Page 31 of Time to Bounce

Probably.

Bashing him isn’t enough. I need to talk to his mom to explain, in detail, what he did.

—Athena’s secret thoughts

ATHENA

The tickets on my counter mocked me.

I had two tickets to Okinawa, Japan.

I also had a trip for two planned.

Four years ago, when I’d booked this trip, it’d been with the understanding that I would have Gavrel with me.

Years ago, when I’d told my brother I wanted to visit where I was born, he’d immediately started planning out our trip.

Our first stop would be Okinawa, where I was born. Then we’d hit up all the other historic landmarks in a two-week vacation, not including travel time.

I’d forgotten all about this trip after he’d died, and hadn’t remembered until a few days ago when the reminder to check into my flight arrived from my travel planner, as well as her letting me know that she charged my card for the tickets.

In four days, I would be going to Japan.

And I wanted to ask Gable to go with me.

We didn’t have a relationship.

Sure, we had some awesome chemistry.

However, I wasn’t fooling myself into thinking we had more.

He hadn’t called once since we’d spent that night together.

Nor had he made any indication that he wanted anything more to do with me.

But, without giving myself time to overthink it, I dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and my Nike Air Maxes—that may or may not have been child sized—and headed out to my car.

It was just after six in the evening, and it took me twenty-two minutes to drive back to the bar.

After talking to Shasha the next day after going to the bar, he’d urged me not to go back, that he didn’t want to mess with a police investigation.

I’d agreed, because I didn’t want to mess with it either, and stayed out of it.

But that was before the tickets popped up in my email…

Truthfully, it would make more sense to ask Garrett.

He was pretty friendly with me.

At work—my job was a dispatcher for DPD—I’d really gotten to know him, as well as the rest of his family.

Though one Carter still remained elusive to me.

Gable was the only one out of the entire family that I didn’t see.

Since dispatch was in a different building from the PD, it wasn’t often that I saw them.

But they still stopped by to say hi.

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