The Original Crowd (A Whole New Crowd 0.50)

My win brought the team to first place.

Everyone on the team had just won a gold medal from Nationals.

Fuck yeah.

I grabbed a towel and pulled my swim-dress over my head before heading to the stands.

Mandy was visiting and Carter couldn’t have been happier.

And when I made my way up to them, amidst a sea of well-wishers, I had to wait. The two were disgusting and drowning each other.

“Ahem!” I coughed, not at all subtle.

“Taryn!” Mandy giggled, wiping her mouth. She shoved Carter aside and gave me a tight hug. “I’m so proud of you!”

“I could tell,” I said dryly.

“I am.” She blushed. “We were just—”

“Carter’s happy you’re here,” I said simply. And he was. It’d taken eight more break-ups due to Devon’s cheating, but Carter finally made a stand and the two of them had been together for a year and a half now.

“Taryn, that was awesome. You’re a great swimmer.” Whatever. Carter came for two reasons. To see girls in their bathing suits and to make-out with Mandy as much as humanly possible.

“Hey, hey.” Grayley greeted from behind me, wrapping his arms around me. In my ear, he whispered, “That was fucking hot, Taryn. Really. I’m proud of you.”

I blinked the tears away, but his words…got me right there, you know. He was my best friend.

“Geezer will be just as happy as me when I call him,” he added.

“Right. Happily stoned,” I remarked, sarcastically. Geezer hadn’t changed. He still liked the marijuana too much, but…what can you do. He’d probably always be a stoner, but Grayley had mentioned a girl. Maybe Geezer would hold back for the new girlfriend. But I wasn’t holding my breath.

“Hey, Taryn. Where’s Tray?”

“He was hoping he’d get back in time for the meet, but guess not. Chance wanted him to stick around for some extra meeting. I don’t know. He sounded

pissed on the phone last night.”

“Where’s he at?” Mandy asked.

“He flew to some conference with Chance and then they were going to visit their dad. All I know is that he was not having fun.”

“Are they still trying to recruit him?”

“Yeah. But Tray wants nothing to do with any of them. DEA, none of them. Ask me, I think Tray kind of gets a kick out of watching Chance’s supervisors send their little agents to do surveillance on him. They still think he held back a lot of his contacts when he was working for Galverson and the police force at Rawley.”

“Dude, Tray’s gotten scarier, if you ask me.” Mandy murmured, but firmly encased in Carter’s arms.

And he had. But it was a topic no one talked about. Mandy just broke that unspoken rule.

“Oh hey,” Grayley murmured, “he’s right over there.”

And there he was, looking as delectable and fine as shit.

I could see his tattoo underneath the black muscle shirt he had on and it mixed well with the second tattoo he’d gotten between his shoulder blades. It was the Hebrew word for loyalty. And it meant a lot to both of us. I’d been there when he’d gotten it and the sex had been explosive that night.

Mandy was right. Tray had gotten a bit scarier, but I knew most of it was because he was having a hard time dealing with Chance and his father. His dad hadn’t ran. He’d been prosecuted and he was in the penitentiary.

It didn’t help that some of his father’s lawyers were hounding Tray to pay them for his dad’s legal services. Tray kept refusing to pay them. He wasn’t his father and he didn’t own any of his loans. Plus, Chance was always on the phone harping at Tray. Chance was among the legends of government authorities that thought Tray hadn’t been completely honest in all the evidence he’d handed over.