Their smirks suddenly made me very happy.
We’d left my parent’s house and were driving home after a humiliating and amusing afternoon, and I thought that Tamsin was almost asleep, so when she spoke, I jumped slightly.
“Our parents can never meet.”
Frowning and not liking this, I gripped the wheel tightly. “Why do you say that?”
Angling toward me, she played with the seatbelt while she replied. “My parents aren’t exactly normal, so if we put them together in the same room…”
Relieved by her reason, I chuckled as I stopped at a red light. “I doubt yours are as bad as mine, pretty girl. You’d need to warn them about mine, maybe even get them drunk so they don’t remember it.”
Shaking her head, she bit down on the corner of her lip. “You don’t understand. I’m an only child, so I’ve had their undivided attention my whole life. Think about it—if your parents have that kind of stuff of you, Raoul, and Cat, what would a parent with one child have? Plus, my mom has an obsession with the People of Walmart and goes around asking people she’s certain are going to make it onto the page for their autographs.”
That… Okay, that was weird. “And people do that?”
“You’d be surprised,” she sighed, facing forward again. What she didn’t realize was, I probably wouldn’t be surprised. “She goes up and explains it to them, shows them her top supporter status on Facebook, then passes them her autograph book for them to sign after she takes a selfie with them.”
“Jesus,” I muttered, rubbing my chin with my hand. “And your dad?”
Covering her face with both hands as much as she could with the cast, she mumbled something into them.
“I missed that. What did you say?”
“He does reenactments.”
That wasn’t so bad. “Like the Civil War type ones? Loads of people do those, baby.”
Clearing her throat, she lowered her hands and stared at the dashboard. “No, as in Jaws ones.”
Without realizing I was doing it, I turned the indicator on and pulled over to the side of the road, relieved that no one had been behind us when I did it. Rolling to a stop, I threw the car into park and turned to face her fully.
“Okay, I could’ve sworn I heard you say he did Jaws reenactments. Are we talking about the movie?” When she nodded, I tried to think of what to ask next, but so many questions were hitting me at once it was hard to decide. Finally, I went with, “He hunts sharks?”
Her head snapped around so quickly there was a small crack, and I was grateful she’d finally had all of her stitches removed and that the tiny wounds from the tears were almost fully healed too.
“God, no. What kind of barbaric piece of shit do you think he is? You don’t hunt sharks, they’re endangered. Did you know that the population of some species has declined by over ninety percent over the last couple of decades? Do you know what that means for our future generations and our oceans? I mean, female great white sharks only reach reproductive age at thirty-three years old, and they carry the babies for eleven months. Why would anyone hunt sharks with—”
Holding up a hand, I stopped her mid-rant. “Right, so he doesn’t hunt sharks. How does your dad re-enact the movie Jaws, then? You can’t throw that information out there and not expect me to bite.” I chuckled at the pun.
Shooting me a glare, she sank down in her seat. “Dad belongs to the Jawesomesauce Crusaders. Every year, they go out on a boat with Quints Shark Fishing JC on it, and they re-enact the struggle to catch the shark.”
I laughed so hard after she told me the fan club's name that I almost missed the rest of what she said. “What do they hunt if they’re not hunting sharks? Oh shit, is it an inflatable shark?”
The mental image was so good that I leaned forward with the force of the laughter that came out of me and headbutted the horn.
“No,” she snapped. Leaning my head on the steering wheel, I watched her blush harder and cross her arms in front of her chest. “One of the members is an engineer who builds robots and shit for the military, so he built a mechanical version of the shark from the movie… to scale.”
Throwing my head back, I swear I tore something in my stomach when I laughed this time.
Then she whispered, “They’ve got a YouTube channel and sell merchandise.”
Hearing that, I took a deep breath and put the truck back into drive to get us home as quickly as possible. The moment I turned the engine off, my phone was out of my pocket, and the YouTube app was open on it as we walked toward the door.
When I found the account, I discovered—to my immense happiness—that they’d uploaded over three hundred videos of their encounters with the shark. They also had ones of their preparations, them re-enacting scenes on shore, in the sea—who could forget the banana boat scene—and a whole host of other things to do with the movie.
Six hours later, I’d had a stitch in my side for three hours, but I couldn’t stop watching the videos. When I eventually saw the time, I couldn’t believe I’d been watching them for that long and winced when I noticed that Tamsin had locked the house up and gone to bed.
How deep the hole go when it came to watching the videos? Considering I watched them on my phone on and off for the next week… the answer was very deep.
Chapter Ten
Garrett
I was exhausted when I walked into work today. Between trying to figure out how to keep Tamsin safe, out how to take our relationship to the next level without fucking shit up, work, training at work, life in general, and everything else in the world that was going on, I was running on little sleep.
So, walking into work while tugging at my vest because I was so hot today, I almost turned around and left again when I saw Hurst Townsend sitting on DB’s desk, laughing with him at something on the screen of his phone.
Unfortunately, he saw me before I could do it. “Why Captain Evans, as I live and breathe—which upsets Lindee, by the way. If she could find a way for me not to be breathing right now, I think she’d risk the prison sentence.”
Smirking at him, DB asked, “What did you do this time?”
Wincing, he hit the screen of his phone, and the screaming coming from it stopped. “The shorter list might be what didn’t I do. But, it keeps the relationship healthy, you know?”
Rubbing the back of my neck, I dropped my head down to study my boots for something to distract me from the possibilities of what he meant by healthy.
Think good thoughts, think good thoughts.
“Hear you had some fun with Miss Sheena, Garrett,” Hurst called.
Sighing, I raised my head back up and nodded slowly. There was little chance of me lying and getting away with it with her dad standing beside him. “Yeah, she spackled Zuri’s floor with her ass.”
A bellow of laughter came out of him. “How’d you get on with that?”
“It was fucking disgusting.”
Laughing loudly, DB added, “He was dry heaving and gagging when I got there.”
Just the memory of it and the smell made me feel like doing it all over again.