But I didn’t care. I wanted him to come back. I wanted him to hurt me. Just as long as he came back.
“What are they like?” I asked, breaking the silence and trying to change the subject. “The horsemen? Besides Damon, I mean?”
I already had an idea of the tool he’d turned into. I couldn’t believe I’d suspected him to be my ghost. My guy was out of this world. And he didn’t smoke, thank goodness.
“Well, Kai’s the nicest,” Rika’s friend, Claudia, said.
“He’s bad in all the right
places, though,” someone else teased.
“He and Damon look a lot alike,” Claudia continued. “Both dark hair and eyes, but Kai’s more…manicured, I guess you could say. Damon always looks like he just shifted back to his human form after being a wolf all night.” She laughed. “His hair and clothes are never in order…”
“And Will?” I asked, trying to get the focus off Damon.
“Will’s nice, too,” Rika chimed in, “but he’s not as sincere as Kai is, I think. He’s good-looking and even better for a laugh. He treats girls better than Damon or Michael do, but…I don’t know.” She trailed off, pensive. “He’s never serious. I don’t think he’s ever had a serious girlfriend like Kai has, has he?”
“Maybe his heart already belongs to someone he can’t have,” Claudia said.
“Aw.”
“Yeah, like Damon,” Noah chuckled. “They’re very close. Like really close, I hear. He keeps Will on a leash. Figuratively speaking.”
“And Michael?” I pressed.
“Michael.”
“Michael.”
“Michael.”
They all sounded off around the table, and I heard Rika heave a sigh to my left.
“Rika knows all about him,” Noah teased.
“Shut up, you guys,” Rika scolded, sounding embarrassed.
After a moment, she spoke up, answering my question. “He’s kind of the leader,” she explained. “Probably on his way to the pros eventually. Light brown hair, golden skin, hazel eyes. Polar opposite of Will. He’s very serious.”
“Hazel eyes. Bedroom eyes,” Claudia taunted. “Rika’s slept in his bed. Did she tell you that?”
Slept in his bed? He had to be eighteen. Or almost anyway.
“I was thirteen,” she explained, “and he put me there. It’s not like he slept there, too. I told you guys that.”
And then she spoke to me. “I grew up around him. Our families are close, so I’m at his house a lot.”
“That’s code for ‘she loves him, will have his babies, and keep your damn paws off’,” Noah told me.
I nodded once, heeding the warning. “Gotcha.”
All of a sudden, music poured out of the speakers and commotion went off around us. People laughed and hooted, and I trained my ears, trying to figure out what was happening.
Was that seriously a Bobby Brown song?
“Oh, my God,” someone said and laughed.
“What?” I asked. “What’s going on?”