Page 55 of Too Late

“You should twirl a strand of hair around your finger,” I suggest. “I like it when you do that.”

She smiles. “Okay. If you see me doing that it means I wish I could be alone with you.” She pulls at a strand of her hair and twirls it around her finger.

I lean forward and kiss her, then force myself out of her car. I wait until she drives away before texting Dalton again.

ME: Don’t let him alone with her before I get there. I’m scared of what he might do.

DALTON: Noted. Not sure what’s going on with him. He shot up, slept for ten minutes, now he’s talking incessantly. He keeps saying he wants spaghetti and that his hair is really thick. He’s not making any sense. He even made Kevin run his hand through his hair.

Fuck. He’s already unpredictable. This isn’t good.

ME: Let me know as soon as you all get back. I’ll wait an hour and then head that way.

DALTON: Good idea. BTW he said you were LSD. What do you think that means? Why did he call you LSD?

ME: No fucking clue.

DALTON: He said, “Carter causes the worst hallucinations and he’s hard to fucking locate. He’s LSD.”

ME: He’s out of his fucking mind.

THIRTY-THREE

SLOAN

My phone is ringing as soon as I walk through the front door. I glance down at the screen and see that it’s Asa.Great.

I slide my thumb across the screen to answer it. “Hey.”

“Hey, baby,” he says. He sounds like he just woke up, but I can tell he’s still in a car. “Are you home?”

“Yep. Just walked in the door. Are you still at the casino?”

“Nope,” he says. “On our way back.”

So I heard.

“We’re hungry. We want spaghetti. Can you cook some?”

“I have a lot of homework to do. Wasn’t really planning on cooking tonight.”

He sighs and says, “Yeah, well, I wasn’t really planning on craving spaghetti.”

“Sounds like we have a dilemma,” I say, uninterested.

“Not to me. Make some fucking spaghetti, Sloan.Please. I’m having kind of a bad day, here.”

I close my eyes and fall onto the couch. This is going to be a long night. I might as well make it as easy on myself as possible. “Okay. I’ll make you spaghetti. Would you like meatballs with that, dear?”

“I would love meatballs. We want meatballs, right, guys?”

I hear a couple of the guys in the car mutter, “Sure.”

I kick my legs up on the arm of the couch and put the phone on speaker, resting it on my chest. “Why are you having a bad day?”

It’s quiet for a minute, and then Asa says, “Have I ever told you about my father, Sloan?”

“No.”

---