Page 18 of Shattered Veil

“What look?” I interrupted him. “I have a look?”

“It’s like…you’re a jack-in-the-box that’s been cranked to juuuust before it’s about to pop,” Shawn explained.

I nearly snorted. Though his description was apt, I muttered, “I don’t look like that.”

“Maybe I just know you well.” He shrugged. “Worked in the same space for a few years; I’d like to think so.”

I sighed. “Fine. Maybe you have a point.”

“So…”

“So…what?”

“So,” Shawn pressed, “ask her out.”

I grimaced. “Zoey’s boyfriend’s little sister.”

He cocked an eyebrow up high. “Lingering tension between you and Zoey?”

“God, no…that was months ago. It just feels…wrong?”

“Dirty,” Shawn corrected me, and I threw him a quick glare.

“There’s a—a bro code about shit like this, right? Thou shalt not pursue a bro’s sibling.”

One of his dark eyebrows raised up. “How close are you with Zoey’s boyfriend? He’s a bro now?”

“Complicated friend circle,” I stated. “Kinda.”

Shawn immediately replied, “Mmkay, well, do you think Cassie’s into you? Because I was up front and center for the tension bomb, and it was comin’ from both of you.”

I ground my teeth together. “We wouldn’t work,” I told him simply. “All of the other stuff aside, I’m a jealous guy—”

“Turner,” Shawn laughed disbelievingly, “that’s an understatement. I saw your face on Friday.”

I exhaled. “Yeah, she makes me a little crazier than normal. I get it. Point being, even if she wasn’t strictly off-limits, I don’t want to be…I dunno…toxic.”

Shawn began to hum the Britney Spears song by the same name. His maroon sweater-clad shoulders bobbed from side to side, I allowed him to do so as I watched him with half-lidded eyes, and then he sang an off-key, high-pitched:

“I’m addicted to you; don’t you know that you’re toxic?”

“Shawn.”

He beamed a smile at me. “I’ll allow the first-name calling. You’re stressed. You do you, boo…speaking of you being crazy—”

“Where’s this going?”

“I swung by the sales cubes. Tommy got in early.”

I threw my head back and groaned loudly, following it up with a hushed, “Couldn’t he just have quit? Save me the misery of potentially seeing his face?”

“You broke his fingers, Jay.”

I cringed at the news, though I had a sneaking suspicion of that already. “And you know this because…”

“Because he has splints on the index and middle fingers on both of his hands, James! He was typing like this.”

Shawn then held his arms out to the side, pointing them down at ninety-degree angles, and began to individually click buttons on his keyboard with fingers that he kept forcedly straight.

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