The Not - Outcast

I was assassin quiet.

He was there.

He was in the bed.

But, hold breath, hold breath—he was still sleeping.

Gah. He looked so good. The bedsheets slipped down so I could see his back and his sculpted shoulders and those very very broad shoulders. I was still on the shoulders. Moving down. The curve of his spine, how his back was so contoured and itching for me to touch it—nope.

Assassin mode back on. I was fully not paying attention to anything in the feelings department.

Spying my purse (I didn’t even remember bringing it with me), the rest of my clothes, and my sandals, I nabbed all of them.

I tiptoed out of the door, still being my assassin badass self, and once in the hallway, once I had pulled the door shut, I moved down the hall a little bit. I shimmied up my skirt, toed on my sandals, and was ready to roll.

I was not waiting around, so I reached for the door, and the alarm panel caught my eye at the same time I had the door open. An ear-splitting alarm pierced through the house, and I had a split-second decision to make.

Stay or bail?

I bailed. And awkwardly fast.

So not an assassin move.

My sandals were kicked off. I bent down, grabbing them and then I was running barefoot down the driveway. I turned down the sidewalk just as I heard the front door being wrenched open behind me, and I immediately went into stealth-mode.

I mean, not really.

There was actually a line of tall privacy hedges blocking his house, so I’d only managed to get behind the hedges. If he came out to the road, he’d see me. Because of that, I hotfooted it down the block. Seeing a tree big enough to shield me, I stepped on the other side of it.

Then, I called Sasha and gave her my new location.* * *I was walking down the block, on the other side of the road when Sasha found me.

I’d told her that I was going to be on the move.

A short toot on the horn and her minivan pulled up next to me.

It’s an unspoken rule that no one is to ask Sasha why she has a minivan. It’s been asked before, and the person who asked the question was never seen again. (That was a bit dramatic, but for real, I never saw the girl again who asked. I’m sure she lives in New Jersey, now married with two kids, but I learned to respect that rule.) I never asked why she drove a minivan. She just did. It was now Matilda, our home-mobile. Or that’s what Melanie called it. Sasha didn’t have a name for it.

The back had been converted into a small bed, so some mornings, it was the miracle van and not a minivan. Which was amazing if Sasha was picking us up on hangover-mornings.

I climbed up, strapped in, and turned.

She had my coffee waiting for me in hand. I took it, and there was a breakfast sandwich perched on top.

I so loved my girl.

“Thank you,” I moaned from how good the coffee smelled.

She gave me a cocky grin before pulling forward and turning at the next street. “So, you ran, huh?”

I groaned, closing my eyes. “I hid.”

“You hid?”

“Behind a tree.”

She choked. “A tree?” She groaned. “Girl.”

“I know.” I groaned again.

“And your reason being?”

I was already shaking my head, knowing she was going to ask. “I have no idea.”

Bleak. I was so bleak.

She let out a sigh, hitting the turn signal and pulling over. “I should take you back.”

“No!”

Christ. My heart stopped just at the thought of that.

“You don’t think I don’t know how you felt about him in college?”

Oh. Crap. Where was Melanie with the toilet jokes when I needed her?

“College?”

I was still so bleak here.

I knew this was a serious talk because Sasha was not sticking to her one-word commentary. She was being real. And her voice was gentle as she said, “And since college. He’s best friends with your brother—”

“Stepbrother, and he’s not family anymore. Deek and Natalie divorced.”

“Still. You guys share a brother. That connects you, and he’s connected to your hockey hottie in a big way. Why do you think I was hitting on him last night?”

Blood rushed to my face. I was hot, like red in the face hot.

I didn’t think she knew, so I thought it’d been a ‘miss’ kind of thing.

I eyed her, biting my lip. “You knew?”

She laughed. “You go to every home game. I know you work a lot, but gurl, I am not stupid.”

“You’re at the strip club.”

She snorted. “Like I don’t keep tabs on my girls. You included.”

See. Total secret agent.

Pressure was building in my head. I knew I should have her take me back, but there’d been dreams and delusions. All that got steamed over when my own stepbrother took one look at me in college, in my own living room, and gave me such a look of disdain and condemnation that was burned in my head to this day.