Page 72 of Red Hot Harmony

She wore loose pants and a hoodie. A dark bandana covered her hair and a pair of huge sunglasses hid half her face. It was a decent disguise that had probably gotten her from the car to this room without being spotted, but that didn’t mean her presence would remain a secret for much longer.

It never did with people like us.

“Where is he?” was the first thing Shanice said to me, her panicked voice carrying over from across the room. She came to a stop before reaching the line of chairs and pulled off her sunglasses.

Through the small crack in the door that separated us from the rest of the visitors—the non-famous ones who didn’t have a bunch of paps on their backs—I spied several heads turning. Curiosity lined their features.

“I don’t know,” I muttered, stretching my legs out in front of me. Somehow, I’d managed to grab a pair of sneakers when I was leaving my place and now they were all dirty and covered in soot inside and out since my socks had taken a beating. “In some fucking tunnel with light, deciding what he wants to do.”

Shanice gave me a stare that could only be described as murderous. “Fuck you, Dante.”

“Nice to see you too, darlin’.” I rearranged my lips into a sinister smile.

The door was closed now, leaving only the two of us to face off.

The room was cold and smelled like sanitizer and I didn’t like how my memories of those first few days after the stroke were currently crowding my mind and pushing positive thoughts to the very back.

Shanice attacked one of the nurses and demanded to see a doctor. One showed up several minutes later with the news that was neither good nor bad.

Malik was unconscious but stable.

“When can we see him?” I asked, still not quite believing he was out of the woods. I needed proof of life. I needed him in front of me, breathing.

“Not yet,” the doctor said firmly, then told us to wait.

We settled across from each other. Shanice pulled out her phone and started making calls to her manager and the publicity team, and that was when the real weight of the ramifications Malik’s stunt had caused finally bore down on me.

I’d fucked up Camille’s day.

I’d fucked up everything.

Sucking in a deep, ragged breath through my teeth, I closed my eyes and rested my face in the cradle of my palms, wanting to be in the darkness, wanting to be somewhere else far away, anywhere but here.

“Do you need me to get you the nurse too?” Shanice said, the words bouncing off the tiled walls and fading into the silence of the room we were sharing.

I pulled my index and middle finger apart and looked through the whole in my palm. Shanice was staring at me, phone on the chair next to her. I realized she was no longer talking to her publicity team and the question had been addressed to me.

“I’m fine,” I rasped out and dropped my hands into my lap.

“You look like shit.”

“You would too if you’d found your friend passed out and full of drugs in your fucking pool house.”

She shifted, swung one leg over the other, then looked up at the ceiling and back at me. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t return your calls, but I didn’t know he was this bad.”

“Wow, is that an apology I hear?”

Shanice tilted her head to the side, her gaze turning viperish again. “Don’t antagonize me, Dante. I understand the situation calls for a truce, but I never liked you as a person and I never liked you as his friend.”

“Old news, darlin’. No one likes me. I’m not a cuddly guy.” It didn’t sound as flippant as I intended it to sound. It sounded bitter and angry.

“You know why?” She leaned forward, her elbow sliding across her thigh and to her knee. “Because you don’t make it easy.”

“I’m not some second-grade math problem.”

“Well, you don’t have to be a post-grad school equation either. Most people don’t get those.”

“I don’t need most people to get me.”I just need one.

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