Jamie grimaces, connecting the dots.
I rub the bridge of my nose. “She’s important to Kate. And Kate despises me. Soon as Kate realizes you’re with me, she’ll disapprove of you, and you can kiss talking to Bianca goodbye.”
“I’d rather kiss Bianca,” Nick says, staring at her again. “So how about we pretend we don’t know each other?”
“Wow. Thanks again for the moral support.”
“Hey, come on. Unlike you, I don’t have women fawning over me all the time. I’ve never felt like this about anyone before.”
Jamie frowns. “You haven’t met her.”
“True,” Nick says wistfully. “And now I’m going to go fix that.”
“Wait. Nick!” I reach to stop him, but he’s gone. And judging by the coy, sweet look Bianca gives him as he approaches her, well on his way toward being a goner, too.
Jamie offers me a sympathetic back slap. “How about a beer?”
* * *
—
To anyone else, Sequence is an innocent old-folks game of cards and five chips in a row.
To this crowd, it’s a gladiator arena.
“Sonofabitch,” Toni mutters as Kate drops a one-eyed jack and flicks his chip off the board. “You’re so hostile!”
“I play to win, Antoni.” Kate lifts her eyebrows at me, then takes a deep drink of her cocktail.
“You know you could play offense,” I tell her, tossing down my card and playing a chip to build us a three-in-a-row on a diagonal. “Then maybe this game would end before we’re all in a retirement community.”
“I know this is a novel concept to you, Christopher,” she says airily, “but just because that’s how you play doesn’t mean it’s the only right way.”
Hamza, Toni’s boyfriend, sets down a card and plays his chip right where Kate vacated Toni’s, giving their team four in a row.
Kate’s cousin, Bianca, groans in frustration at this turn of events. Nick stares at her like she hung the moon.
“Yeesh,” Bianca mutters. “I don’t remember it being this cutthroat when we played at the family reunions.”
“Because it wasn’t,” Bea says. “At least, not at Wilmot family reunions. Mom’s side of the family, however, is a whole other matter.”
Kate grins wickedly. “I love O’Reilly family reunions.”
“Someone lost a finger at the last one,” Bea reminds her.
“Eh. They’ve got nine more,” Kate says, plucking a cashew from a nearby dish and tossing it in her mouth. “The fireworks got a little out of hand. It happens.”
Bea laughs disbelievingly, then turns back to Bianca. “You’re not misremembering. Sequence is usually pretty tame. We just tend to get carried away on game night.”
Jamie clears his throat. “I read an article recently about the mental health benefits of play in adulthood. Board games were specifically mentioned.”
“Really?” Margo grumbles, playing a card and setting a chip in no-man’s-land. “Because this feels like the time I drove through the car wash and only too late realized my windows were stuck halfway down.”
Sula laughs. “You’re just a sore loser.”
“I’m shit at board games!” Margo protests. “I wanna do physical things, blow off some steam, not sit on my ass and get it whupped at board games. Let’s go ax throwing—”
“No!” Jamie and I yell. Kate would kill me with her first throw and Bea would take off someone’s arm.
“What about paintball?” Bea asks.
Jamie gives her a look I can’t read.
“Not sure you can do that this time of year,” Sula says, “given it’s outdoorsy, but I honestly don’t enjoy anything that involves even a facsimile of a firearm.”
“True that.” Hamza lifts his beer.
A chorus of sames echoes around the table.
“Ooh,” Toni says, slapping down his cards. “I just remembered, I saw something recently about a new paintball place. It’s supposed to be play focused and nonviolent.”
“Nonviolent?” Hamza sounds skeptical. “But it’s . . . paintball.”
“Well, relatively nonviolent, at least,” Toni concedes. He pulls out his phone, tapping open a web browser and typing quickly. After a beat, his eyes scanning the screen, he says, “How cool is this? Biodegradable paintballs that you throw freehand or you can use slingshots to launch them. Peace, Love, and Paintball. It’s an indoor-outdoor space, so they run it all year long. We could go anytime.”
“I’m in!” Margo hollers.
Jamie grimaces. “It sounds extremely messy.”
Bea’s eyes glow. “It sounds amazing.”
“We should do it!” Bianca says.
“I’m in, too,” Nick tells her.
Kate glares death at him.
“Hey.” I knock her knee under the table. “Take it easy. Despite his proximity to me, he’s a good guy.”
Her lip curls, her eyes still on Nick. “I swear to God, if he messes with her, a bad haircut is going to be the least of his worries.”
“Ah, nice. Judging someone’s character by their appearance.”
“I’m not—” Kate’s cut off as a cascade of beer sloshes onto her shirt and mine, too.
“Sorry!” Bea says, picking up an empty pint glass that up until seconds ago was holding Jamie’s beer. “I didn’t even see it there and just knocked it right over.”
Kate and I stand simultaneously, flicking beer off our hands.
“It’s fine, BeeBee,” Kate says.
I force a smile. “No worries.”
We storm down the hall simultaneously, wedged close, thanks to its narrowness.
“I’m taking the bathroom,” Kate says, throwing her good shoulder into me, charging ahead.
“You have a bedroom!”
“I have to wash off the beer. I smell like a frat house.”
I stop dead in the hallway, furious. “Fine. I’ll handle my wardrobe change here.”
Kate freezes as I unbutton my dress shirt from work. “What are you doing?”
“You aren’t the only one who doesn’t enjoy being drenched in hefeweizen.”
Her eyes widen as I shake off my button-up, then grip the back of my undershirt. Some small, rational corner of my brain says this is about as far as I could possibly get from keeping my distance and de-escalating tensions with Kate, but a bigger, baser part feasts on her pupils’ dilating, that deep red flush creeping up her throat to her cheeks.
“Take the bathroom,” she croaks.
I wrench off my shirt. “Too late.”
She slaps a hand over her eyes and stumbles back into the wall. “You’re naked.”
“Half-naked.”
A shaky exhale. “What is wrong with you?”
I step past her, headed toward Juliet’s—now Kate’s—room.
“Why are you going in my room?” she shrieks.
“I keep some casual clothes here. I know you can’t relate, but your sisters actually want me to feel at home when I’m here.”
I riffle through the bottom drawer in Jules’s dresser and find a spare T-shirt, then tug it on.
The room is suspiciously silent. When I drag the collar of my shirt past my head, I see why.
Kate stands with her back to me.
Her naked back.
“Fucking hell.” I scrunch my eyes shut, turn abruptly for the door, and walk right into the wall.
That hoarse, smoky laugh dances through the air and whispers over my skin. “Don’t enjoy the taste of your own medicine?”
My eyes are closed, but she’s burned into my retinas—the curve of her waist, the line of her vertebrae straight to two soft dimples at the base of her spine. Heat rushes through me, tightens my body, as I picture my hands on her waist, my thumbs tracing those dimples, hoisting her up by the hips and dragging her close so I can bend and spread her wide, drag my tongue—
Shit. Shit.
I can’t stay here. Or see this. Or hear it. The shush of cotton slipping over her skin, the snap of a bra being smoothed out. On a pained, frustrated growl, I feel my way toward the door, then storm out, slamming it behind me.
“There you are!” Nick’s right on me in the hallway. “So, did you straighten things out with her?”
“What?” I walk past him, but Nick chases me down.
“With Kate. The one who keeps looking like she wants to castrate me every time I smile at Bianca.”
I laugh emptily. Like anything could ever be that simple with her. “Yeah, Nick. I just told her you’re a nice guy and she said, ‘Swell, Christopher. He has my blessing.’?”