Page 28 of The Cruelest Kind of Hate
“What? No!”
“Ohhh. The harder stuff?”
Fulton deadpans, “No, Gage. I brought?—”
I feel the weight of an arm sling over my shoulder, and then my body gets cramped into the furthermost side of the booth when my fuckingteammatessqueeze in next to me. Three of them, with their stupid, hockey-built walls of muscle. Physiques that clearly overcrowd the capacity of this booth and squash me into the wall like a sad, little bug.
“Fulton sent us an SOS text,” Kit explains, showing me his phone screen.
Fulton:Help. Gage is losing it in the middle of Taco Bout It.
Fulton:Update: I think he’s going to shank me with a plastic spork.
My lips pinch together to make apshsound, and I flap my hand. “I wasn’t going toshankhim. I was just having a strongly worded talk with him.”
Bristol scoots in next to Fulton, and if you’re wondering, no, he didn’t barge intoFulton’spersonal space and flatten him against the wall. “It’s alright, Gage. We’re here to help.”
Kit reaches for a laminated menu and begins poring over the afternoon specials. “Actually, I’m starving. I think I’ll order a carne asada burrito. Ooh, how are the nachos here?”
A smile teases Fulton’s lips, one of those blatantly clueless and slap-happy smiles that chubs out his cheeks. “Oh, they’re great. You should get the beef-loaded nachos. Those are the best. Though I’d ask them to add their spicy guacamole for a good kick.”
“Okay, but how spicy? Like on a scale of one to ten? I need a seven at best. Anything lower and I can barely taste it.”
“Hmm. Maybe like a six? I know their hot sauce is really spicy. So, like, with the combination of the two, it’ll be a fifteen or something.”
I slowly reach for my spork with murder on my mind, but Bristol just shakes his head and moves it out of my reach like a parent confiscating something pointy from a child.
“Look, I appreciate all of you coming down here, but I don’t need an intervention,” I growl, shoving Kit and his gigantic body over so I can breathe without my lungs being crushed.
Hayes frowns sympathetically. “No offense, man, but you’ve been a bit of a mess these past few days. Clearly something’s up. I went into your room to get a load of your laundry earlier, and it smelled like an opossum died in there.”
Kit nods in agreement. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but you do smell?—”
Rage rumbles through me so profoundly that it could’ve been a 7.5 earthquake on the Richter scale. “If you finish that sentence, so help me, God. I. Will. End. You.” And I mean it. Bristol may have confiscated my weapon of choice, but my fists are just as effective.
“Gage, the first step to overcoming a problem is admitting you have one,” Casen says, completely ignoring my empty threat as he swipes a chip from my plate.
“This ‘intervention’ will never work,” I counter, doing air quotes in lieu of the middle finger Iwantto give them.
“Just try it. Maybe you’ll feel better talking about your problems rather than threatening us with the pointiest thing in the vicinity,” Bristol offers, throwing me one of hisI’m-your-captain-and-I-know-what’s-bestlooks. He just has one of those inviting faces, you know? The face of a man you can tell your deepest, darkest secret to and he won’t alert the authorities.
“Fine. I have a problem. A Cali-sized problem. A five-foot-seven problem that I’m going to be stuck with for three months.”
One of the waitresses comes by to take the table’s orders—which end up covering a page and a half of her notepad—and Kit busies himself with working on the appetizer that just so happens to be my abandoned pile of nachos.
“What makes her so different than the rest of the girls you’ve been with?” Fulton asks.
Just thinking about Cali has my blood pressure rising. I’m surprised my brain’s even functioning enough to form a response to that. Usually it’s a hit or miss situation. She gets in my head and ties all my wires together, right after she gets done sucker-punching me in the gut withfeelings. “I don’t really know. Everything? She’s just…she isn’t wooed by my status. She doesn’t want to get with me for the fame or the money. She doesn’t suck upto me either. She challenges me, and I guess a very twisted, masochistic part of me likes that,” I confess darkly like a time-weathered alcoholic confessing his problems at an AA meeting.
“Damn, dude. You must have it bad,” Kit mumbles through a disgusting mouthful of chips and cheese.
Thank you, Captain Obvious.
Hayes ponders me with a crinkled brow, then he holds his hand out. “Can I see a picture of her?”
“What?” I choke out.
“I’m just curious.”
