I turn to my friend, teasing, “Just don’t send one of our old buddies after her for a young wife of his own to match yours after I leave, okay? She’s a kid.” I grab a weight bar. “And leave them alone.” I indicate the boys she’s with. “You’ve settled into calm, domestic bliss. Keep it that way.”
I should’ve been as smart as him back in the day, and then I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now.
He circles around my other side. “You saw his tattoo?” he asks under his breath.
I dart my eyes to the Green Street guy with Quinn. “Yes.”
I’ll ask Lance about Green Street later. It’ll save me from asking Madoc. I was hoping to avoid any mention of the club altogether, but I see now that it will be impossible.
Lance and I get busy lifting, one of my eyes staying on Quinn through the mirror in front of us.
“Sit ups.” Noah gestures her to the floor. “Wanna race?”
She breathes out a laugh. “No.”
Quinn moves to the pec machine, straddling the seat and sitting tall with her back arched. I shift my gaze away from her hips in her tight leggings.
“Leave her alone,” the other one chimes in. “You can’t fit her into your schedule anyway, Van der Berg.”
The latter just smiles at him. “Wanna race?” he repeats.
“Not really.” Green Street shrugs. “We already know I’m a betterrider.”
“Can you even get into a bar?”
“And when I can,” he moves in closer to Noah, “what are you going to do then?”
“Take Quinn to a different one.”
She snorts, quickly folding her lips between her teeth to stop from laughing.
I scowl.
She rises from the machine, grabs a free weight in each hand, and raises both arms over her head. But she stops before she even starts, pivoting toward Green Street, who lurks behind her.
“Come around the front,” she instructs, pointing.
He smirks. “Yes, ma’am.”
He moves to the area in front of her, not at all embarrassed that she knew he was ogling her ass.
Quinn lifts both arms into the air, again and again. “So I hear you leapt at the chance to move here,” she tells Van der Berg. “Is this you living the good life?”
Why am I not talking to her? And if I’m not talking to her, then why don’t I move-the-hell-on to another area?
Noah puts his foot up on a bench, leaning his shoulder onto a machine as he smiles playfully at her. “You mean, is it fun not waking up at four-thirty in the morning to shovel snow with a hangover because the Internet has been down for a week due to a storm, and the only thing to do is remain consistently drunk?” he retorts. “When you get to wake up every day and know that not one hour will be spent being unhappy, yeah, that’s the good life.”
To that, she smiles. Soft, genuine, and it stays there.
Fucking little shit. He sure knows how to talk to women. He’s sensitive, personable, wise… I don’t like him.
“Touché,” she breathes and then turns to the other. “What about you? Living the good life?”
He doesn’t miss a beat. “The only way out is through.” He shoots Noah a look. “I don’t leavemypeople behind.”
Noah’s eye twitches, but he doesn’t argue.
So, they both live here. Or close, anyway. Green Street Guy is younger than Quinn and Van der Berg. But probably only by a year or two. I gathered that much.
