Page 4 of Live for Me

“No. We just take secret pictures of you all day long and send them to the group chat that we’re in with Triss.”

“I meant did she tell you that I touch her too much?” I paused for a second. “Please tell me you aren’t actually sending pictures of me to those girls?”

“I keep the good ones for myself,” he said and shrugged his shoulders before he went back to preparing to fire.

The thing about Indy was that every word of that statement could’ve been the absolute truth, or every word could’ve been entirely fabricated from nothing. Maybe even something in the middle, where only parts of it were true, but he’d added something extra just to fuck with me. And I would probably never find out for sure which scenario it was.

I stayed out there with Indy to answer his questions and offer anything I knew about guns until he decided that he was done for the day. It was nearly dark outside by the time we were headed back toward the house. New Jersey’s groundskeeper, Kyle, was already out setting up his evening campfire routine with his dog, and Indy was chattering away about what kind of pizza he was going to go pick up for everyone. All while my mind lingered on Memphis.

She was uncomfortable with me compared to the way she acted with the others. I very much wanted to change that.

I waited until Indy left to retrieve his pizza before I went to knock on the door of her room.

“It’s open, Indy,” Memphis called quietly from the other side, because that’s how infrequentmytrips were to her corner of the house. I pushed it open and waited in the doorway while covering my mouth with my hand to try to keep from laughing. She’d completely deconstructed the 3566 and had its pieces scattered across her desk while a video of someone talking about firing pins played on her laptop.

“Sorry,” she said without bothering to turn around. “I saw your text, but I was—” She stopped talking when I cleared my throat.

“Did he really send you a picture of me?From today?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“What?” Memphis asked and laughed. “No. Why would he do that?”

I stared at her until she rolled her bottom lip between her teeth. She glanced back to her desk quickly and made sure to flip her phone upside down before she looked back to me.

“That fucking guy,” I said and shook my head.

“How long have you known about that?” she asked.

“How long have you guys been doingthat?”

“I don’t want to answerthat,” she laughed.

There she went again.

An adorable laugh was all it took to shut down the logical part of my brain and kick the animal side into high gear.

The side that wanted to take her smiles and her laughs just to turn them straight into gasps and moans.

No wonder she was uncomfortable around me.

“What are you doing, angel?” I asked and walked the rest of the way into her room to take the slide from her fingers.

“Learning.”

“Where’d you get the tools?” I asked, taking note of the equipment she’d managed to gather to actually sit here and fucking clean the internal pieces of a firearm without ever having learned to shoot one.

“I asked Kyle.”

“You could’ve asked me.”

This girl pinned me right in place with those perfectly green eyes when she looked up at me. She very clearly put a lot of effort into what she did with her makeup most days, and the whole goal of it was always to make her eyes look even bigger and even brighter than they were. It worked phenomenally in her favor because I couldn’t breathe any better than I could move in that moment.

“I learn better when I just teach myself.”

“Just because you’re used toneedingto do it yourself doesn’t mean you learn better that way. The video you’re watching isn’t a Smith & Wesson.”

“Most guns are made of the same inner components. The concepts needed to take them apart to clean them and put them back together are transferable across manufacturers as long as you’re paying attention while you take them apart.”

Yikes.

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