Page 45 of The Show

She’d spent most of the flight buried between her laptop and a notebook, resurfacing every twenty minutes or so to ask me question about baseball, before her head went down again. I remember laughing a couple of times, I remember trying not to stare too much, but that was near impossible, especially when I’d never been privy to such uninterrupted alone time with her. And I remember making arrangements for when we got back to New York to head directly to the stadium, to figure out a game plan.

I called out as I walked through Dylan’s house, getting no response before I found them by the pool, stretched out on wide sun loungers; Dylan and Lowe. My heart was on the verge of stopping.

A jug of mimosas was dripping condensation on the table between them but they hadn’t noticed, because from the looks of it, they were far too deep into their conversation.

But there they were. In bikinis.

Specifically Lowe… in a very tiny bikini. I couldn’t give two shits what my sister was wearing.

I stopped walking, frozen in place and not wanting to get any closer than absolutely necessary. Five hours fully clothed on a plane was one thing; a flimsy strip of material being the only thing separating us was quite another. I could already see her pebbled nipples from here, the ripple of pert, smooth flesh as she laughed at whatever Dylan was telling her.

Nope. This was a line I would not survive crossing.

I tried to back away as slowly as possible before they noticed. But it was too late.

“Hey, Penny! How’d it go?”

I took one more step back. “Good. We’re all going to the game tonight.”

“Cool. Hey, can you get…” Dylan hollered but I’d already turned on my heel and fled.

I wasn’t getting her anything until I’d gotten my ass in a cold shower.

9

Penn

Jupiter Reeves was not having a good game.

It was almost as if he was distracted by something.

So far tonight, he’d missed an easy catch and got caught out on second base. His bat wasn’t having a good game either, especially after he smashed it in half.

R.I.P.

“What’s going on with Reeves?” Decker leaned over me, motioning to the beer dispenser guy as the crowd watched Jupiter storm off the field. “This is pretty embarrassing.”

“I know,” I grinned, because yeah it was embarrassing, but I was also pretty sure I knew why he was falling apart.

Decker handed over a twenty, then passed me two beers which I in turn handed over to the girls. “Think this is because of you?”

I waited to watch Lowe take her beer, witness the smile she shot my way before sipping it, her tongue darting out to lick the foam which had stuck on her lip.

My. God.

It took all my willpower to turn back to Decker and focus on his question, instead of what I wanted that tongue to be doing to me. “I hope so, because then it would mean he’s considering it. If he wasn’t, he’d be totally focused.”

“What did you offer in the end?”

“Anything he wants.”

He tore his eyes away from the field, The Dodgers’ fans going wild at the first home run of the game, “Shit, buddy, you might actually get him. That’s gotta feel good.”

I leaned in, away from prying ears, “Honestly, Deck, it does, but it means this shit is real and now I have to deliver. But if he says no, I have to come up with another plan, which I don’t currently have.”

For the first time in my life, I was beginning to regret not having a Plan B.

I’d never believed in the concept before. Plan B was for the weak; for those who didn’t have the faith in themselves to follow through. I was a Plan A man all the way. But right now, my Plan A was teetering on a knife’s edge, because everything revolved around the decision of one individual who had never previously shown any inclination to do what I was asking of him.

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