Page 94 of Close Your Eyes and Count to 10

Reaching down, Tavo extracted from the twisted sheets a red lace thong, held it up, raising his eyebrow.

“Huh,” said Mav, sheepish. “How’d that get here?”

“You didn’t hook up with Chloe again, right? She’s trouble. You know that.”

“Brah.”

Tavo lifted his hands. “Okay, man. Whatever. We gotta get back, right? Wheels up at noon?”

Maverick agreed, and Tavo left casting him a look that Maverick couldn’t read. Maverick puked one more time, then ordered a huge greasy breakfast from room service, got in the shower, and tried to feel human.

When he got back to the phone, it was full of text notifications. Chloe.

Hey look, last night. It wasn’t cool.

The next text was just a picture, her bloodied and swollen lip. Another: big purple fingerprint marks on her arm.

What? No. Hedid notdo that. He grappled for memories of the evening. All he remembered was pleasure, her soft skin, her breath in his ear, his cock in her mouth. He’d been accused of a lot of things in this life, most of them true. But not this. He would never, ever physically hurt a woman. Never.

I’m keeping these pictures.

I have to give this some thought. I have to decide what to do next.

Then there was a notice that he had a PopTalk message.

Chloe.

He clicked on her video message. She stared intently into the camera, her lip puffed up, looking swollen and painful. “You owe me, Mav.”

The thing about PopTalk messages was that they disappeared right after you watched them. No replay, no record, no screenshots. It was just there, then gone.

You owe me, Mav.

“Mav, are you with me?” said Hector now, still waiting for his answer.

He wanted to spill it all, everything that had happened since that night.But it was so ugly, he just couldn’t get it out. If Hector hated him, Maverick wouldn’t know what to do.

“We’ll be okay,” he said again, patting Hector on the shoulder. He pushed away everything about Chloe, about Alex; it was behind a thick concrete wall inside him. “We always are, right?”

Hector looked like he was about to say something else, then just nodded. There was something odd about the way he looked at Maverick.

“Yeah, man,” he said. “Sure.”

Maverick adjusted his body cam and geared up. As soon as Tavo and Angeline got back, they’d go find the hiders. He couldn’t do it without them.

Where were they?

35

ANGELINE

Angeline’s knee always ached when a storm was coming. She trudged behind Tavo, who moved with the speed and lightness of a true athlete, seeming to leap along without the drag of gravity, ignoring her. She pushed the pain away. She’d thought that aching old injuries were just a myth until she’d started wrecking her body at those Tough Be-atch competitions. Now, her rotator cuff swelled when she was overtired. And when rain was coming—and itwascoming—her right knee was a siren, high-pitched and relentless.

She dug deep, tried to keep up with Tavo.

She’d started training for the competitions after a guy tried to overpower her in a basement bathroom of a nightclub. Not tried. Hehadoverpowered her, quickly, easily, as she’d emerged from the stall having broken one of her mother’s cardinal rules: never go to the bathroom alone at a nightclub. Especially in New York City where the bathrooms were almost all in the basement, where the music upstairs was so loud that no one would ever hear you screaming.

He had been big, she remembered that much. His narrow brown eyes were blank, glassy, unfeeling. High, drunk. His mouth tasted like tequila as he pressed it against hers, pinning her to the cold tile wall with his body. She struggled, but her arms and legs were as useless as butterfly wings against his superior strength, his weight. She still dreamed about it sometimes, that feeling of utter powerlessness, the brutality of a man taking what he wanted, of being dehumanized by another person’s desire.

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