I fought the instinct to shield my face from her penetrating gaze.
"Oh my God. Does the guy Mom said you were crushing on live around here?” She ran to her bedroom and started rummaging through her closet. There were no secrets in my life. I threw up my hands.
Chasing after her I yelled, “You’re not coming with me.”
"Did you go out with him? Is that what you were doing the other day? You went out with a GUY?" Bitsy virtually screamed the last part.
"I'm right here.” I tapped my ears to check that there was no damage to my hearing.
"You're avoiding the question," she yelled at me.
"Fine, yes, Gray is staying over at a friend's house."
Bitsy gaped at me and then pulled me in for a hug. “Gray? His name is a color? Wait, I don’t care. I’m so happy for you."
"Why?" Bitsy’s energy was making me smile, making me release my pent up hopes about this afternoon.
"Because, you've decided you haven't died along with Will."
I didn't have much of an answer to that so I just finished tying my shoes. “I love you, Bit by Bit,” I said and let myself out of the house. Bitsy’s groan echoed through the door and I couldn’t stop smiling.
CHAPTER TEN
Gray
BUILDING THE SLIP AND SLIDE had taken a couple of hours. The house had a long, fairly steep drive. We'd gone out this morning to the sporting goods store and bought seven king size air mattresses and several tent tarps, and a kid's bouncy house was in the process of being inflated at the bottom of the drive. The big motor required to inflate it was making it hard to hear, even at the top of the hill.
"You do this before?" I asked Bo as we surveyed our work. The mattresses had been laid end-to-end and covered much, but not all, of the drive. The pressure of one end of the mattress on the other was to keep them in place, like a stacked set of blocks. The tarps, which would ordinarily go beneath a tent, were stretched tautly across the top of the mattresses. Bo, Finn, Noah, and I had worked in pairs to drive in the stakes to hold down the tarps while Adam and Mal, the other two roommates, had made sure that the bouncy house was set up securely down at the base of the hill.
"Nope." Bo flipped the hammer in his hand. "Haul up the hoses." We'd also had to buy to extra hoses to make sure that we could hoist one to the top of the drive. The bill for all the supplies was astronomical, but Adam had paid without a blink. Bo told me in the car ride back that Adam's dad would think this was the best possible use of his money. I shrugged. Not my dime—and it did look fun as hell. We'd also bought a couple of gallons of baby oil.
Bo threw one at me. "Time to lube up. I'm sure you're familiar with this."
"Oh I am," I replied. "I always apply lube. It's the only way any chick can take my monster cock."
"Is that the pick-up line you're using now? Because it seems like you'd end up disappointing them when you get home."
"No girl has ever left my bed unsatisfied. That’s probably something you don't know a lot about."
"If you have to use lube, then I'm worried you don't know what you're doing in bed."
"Don't worry about me. I'm using lube because I'm going places no man has gone before."
"You're fucking their earhole?"
"Bo, I thought for sure we'd taught you a few things when you were in the service, but now it seems like you don't know your earhole from your asshole."
"That's not what AnnMarie was saying last night,” he said smugly.
"Actually, AnnMarie told me that she didn't realize dicks were longer than her hand and wondered if mine was bigger than average." I squirted more baby oil on the tarps. "I told her no, that you were just really small. Poor girl. Good thing she isn’t required to do a lot of math.”
Bo threw down his gallon container with a roar and dived across the mattresses and tarps to get at me, but I'd slicked the tarp with oil and he went sliding down. I bent over and laughed so hard I cried as he kept trying to climb up to get me and I kept squirting him with baby oil. Noah put an end to our fun when he came over with the hoses and sprayed us all down. I jumped onto the tarp belly first and rammed into Bo and gravity took us both to the bottom where we commenced wrestling.
Adam's shout to the top of the hill made me pause and look up. Bo took the opportunity to hit me. "Dammit, Bo, always when I'm not paying attention?"
"Pay attention then." He shoved my head down onto the tarp and got up. "One of these days you're going to fall hard for a girl and she's going to break your ever-loving heart."
"Been there, got the T-shirt. Never going back," I said as I popped up. Adam was hailing Sam. I ran up to the top of the hill, stripping off my oil-and-water-slicked T-shirt. I wasn't trying to look good for her—okay, maybe a little. I was panting and out of breath when I got to her, but I beat Adam by about ten feet.