“What is that dreadful sound?” Katarina says, her nose turned up as she moves into the villa, walking past me. “Kricket, Krow, are you here?”
The sound of a donkey-man hee-hawing sounds from a bedroom upstairs. The noises are followed by what sounds like a girl screaming. Only, I know it isn’t a girl screaming.
Katarina seems beside herself as she runs up the stairs and barges into Kricket’s room. She falls backward. Miss Perfect, in her four-inch black stilettos and her matching pencil skirt, has fallen on her ass in the hallway.
Bradley jolts after her to help his pretty fiancée off the ground, but when he looks into Kricket’s room, it’s like the winds of whatever is happening in the room blow him back against the hallway wall.
“What is that?” Bradley asks, sounding horrified. “Is that a ... a taser? Why is it up ... there ...”
“Oh my God,” Kricket yells. “Kat, what are you doing here?”
Kat is in shock, O face and all. “What am I looking at?”
“It’s a long story,” Kricket says without missing a beat.
“Can he breathe like that?” Kat asks, taking a step closer to the room. She recoils just before walking inside. “Tristan?”
Oh, how fun, they know each other too. “Hey,” he says, his response muffled by the massive ball-gagger in his mouth.
“You know this is a term for dismissal,” Kat tells him.
Rule: No relationships or relations.
“No, it’s not,” Kricket replies, knowingly. “Little do you know, I went back and read all the fine print Daddy laid out.”
Daddy.
“Whoa, whoa, what does your dad have to do with this?”
Bradley rights his posture and presses his hands against my shoulders, pushing me down the hall toward my bedroom. “This isn’t a good time.”
“Oh, no, no, this is the only time.” I grab Bradley by the collar of his shirt and drag him into my bedroom. “What the hell did you get yourself into?”
“I do love her,” he says. That is not what I just asked him.
I wave my hands in front of my face. “Bradley, snap out of it.”
“What am I supposed to do?” he asks. His confidence is disappearing by the moment.
“Start talking … from the beginning,” I tell him.
Bradley runs his fingers through his … new … hair and takes a seat at the edge of my bed. He kicks my open suitcase that’s sitting on the ground in front of the bed. “You were serious about leaving, huh?”
“Talk, Bradley.”
“Everything is great,” he says.
“Are we on camera?” I mutter, looking around the room for evidence.
He shakes his head to say no but doesn’t answer verbally. “This is a great opportunity for you.” He stands from the bed, spotting my laptop sitting on the writing desk. He sees my notebook and a pen, opens it to a clean page and scribbles words. “This social study truly has nothing to do with you, but you’re an asset—if that makes sense. Plus, you get to live in this beautiful villa and meet some great guys.”
“Who I can’t get involved with,” I remind him.
He waves me off as he continues writing in the notebook. “Right now,” he responds. “When this is all over, who knows what can happen, right?”
He’s scratching his pen against the paper, making lines and bullets. I can’t imagine what he’s writing. “When this is over, I won’t still be standing here, Bradley. There is literally nothing aside from the free rent that is making me want to stay here. Mom and Dad’s one-bedroom condo sounds like heaven right now. Did you see what your future sister-in-law is into? Yeah, I walked into that happening on the kitchen table last night.”
“I know,” he says.
