“Are you two leaving?” I ask with unrestrained surprise in my voice.
Groupie One presses her bare knees up against Mike’s leg. “Unless you want us to stay,” she suggests with her eyelashes batting down at him.
He holds up the empty beer bottle that somehow got passed back to him. “Can you toss this in the trash on your way out?”
She rolls her eyes but doesn’t stop smiling, and when she and her friend begin leaving the bus without taking the beer bottle, I call after her, “What about your friend?” Three gold diggers came on this bus, but only two are leaving. It’s been a long night, but simple math says they’re forgetting someone.
Groupie One tosses her blonde hair over her shoulder and stops only long enough to giggle and answer, “We’re going to the other bus. Shawn said he was a one-girl kind of guy.”
I STAY PARKED on the benches long after the first two girls leave and the last one’s giggling behind the curtain dies down. Long after Mike ventures through it with his eyes covered to get to the TV in the back. Long after my eyelids start to droop and my head starts to roll forward.
I stand up, take a deep breath, and move to the heavy curtain separating me from the bunks, imagining what I’m going to see on the other side. Clothes on or off? Shawn on the top or bottom? Ugh, I should just sleep on the fucking bench.
Instead, I grit my teeth and yank the curtain back—to find Shawn lying fully clothed on top of his bedcovers, his long legs crossed at the ankles and a book on his lap. His reading glasses are low on his nose, his pillows are piled behind his head, and he definitely does not look like someone who just spent the past hour playing rock god with queen of the groupies.
My confused gaze travels from him to the bunk across from him—my bunk—which now holds said queen, also fully clothed. She’s passed out under my covers, drooling on my pillow, and when my gaze slowly swings back to Shawn, he’s smirking at me over the top of his book.
“What the hell is she doing in my bed?” I snap.
“You’re the one who invited her on here. What was I supposed to do, let her sleep in mine?”
I hear Mike laugh from back in the kitchen, but I ignore it and bark at Shawn. “You sleep with her and then put her nasty ass in my bed?”
The girl under my covers stirs and mumbles something in her sleep. Then she goes back to smearing lipstick all over her drool-coated cheeks.
“Who the hell said anything about sleeping with her?” Shawn asks, closing his book and uncrossing his ankles to sit up.
“Then what the hell have you been doing for the past hour?”
“Cleaning up the mess you made.”
“What about her?” I snap, pointing to the body attached to the widening puddle of drool on my pillow.
Shawn has the nerve to smirk at me. “Figured I’d leave some of the mess for you.”
He leans back, recrosses his ankles, reopens his book . . . and I stomp over to him and slam it closed. “No fucking way. Get her out of my bed.”
“Do it yourself.”
“SHAWN.”
“Yes?” he says sweetly, and my fingers itch to strangle him. Instead, I growl so loudly, Mike laughs from the kitchen again.
I turn to the girl and yank my covers off of her. She’s curled up with her glittery silver heels still on, and I poke her shoulder with the tip of my finger and then wipe it on my jeans. “Hey.”
She groans in her sleep and turns her pink-stained mouth all the way into my pillow.
“Dude,” I say, “get up.” I poke her again, harder this time.
She starts snoring, and Shawn chokes back a laugh from where he’s lying comfortably behind me.
“She drank like half the bottle,” he says. “She’s not waking up anytime soon.”
I turn around and glower at him. “Then get up.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m taking your bed.”
He casually flips the page of the book he’s reading. “Don’t think so.”
Adam and Joel appear in the doorway, Adam rubbing his elbow like he nearly cracked that instead of his head open when he climbed down from the roof of the bus. “What are you two fighting about?” he asks.
“Her.” I point an accusing finger at the skanky lump in my bed, and Joel raises his eyebrow.
“Why is she in your bed?”
“Because Shawn’s an asshole!”
Shawn chuckles, doing nothing to erase the confused expressions from Adam’s and Joel’s faces.
“Where are you going to sleep?” Joel asks me, and I turn on Shawn again.
“Get up.”
“Nope.”
“Shawn, I’m not playing.”
“Then you shouldn’t have started this game in the first place.”