“Long enough to make sure you guys don’t implode. My brothers are dimwits. Now that you’re big-timing it, you absolutely need your own separate financial advice.”
He could be honest with Evie. “Why do I feel like dipshit about it?”
Evie patted his armor-plated chest. “Because for once you’re the disruptor, not the pacifier.”
Ah, that’d be it then. He raised his arms over his head and bellowed. “I am the disruptor.”
Evie laughed, and Oscar shouted. “You are dead meat, Grippen,” and hit him in the back with a green paintball before they’d even fucking started playing.
It was on. Two against three until Jay joined the team and they worked out a strategy, which was essentially about letting Abel, Isaac and Oscar exhaust themselves, get frustrated and take useless risks. Which was some kind of metaphor dressed up in paint splotches because that’s what Grip feared they all might do with too much money.
“Mum put you on to Caroline Swire, right?” Jay said, shifting from behind the bunker they were wedged tight in to lob a shot directly at Abel’s thigh, taking him out and making him chuck an epic tantrum.
“She’s just had a bub so I’m working with Mena Grady.”
“And?” Evie ducked an incoming.
“She’s a stone-cold bitch,” who blushed the prettiest shade of pink, “with a great laugh. Won’t let me get away with any nonsense. Just what I was looking for.”
They could no longer hear Isaac or Oscar. Jay took a risk by standing to look around and a paintball whizzed past, almost nailing him. “Stone-cold bitches generally don’t have great laughs.” he said, crashing down beside Evie.
“More ice princess. White blonde, a bit stiff, focused.” When she wasn’t being embarrassed by him. “Probably thinks I’m a,” he searched for a word and landed on, “wanker,” for ease. “She’s a professional and it doesn’t matter what she thinks about me personally.”
“Makes it easier not to want to sleep with her,” Evie said.
Grip peered out from behind the rough log arrangement that formed the side of their bunker. “I think she’d break my hand if I made a pass at her, which would be, you know.” He saw a flash of movement and fired, hitting a tree, “inconvenient. And I’ve stopped doing that. The one-night thing, the quick hook-up.”
“You what?” Evie said, leaning around him to see his eyes inside his goggles.
He pushed her back and down as a volley of shots came at her bringing that unique paintball smell, fish oil and stale banana. “It was great for a long time, no strings, nothing serious, but something changed. Success, the money. Now it just makes me feel lonely.”
“Oh baby,” she said. “How long have you been in this sad state?”
He turned to Jay. “She’s fucking nosy. How do you put up with her full-time?”
Evie answered. “He thinks he’s the luckiest man alive.”
“I always was into being examined forensically,” Jay said. “It’s so hot.”
“Well?” Evie prodded Grip’s arm.
“Bugger off.”
“I’m worried about you.”
“It’s not like I don’t have options. I’m choosing not to exercise them.”
“I’m still worried. Abstinence is not you.”
He stood and fired off a series of shots at the place he thought Isaac was hiding. This game was going to go on forever and he was hungry. “You’ve been gone a while.”
Evie squeaked. “This isn’t new?”
Nope. He’d watched Evie and Jay reconnect, three years ago, almost not make it and then decide they were it for each other. He wanted that. So much feeling for another person you were made greater for it. And he wasn’t going to find something like that the way he’d been living.
In all the years of having fun with random people who were up for it, there were none who were still in his life and few he remembered. And of those there was only one who remained in his memory from when he was too young and full of doubt to know what he’d found and let go so cavalierly.
He could still picture her waist-length ink-dark hair, so black it was almost blue, her exaggerated makeup and lithe little body. She was smart and fun and addictively sexy. What he remembered most was that she’d gotten him talking, gotten him thinking.