his lungs when you’re around, but your naïveté with the male population is adorable.”
“Oh okay, queen of the opposite sex. Your love life is clearly going spectacularly. Please, teach me something about men.”
“They all suck. That bit of knowledge I will offer freely,” I said quickly. “That was a low blow, by the way. You dick.”
“Maybe you could ask Indy for advice,” she said and laughed. “He seems to be better with men and women than the two of us combined.”
“Sex seemed like the only thing that we were effortlessly good at,” I said. “And now it feels like he’s never been less interested in it.”
“I hope you can hear how intensely unhealthy that sounds at a baseline level, Trista.”
“I do,” I admitted. “But anything at all from him would feel better than what’s happening now.”
