He shook his head. “No. But Olivia – ”
I turned around and walked away, not in the mood to get another warning about what a bad person Colt was.
Please don’t let me be wrong about him, I thought as I headed down the sidewalk back toward the club. And then I began to run, as if the quicker I got back to him, the more chance my wish had of coming true.
I spent the first few hours of the day back in the office while Colt dealt with some kind of delivery probably with one of the kitchen vendors. I fell into a steady rhythm of entering receipts into the computer, the work so monotonous it tempered my anxiety from a rapid boil to a rolling simmer.
But the whole time, my necklace lay heavy against my chest, a reminder of my reality.
Colt and I ordered in sandwiches for lunch, ate them sitting around my desk, talked about food and the weather and a baseball game Colt wanted to watch, what we should do this weekend.
It was ridiculously normal, and I wanted to scream into my necklace, to tell stupid Caleb that I’d been right, that Colt wasn’t a bad person, that I was done helping them, that I didn’t give a crap if they arrested me.
After lunch, it was more office work, until finally, at six o’clock, Colt returned to the office.
“Do you want to go home?” he asked. “I could take you.”
I shook my head. “No, I...I want to stay here with you.” I felt myself flush at him calling his apartment “home.” I knew he meant his home, but still. It felt very intimate somehow.
“Oh, yeah?” he teased, and walked over to me, pulling me out of my chair and putting his hands behind me on the desk before pressing his body against mine. “You want to stay here with me?”
“Yes,” I said, grinning as his lips brushed mine.
“What will we do?” he murmured.
“Colt!”
“What?” he asked, acting innocent. His hand moved up under the bottom of my shirt, brushing against my belly. “You didn’t have a problem with it on the couch the other day.”
“Colt!” I said again. I giggled and pointed at my necklace, imagining a truck full of FBI agents listening to Colt and I have sex.
“I don’t give a fuck,” Colt mouthed to me, and he was so close and his lips so hot against my neck that he almost convinced me that I didn’t give a fuck either, and I leaned back on the desk as his hands moved down and unbuttoned my jeans.
But a second later, there was a knock on the office door.
“I’m busy,” Colt barked.
“Colt?” a woman’s voice called. “It’s Ava.”
Ava. The girl from the other night, the one who’d told Colt she’d take him to the after party, the one with the tanned skin and the perfect breasts. Jealousy welled inside of me.
“I’m busy,” Colt said again, his lips still pressed against my neck.
“It’s your uncle,” she said. “He’s here.”
Colt straightened up slowly, buttoning my pants back up and then he was off of me, walking over to the door and throwing it open.
Ava stood there in a tiny sparkly pink string bikini, her nipples like gumdrops through the fabric. “Sorry,” she said. “But your uncle’s here and he’s acting like a dick.”
“What are you talking about?” Colt demanded.
“He’s out on the floor,” she said. “He was giving one of the girls a hard time.”
Colt was out the door in a flash, weaving through the hallways toward the front of the club. I followed him, struggling to keep up with his long strides.
Out in front of the main stage, the lights were down low and a girl named Amber was on stage dancing to a slow beat. The strobe lights passed across the floor lazily. The club wasn’t busy yet – it wouldn’t heat up until around eight or nine, and then get progressively busier from there.
I spotted Colt’s uncle right away. He was sitting at a table toward the middle of the club, dressed in a black leather jacket and nursing a beer.
I watched as Colt approached him. The two men talked, their heads bowed, both of them looking serious.
“What’s going on?” I asked once Colt came back to where I was standing on the side of the room, where the curtain separated the main from the back corridor. “What did he say?”
“He claims he’s just stopping by for a beer.” But Colt didn’t sound sure. He looked over his shoulder to where Mick was sitting. Mick looked harmless enough, just sitting there, watching the girl on the stage move lazily to the beat as she reached up and unhooked her tiny bikini top, her large breasts falling out.
But then he took a pull from his beer and his snakelike tongue licked his bottom lip, and an involuntary shiver moved up my spine. I remembered what Colt had said, how his uncle had beat him, and my anger burned bright.
“And you believe him?” I asked.
“No.”
“So what are you going to do?”