Until Jinx - Happily Ever Alpha World

“Um,” he hummed, sounding reluctant to answer it.

That had me intrigued, so I angled myself to face him so I could see him better, smiling when I saw how red his cheeks were in the lights of a passing car.

“Well, did it?” I pressed.

“Yes and no,” he sighed. “It was dumb stuff that really couldn’t and shouldn’t have been attributed to me anyway—”

“What kind of dumb stuff?” Maddie pushed. “I mean, you can’t dangle a carrot in front of us and not expect us to bite.”

“Fine,” he growled. “Once when I went to the store, I bought milk for the club. It was okay when I put it in the trunk of one of the club’s vehicles, and it’d been perfect in the cart and during checkout. But when we got back, there was a small hole in it, and it’d leaked all over the trunk.”

I was slightly disappointed by that example. “That’s not so bad. Maybe something else in the bag pierced it?”

“There were four other containers of milk in the bag. We have to get three different types because of personal preferences, so it sounds like a lot, but—”

“We get it, different kinds of milk,” Maddie interrupted, sounding confused. “So how did it get the hole, then?”

“Not a clue. Unfortunately, as I was unloading the milk into the fridge, we got a callout that one of the women needed help. So I locked the vehicle up as we were leaving…” he trailed off, and I just knew what was coming.

“You forgot about the stuff that’d spilled in the car, didn’t you?”

“Yeah,” he muttered, turning onto the road that ran down the center of town. “It was summer, too, so when the next person got in to drive it—”

“Grody!” Maddie cried, then burst out laughing.

Now that I was getting a taste of the ‘jinxing,’ I wanted more. “What else have you done?” When he just glared at me out of the corner of his eye, I pointed out, “You know about the pad incident at school and a lot of stuff about me. It’s only fair.”

“Fine,” he bit out. “I was sleeping at the club one night, and the cable charging my phone set the bed on fire.”

“Holy shit,” I breathed, thinking about my own cables. “How does that happen?”

Apparently I’d been living under a rock because this didn’t shock Maddie. “I’ve heard about that before. There’s a lot of warnings about it online.”

“I was also driving down the road that’s about five minutes away from your place, Sienna, when the back wheel came off my bike. I’d just replaced it after it burst, but I hadn’t tightened it properly.” When neither of us said anything, he tapped the steering wheel nervously. “Fine, I was exhausted. We were in the middle of redecorating Blazing Inx at the time, and I was juggling it with Daniel’s Bar and the club, so I hadn’t slept in almost sixty-seven hours.”

“Go on,” Maddie encouraged, enjoying this now.

All I could wonder, though, was how was he even still alive?

“This is the last one I’m giving you,” he warned us as we pulled up in front of the bar.

I remembered it from when I was a kid and had passed it a lot since I’d moved back, but I’d never been inside. Even though it was shut for the party, it was still buzzing with activity, and the parking lot was filled with vehicles and bikes, making my stomach cramp slightly.

Needing to distract my mind again, I focused back on Jinx. Except, when I looked back at him, he was watching me with his lips pressed tightly together, his eyes searching my face to make sure I was okay.

Whatever he saw there prompted him to tell us another example. “I kind of caught on fire last Halloween. I was dressed up as Frankenstein’s monster, and when I moved my arm as I was talking, it hit one of the pumpkin candles July, Wes’s woman, had placed around the club. I don’t know if it was the material or what, but my arm went up in flames.”

Maddie had undone her seatbelt and was braced between our seats now, so I was able to make eye contact with her when she turned to look at me in shock, and then we both focused our attention back on him.

“Seriously,” I said slowly, “you can’t leave it there. What happened?”

“I ran outside the club and did the drop and roll thing on the ground. One of the guys was drunker than the rest of us that night because he’d been drinking a bottle of whisky by himself. Come to find out, he’d had roughly a quarter of it left when he’d dropped it on the ground…” When he trailed off, I winced, and could only guess at what’d happened next.