Frustrated, I pull on some clothes, grab my keys, and start to go search for her. However, when I open my door, Bill is standing there with none other than George Malone.
I’ve seen this movie.
This is the part where the obsessed city guy who stalked the girl gets killed and dumped in the lake.
“Good!” Bill says with a wide smile on his face. “You’re up! Challenge committee is meeting in ten minutes. You can ride with us.”
George has his eyes narrowed as he looks past me and into my house.
“Kylie here?” he finally asks, his eyes meeting mine.
Not awkward at all.
“Nope,” is the only response I give while walking out, moving between them as I head toward the dock. “So what happens at these meetings? And how much warning is there usually?”
“It’s always spontaneous and there’s a lot of arguing. This year, we finally get the best challenge passed, because we have you,” Bill says.
He claps my shoulder.
Benson drives by in the new ski boat he just bought, since Lilah’s boat finally crapped out and she took his boat as a wedding present to herself. Killian and Hale are with him, and I half want to slap them for not being the ones to come get me.
Killian and Hale turn to give me a telltale grin when they see the beastly Malone right on my heels. Dicks. This is because I canceled steak night to spend all night with Kylie.
Without thinking too much about it, I hop down onto George Malone’s hover boat, wondering if I should leave a note for someone to find in case I go missing.
Refusing to look at him again, I concentrate on Bill, hoping to get some insight into what kind of madness I’m about to walk into.
“It’s a very classy gathering,” is his only lie.
***
“For the last time, Hale, we are not going to wear loin cloths as a challenge! It’s not decent!” Vick—the only cop in this town—groans. “No one wants to see balls all the time.”
“My balls are beautiful,” Hale deadpans.
“You knew the ones with tiny dicks would never go for this,” Killian tells his brother dryly. Then reaches down and grabs his crotch. “They’d have to be put to shame by us, then all those desserts and casseroles would start coming to the Wild Ones instead of the boring ones.”
Vick palms his face, as Joey starts arguing that his dick is the biggest dick he’s ever seen, even if he’s not a Wild One. Paul gets in on this argument, also raving about his ‘massive stallion’ that has his girlfriend ‘wild’ with glee.
I just slouch in my seat, trying not to draw attention to myself as I soak in all the crazy around me.
“This is why we banned Wild Ones from these meetings. Why did you let them back in?” another man asks. “There’s a reason they can’t all be in the same place at the same time for very long.”
A guy—a Wild One from the Nickel family, I think—makes a sound that eerily mimics a jaguar’s battle cry, and another guy falls out of his chair.
The jaguar impersonator snorts a laugh and bumps fists with the guy on his left, who is also laughing.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, someone get them out of here. This is getting ridiculous,” another man groans.
“I’m cool with the loin cloth challenge,” Kai Wilder states absently, a massive knife in his hand as he shaves the head of his brother in front of him.
Because publicly shaving your brother’s head with an apparently super sharp machete is a completely normal thing to do while having a town challenge committee meeting.
“Because you’re a Wild One,” Killian says with a shrug. “And they don’t have the balls to go through with it,” he goes on, gesturing around at a few red-faced, angry men.
“This is why they were banned,” a bearded man gripes as he gestures to Hale, who is pretending to hump the face of the man getting his head shaved by a machete, causing an eruption of laughter from everyone around.
Even I have to restrain a smile when the half bald guy reaches for Hale, and misses by inches, not giving a damn there’s a knife close to his head as he leaps to his feet and scrambles to grab the quick-footed Vincent.
Seeing a guy with half a head of hair and half a bald head curse as he chases Hale, slinging shaving cream everywhere in the process…well, it’s not something you witness every day.
Hale laughs as the bigger guy chases him, and Kai Wilder wipes the machete blade off on his jeans to remove the shaving cream.
“What’s the vote? Who wants to do the loin cloth challenge?” Vick says on an exasperated sigh.
Only the Wild Ones, excluding Benson, raise their hands.
“So that’s a no. Onto the next challenge suggestion,” Vick says as he reads a card. Then he groans as his eyes come up to meet Bill’s. “Again, Bill? Seriously?”