Page 186 of Duty and Desire
“Without the benefits, of course,” Mag added.
“Lottie, babe, step up the matchmaking shit,” Mo ordered, leaning hips against the counter beside me as I reached to my purse so I could switch out what I needed to my clutch.
But I felt it, that “it” was strong, and I had to stop what I was doing to look around.
I turned my head side to side to see everyone’s attention on me.
Even Axl had pushed up on my couch so he could look around the back of it my way.
“Matchmaking shit?” Boone asked.
“Lottie’s gonna set you boys up,” Mo told them.
I was?
“Let them be strippers. Please, God, if you love me even a little bit, let them be strippers,” Mag prayed, head tipped back, eyes to my ceiling and everything.
“Actually, Mag, we have a girl working her way through college at the club. She wants to be an engineer. And she’d besoyour thing,” I told him.
His eyes came to me. “An engineer?”
“Software.”
Mag started to look like he might be quietly choking.
He clearly was when his next words sounded strangled. “A computer nerd?”
“Yep,” I said and turned back to my purse, trying not to smile.
Though I would never, in a million years, introduce Evan to him. He was a dawg. He was hot and he was funny and he loved Mo and he was sweet to me.
But he was a dawg.
And Evie was very pretty, in an understated way, when she didn’t have teased-out hair and wasn’t (somewhat awkwardly, she never got the hang of it, but she was so pretty, it didn’t matter) slithering on a stage with bills poking out of her g-string.
I already felt bad enough—for Magandthe women he involved—that Mag was working out his heartbreak from Nikki by tapping as much ass as he could to block out the pain.
Mo had told me she was the reason he needed a place to live. Nikki and Mag broke up three weeks before Tammy and Mo broke up. He’d been sleeping on Axl’s couch, until Mo’s breakup saved him from chronic back pain.
I wasn’t going to subject Evan to his This All Could Be Yours If Some Other Woman Hadn’t Fucked Me Up Routine.
Until…
“No offense to your friend, but I’ll pass,” Mag told me.
That bought him my attention again.
My attention with squinty eyes.
“You got a problem with smart girls?” I asked sharply.
“Well…” he shrugged, “yeah.”
I couldn’t believe my ears.
“Why?” I rapped out.
“Babe, if they’re smart, they can figure you out. Not everyone is level-headed, even keeled and adjusted like Mo,” Mag returned. “I don’t need some smart girl figuring out my shit.Ican’t even figure out my shit. What I know is, my shit is such shit, I don’twantit figured out.”
