Page 30 of Make Me Sin (Bad Habit 2)
Kat and Grace stare at me.
“What?”
Kat says, “Russia?”
Grace says, “Cemetery?”
I shrug, plowing into the salsa with two chips. I’m trying to make a chip-and-salsa sandwich. “Yeah. I know. What’s even weirder is that he told me when he looks at me, he sees ghosts.”
Grace starts laughing again. “He sees dead people? Like the kid in that Bruce Willis movie? This shit is solid gold!”
Kat isn’t laughing. She’s just staring at me with this really weird look, like she can’t decide if she wants to say something or not. So of course I have to know.
“Tell me right now or I’ll throw my chip sandwich in your face, girlfriend.”
She dusts off her hands, takes a swig of her drink, and wipes her mouth with her napkin. It looks like she’s stalling. Finally, she asks, “Have you guys ever noticed A.J.’s accent?”
Grace and I repeat in unison, “Accent?”
“Yeah. His accent. His oh-so-subtle-but-definitely-there European accent.”
Grace says, “You’re on crack.”
Kat shrugs. “That was almost exactly Nico’s response when I asked him about it, too.”
But I don’t dismiss it so lightly. Kat is really intuitive about certain things. Like, scary intuitive. She’s the one who told me I should check my ex-boyfriend Jeremy’s closet for my missing underwear.
“He grew up in Las Vegas. How could he have a European accent?”
Instantly, Grace has me pegged. “You Googled him, didn’t you?”
Crap. I motion to the waiter to get me another margarita.
“His tattoos are a little Russian prisony looking, though,” she adds thoughtfully.
“Prison? What?” I’m totally confused, but Kat picks up Grace’s train of thought right away.
“That’s what I thought! Those tattoos on the backs of his hands are totally Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises!”
Grace licks her lips. “God, he was so hot in that.”
“And when we were on tour, one time I saw him without a shirt. It was a total accident. I walked into the wrong dressing room. You’ve never seen a guy go sideways so fast, though. He was so pissed I thought he was going to explode. He acted like I’d caught him fucking a chicken or something.”
A chicken? I look to Grace, the expert. “That’s not a real thing, is it? Please tell me people don’t have sex with poultry.”
She smiles at me like I’m the village idiot and pats my hand.
Kat says, “If you think fucking chickens is weird, you should’ve seen some of the stuff we saw in the red light district in Amsterdam when we were on tour.” She shudders. “I’ll never look at bananas the same way again.”
“You guys are really starting to freak me out.”
“Moving on: Is his chest as lickable as it looks underneath all those stupid hoodies he’s usually wearing?”
Grace is more interested in hearing about A.J.’s naked torso than I’m comfortable with.
“I was too busy being goggle-eyed by all the tattoos to really notice. You’d never know it, but he’s got full sleeves, wrist to shoulder, in addition to stuff just everywhere, all over, front and back. Nico has lots of tats, but I’m talking hard-core. I’m talking full-on hard-core.”
I remember his face when he told me to get my ass on the back of his bike. I remember the look in his eyes. Now I imagine he’s naked, covered in tattoos, and, with that same look in his eyes, ordering me to strip and get my ass in his bed.
