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“The worst,” Rico said. “It looks like ancient Greek.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” I growled at them.
“You love Mark,” Chris said, squinting down at his notepad. “Last week. Saturday. Three thirty-seven in the afternoon. Main Street. Mark walked by the diner window with a friend, and Gordo sighed dreamily before asking who the girl was and why she was standing so close to Mark.”
“I didn’t do any of that.”
“You said you thought she was probably a bitch who wanted to get her claws in him,” Tanner said, wiping off his elbow. “Claws, Gordo.”
“We could go on,” Rico said, arching an eyebrow at me.
“For fuck’s sake,” I muttered.
“Chris!”
“Two weeks ago. Tuesday. Five forty-six in the evening. At Marty’s
. Mark brought Gordo dinner, and Gordo made SMF at him.”
“SMF?”
“Suck My Face,” Rico said. “It’s a look you get when Mark stands near you like you want to tell him to suck your face.”
We got detention for three days after I started a food fight when I threw my milk carton at Rico’s head. If it exploded before it hit him and drenched all three of them with far more liquid than should have been in that tiny carton, well. No one needed to know that but me.
“I DON’T want to suck your face,” I told Mark later.
He blinked. “What?”
I scowled at him. “Nothing. Fine. Whatever. How’s Bethany.”
He smiled, slow and sure. “Good. She’s… good. Sweet girl.”
“Great,” I said, throwing my hands up in the air as I stalked away. “Fine. That’s just swell.”
He laughed and laughed and laughed.
THINGS WERE happening. Things that I wasn’t privy to. I wasn’t always invited into meetings with Thomas and Osmond and the wolves from back East. Hell, I wasn’t even sure where back East was, exactly. But even though I still heard my mother’s voice in my head sometimes, I trusted Thomas. I trusted him to know the right thing to do. What it meant to be an Alpha, to have a pack.
I shouldn’t have.
MARTY SAID, “Oh man. That’s… that doesn’t feel right.”
And then he collapsed in the middle of the garage.
I reached him first.
His skin was slick with sweat.
His breathing was erratic.
He ended up in the hospital for a couple of weeks after they put a stent in his artery.
“A balloon,” he told me, looking grumpy as a nurse flitted around him. He scowled at her and tried to get her to leave him alone, but she told him she’d dealt with far worse than the likes of him. “They stuck a goddamn balloon in me, blew it up, then put in a stent. Helps the ticker keep chugging along.” He grimaced. “Apparently have to make some dietary changes.” He didn’t look very happy about that.
“No more diner food,” I told him seriously.
“No more diner food,” he said morosely.
