Page 100 of Yolo

“First make sure you wash your hands,” Bindi teased.

Lea did.

Ruben grabbed a beer and went to the bar.

I washed my hands and did what Bindi told me to do for the next four hours.

Don’t worry about me. Worry about your eyebrows.

—Bindi’s secret thoughts

BINDI

“My brother was shot because of me,” Garrett said to my father.

I whipped my towel toward him and heard the satisfied tap of it hitting a limb.

But then my dad yelled, “Oow!”

I winced. “Sorry, that was meant for Garrett.”

Garrett was chuckling, which was better than him blaming himself, so I counted it as a win despite the wrong target.

“She doesn’t like when I say that my brother was shot because of me,” Garrett admitted. “Truthfully, whether she wants to admit it or not, it really was.”

“What happened?” Dad asked as he started heading up the front walk of Garrett’s brother’s place.

Mom was holding my hand, and each of us was balancing a tray of pies.

She squeezed my hand when I went to interrupt again. “Shhh, honey. Let him speak.”

I shut my mouth just as Garrett started talking.

“A while ago, I had a hit put out on me because of some shit that went down when I was undercover. I guess as they tried to rebuild, they’d forgotten about it. But just because they’ve forgotten about it, doesn’t mean that it’s gone. You know what I mean?”

Dad muttered a “yeah.”

“That’s why I stayed away from your daughter for as long as I did, because that hit finally caught up to me,” he explained. “I didn’t want to put her in any danger.”

“Is that how you got the scar?” Mom asked as we came to a stop at what I assumed was the front door.

I’d seen the scar, of course.

I remembered him from before after he’d explained that we’d seen each other that day when I was in town with Joseph.

I’d seen him in the hotel lobby with his K-9 officer, Boss. Though I hadn’t known who they were at the time, I’d kept his face in my mind.

It’d been captivating.

I’d seen the scar running down his face, but his eyes—they’d been so freakin’ brown. And the glasses were even cuter. I’d thought he looked like a contradiction with his scarred face and his cute black-rimmed glasses.

I was so happy to finally know what his face had looked like. I didn’t know why it mattered to me so much, but I felt at peace about it finally.

Like I knew who it was that I’d fallen in love with completely now.

“Hey, bro,” I heard called. “You need help carrying anything else over?”

“Actually, yes,” Garrett said as he walked deeper into the house. “I have a tray of some sort of appetizer…”

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