Page 29 of Stay in Your Lane!

I pursed my lips. “Hmm. Maybe? I’ll have to take a look. Maybe if I take out the one they already have.”

“Ooh, no, I don’t want to take away something they like. It’s just a thought, but if they?—”

“I switch out their toys and plants sometimes,” I said. “I like to take them out and clean them, so I put other ones in and just kind of rotate them.”

“Huh. I never thought about doing that with fish toys.”

My face heated, and I shrugged. “I’m a little neurotic about it. They actually like dirtier water, so I try not to go overboard. But they’re really, really messy eaters, so I have to stay on top of things. And peoplesaypiranhas can live with plecos—those algae eater catfish things?—but someone on a forum told me his piranhas ate them. So… I don’t take the risk.” I paused. “Sorry, I’m rambling about my fish.”

“Don’t apologize. I’m fascinated by them.” He flashed me a grin. “I’m still determined to make friends with Steve.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “Well, maybe next time you come over, I’ll let you use the net to clean the water after they finish eating.”

“You have to do that? You don’t just like, clean their tank?”

“Oh, I do. But I also have to basically let them eat, then scoop out whatever they don’t eat so it doesn’t get gross.” I glanced at him and grinned as I turned down Leon’s street. “If you cando that without getting nipped, then I’d say you’ve made friends with Steve.”

God, that dorky, charming, incredibly cute smile was going to be the actual death of me.

“Clean out the food without getting bitten?” He put out his fist for me to bump. “Challenge accepted.”

CHAPTER 9

EVERETT

Leon, it turned out, wanted to meet at Decadence. The building used to be the railroad station, back when the town had been a manufacturing hub, but after the factories shut down in the seventies the station was eventually abandoned. Only industrial trains ever came through here now; they just didn’t bother stopping anymore. The place was rezoned commercial—Dad had considered moving the family business here back when I was little, but the rent had been too high. It had gone through a lot of iterations before settling on a club, which I’d never been to before this.

Actually, I’d never been toanyclub before. I’d always wanted to go, but there was never anyone to go with me, and it wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted to do alone. What if I broke some sort of club etiquette by cutting in line, or I pissed off a bouncer, orworse, I pissed off some guy who thought I was hitting on his girlfriend, which would be ridiculous since I was gay but whatever, and then he tried to fight me and I had to defend myself, andthenthe bouncer got involved, only he kickedmeout because he thought I was the one who’d started it? What if I ended up getting arrested and went to jail for the night?

In fact, that might be a good way to talk to some cops, but the ones who worked at the jail probably didn’t know anything about this particular case, and?—

“Earth to Everett.”

I started and turned to blink at him. He’d already parked the car, turned the engine off, and had the driver’s side door open while I was sitting here with my seat belt still on. “Hey. Sorry.”

“What were you thinking about?”

Ha. I knew better than to answer that question directly. My family never bothered to ask anymore, they were so tired of my tangents. “You don’t want to know.” Kyle frowned, but I unbuckled my seat belt and got out before he could say something that was nice but would just end up frustrating him. “So, Leon said he’d be at a table in the back. Have you ever been in here before? Do you know where the back is?”

Kyle got out of the car too. “At the back of the building, I assume.”

“What if it’s not so clear where the back is once we’re in there?” I asked as we headed for the entrance. “What if it’s, like, a circle on the inside? Or a dodecahedron?”

Kyle made a noise that sounded like he was muffling a laugh. “That’s possible, but there’ll still be a back. We can ask if we need to, but really, it’s not that big a place.”

A familiar rumble began to reverberate through the air, then the ground. I stopped out of habit and turned in the direction of the incoming train, watching as the light on the front of it went from a faint dot to a blazing brightness that almost matched the intensity of the horn blast I knew was coming in five…four…

“Dude.” I nudged Kyle, then indicated putting my fingers in my ears. “You’re going to want to do that.”

A bit bemusedly, he did, then jumped as the train’s horn went off, a continuous blast that lasted all the way through the first two dozen cars before petering off. The train kept going,though, and I found myself counting as each new car went by. It was a short train, luckily, but Kyle stood with me and waited for the last one to disappear before he said, “Well. I guess if we get lost in there, we should just head in the direction of the train blast. That’ll be the back of the building.”

“Good call.”

I was a little disappointed to find that there wasn’t a bouncer waiting at the door to undo a velvet rope and let us in. There also wasn’t a line of people out the door, and once we got inside the music, surprisingly, was the mellowest rock ‘n roll instead of the mind-melting techno I’d expected.

Wow. Movies had a lot of lies to answer for.

“It’s just a bar!”

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