“I mean it. You know how much our friendship means to me. The last three weeks have been hell.”
He nodded. “Let’s not worry about it, drunk in a White Castle, okay? That’s flight home shit.” Logan slid into the booth beside her, draping his arm along the back, and she saw it.
The agony on Milo’s face, living in the tick of his jaw.
She hit her hands on the table. “As much fun as this is, gentlemen, if I don’t get to my hotel in the next twenty minutes, you’re going to be carrying me across the strip.”
They both laughed, but something in the slur of her voice made them take her seriously. They all fell into an Uber within minutes.
“Longest legs up front,” Milo quipped to Logan, who begrudgingly took the passenger seat.
The strip whizzed by in swaths of light and color as Milo’s hand drew circles on her knee, the impact of which she wished she was sober enough to feel.
“I’ll walk you up,” both men said when they exited the Uber at the entrance of The Cosmo.
They all exchanged glances, and she awkwardly mumbled, “The more the merrier!”
They weaved through the casino toward the Chelsea Tower elevators. The silence was deafening in the elevator with Milo on her right, Logan on her left, and her brain running a mile a minute trying not to say anything that would make things weirder than they already were.
She battled a threesome joke into submission multiple times.
When they got up to the penthouse suites, she stumbled toward their door, and Logan fished through her purse for her key card while she leaned against the wall and tried to think sober thoughts.
The door swung open and she wrapped her arms around Logan’s neck—muscle memory—and hugged him goodnight. Then, because she hated herself, she forced Milo into the same drunken embrace.
His hands splayed across her back and she realized just how thick he was compared to lean, lanky Logan. He lingered longer than Logan liked and, even drunk, she could see the disapproval pursed on his lips.
She could still hear Logan’s internal screaming as she stumbled into the room, her phone buzzing before she even got her heels off.
ALWAYS ANSWER
Meet me downstairs in ten? I’m going to the old strip.
HANNA
I’m going to die.
ALWAY ANSWER
No more drinking, I’ve got a buddy with a new tattoo shop and I promised I’d stop by.
Hanna stared at her phone, weighing the repercussions of walking out of the hotel with Milo. She snagged a bottle of water off the countertop and chugged as much as she could before she swapped her shoes and stumbled back downstairs.
The cab ride was quiet—too quiet.
Hanna hated hearing him breathe so steadily when she felt anything but. They hadn’t been alone since the night Logan walked in on them. She swallowed, her heart circulating sheer panic through her system.
“Jenner opened this place a few months ago. He did most of my work.”
“What?” Her head swiveled as the cab wound down a street behind the glowing lights of old Vegas, gliding to a halt outside of a shop with a neon sign that read TATTOO. Milo smiled and got out of the cab, rounding behind it and opening her door.
“I was saying that Jenner did almost all my tattoo work.” He held a hand out for her and she let him pull her out of the cab, the counterbalance nice as her head continued swirling.
He didn’t drop her hand until he pulled back on the metal door of the tattoo shop. The receptionist’s head snapped up from their phone, their bright pink hair catching and holding the lights that danced across the street.
“Jenner around?” Milo asked.
“Ink or jewelry?”
