“Well, that answers my second question,” he said.
“Which was?”
“Would you give up the life to stay with him? If he asked?”
I slumped down into the chair with an exaggerated sigh. Wasn’t that the question? Would I? Could I? Could I conceivably somehow rejoin mainstream society? And do what? Get a job?
I felt Leo’s eyes on me. I gulped down the last of my drink with a scowl. “He would never ask.” I thumped the glass heavily on the small cocktail table and then stood. “I’m going to retire and regroup,” I said, gathering what dignity I could around me. We hadn’t changed after the golf course and I was feeling vaguely ridiculous in a yellow polo shirt and khaki golf shorts, though they made me almost invisible in this crowd.
“That’s not an answer,” Leo said to my retreating back.
I stopped, not turning around. “I know.”
He didn’t say anything more.
Back in my room, I changed into boxers and a light T-shirt. Pulling myself together, and placing my mind squarely in the here and now, I turned the television on and took out my laptop, setting it on the bed next to me but not turning it on. I had work to do. I doubted Eric was sitting at home rehashing our sad, childish affair. He was probably laughing with Ryan over how pathetic I was. Or more likely, they weren’t thinking about me at all.
My phone vibrated with an incoming text, interrupting my very important session of brooding and staring at the ceiling. I ignored it. There was a second buzz and then a third hard on its heels. Fine. With a sigh over the injustice of it all, I looked at the phone.
The message was from an unknown number with an area code I didn’t immediately recognize. We need to talk. Ominous and cryptic. Wonderful.
Message number two cleared it up. It’s Eric. This is my number. Obviously.
Maybe he was thinking about me.
Message number three read. Call me. Please.
Oh, goody, just what I needed, more guilt. Now that the free booze and sunstroke of the golf tournament had worn off, he’d probably realized that he’d been an idiot to even consider getting back together. He probably wanted to yell at me. Maybe I should let him. No sense in postponing the inevitable. The phone buzzed again as I was saving his number in my contacts.
I know you’re brooding, Carly. Stop being so fucking dramatic and text me back.
A small laugh escaped me. I shook my head and sat up on the edge of the bed, staring at the phone in my hand. Fuck you, Tiny, I texted back before my brain could spend an hour searching for the hidden meanings and passive-aggressiveness in his text, trying to figure what angle he was working.
There would be no angle.
Eric had always been direct, painfully so, in his communication. He said what he meant and meant what he said. Something I hadn’t realized I’d missed until right now. Mentally rolling my eyes at myself, I added a smiley face to the end of my words so he wouldn’t think I was angry with him.
Did you call your mother? he asked.
Went right to voicemail. I left a message asking her to meet me at the rink around noon. I didn’t tell him I’d waited until I knew she’d be asleep.
Good for you.
Do I get a prize? I knew what I wanted.
Lunch with me?
Not exactly what I wanted, but I’d take what I could get. Sounds good.
Feeling much better, I fired up the laptop and checked in on some of the potential opportunities I’d been perusing before all this nonsense. No point in letting business fall off. I wouldn’t want the other conmen out there thinking that Carson Grieves was no longer a player. Reputation was serious currency in my circles, second only to information, and reputations couldn’t be bought or sold. They could, however, be ruined. And once that happened, once you lost the fear and respect that people gave you based solely on your name, it was the beginning of the end.
Despite how badly I wanted Eric back, I wasn’t quite ready for this ride to be over.
11 Eric
I exhaled after sending the last text and sank back against the couch cushions. That fuck you, Tiny had sounded almost affectionate. No one but Vinny had called me Tiny since high school. No one had made me feel like this since him.
Fucking Jake Karlsson.
We’d been friends since birth. I couldn’t remember any part of my childhood without him. And then around fourteen I started feeling more than friendly feelings toward him. It could have been awkward if I hadn’t already loved and trusted him. When I kissed him that first time, it gave me butterflies that never went away. All I wanted was him.
He had the key to my heart and my libido. No one had ever gotten to me the way he did. Honestly, I wasn’t sexually attracted to many people. I never saw someone and wanted to drag them off to the bathroom and do things to them.
I wasn’t even crazy about sex with Ryan, to tell the truth, and boy hadn’t that been the source of a lot of our arguments. Apparently, it was my fault he cheated because, like a 1950s husband, if he wasn’t “getting his needs met at home” he was free to look elsewhere.
He was free to walk his ass out the door, I told him, and he did every time.
And when he came back, I let him in every time. He was familiar and a connection to home and my past. My one shitty constant outside the actual game of hockey.
I’d thought the butterflies and need to have my hands all over Jake had been because he was my first. First real kiss, first love, only love if I was being honest, which I guess I was. I hadn’t even dated in high school. Hockey and grades took up so much of my time, I hadn’t had time.
But Jake, he was there. He’d always been there, and I’d assumed he always would.
Now he was back, but I knew he’d leave again. It was his nature, just like it was Ryan’s. I was like the frog who got a ride on the scorpion’s back and was surprised when I got stung. But still, knowing that everyone would leave was less painful than expecting things to last.
But damn he had looked good. I could clearly remember how gorgeous I’d thought he looked when he came. It almost felt wrong, now, thinking that about a kid, but I’d been a kid, too.
My fantasy shifted and Carson took the place of Jake in my mind. It was…not bad. Whatever Jake had created Carson to be, he had even more of the intensity he’d had as a kid and now it was honed, more deliberate. What would it be like to have all that intensity directed my way? We’d been inexperienced kids, making it up as we went along.
We’d never progressed past hand jobs and one desperate blow job. Would he fuck me? Did he like to get fucked? I didn’t know Carson, but Jake, for all his emo aggressiveness, had needed someone to make the decisions, to take him out of his head. Not an easy task. I loved the idea of making him so desperate for it that his ridiculous brain shut off.
My cock stood up and took notice at that. “Stand down, soldier,” I told it. It didn’t listen. It never did. Who was I kidding? I was totally going to jerk off tonight thinking about this grown-up Jake.
I was an idiot.
There was a loud mrrwow and eight pounds of black cat leaped onto my lap somehow compressing his entire weight to a half-inch square in my stomach.
“Tell me I’m an idiot,” I said to him.
Godzilla mrrwowed obligingly and circled in my lap, rubbing his tail against my nose and sticking his gross cat butthole way too close to my face. “Gross.”