Page 170 of The Storm

“Hey!” I say.

“Relax.” He grabs my shoulders and shakes me. I think he figures it’s gently, but he’s a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound NFL player and most of his weight is muscle.

“I can’t relax.” I try to take my phone back.

“You will. I’m keeping this for the rest of the night.” He slides the phone into his pocket. “You’ve done enough. There are people here who can take care of stuff. In fact, listen up, motherfuckers!” he shouts in his next breath. “You need something taken care of? Come to me. Indy is off limits for all questions and requests. Got it?”

A murmur of voices mixed with loud whoops and hollers from Callum’s teammates follows, even though I’m pretty sure they’re all too drunk by now to really understand why they’re cheering.

I sigh. “Your parents just didn’t bother teaching you any manners, did they?”

He claps me on the back and grins. “Go get a drink. Dance. Make an offer on a vacation to the Bahamas at the auction. It’s on me. Have fun.”

With those words, he pushes me toward the dance floor. I linger at the edge, trying to find any enthusiasm for getting out there, but I’m suddenly so stupidly tired that pushing myself into the middle of too many sweaty bodies sounds like the least appealing prospect of all the prospects.

I wander the house and the surrounding lawn for a bit before I make my way back inside, eventually finding my way upstairs, where I go from room to room, trying to find one no one is having sex in. There are a lot of fucking footballers. Literally.

Finding all the rooms occupied, I trudge back downstairs, and at the foot of the staircase, I run into Nick. I haven’t seen him the whole evening, so I honestly figured he’d taken off a long time ago.

“Hi.” I blink at him.

My heart jumps at the sight of him, and it’s bad. It’s so, so bad. Friends, I remind myself. We’re friends.

But that feels so inadequate. So pathetically far from what I’ve always wanted.

I’m too tired to hide from myself, so all these thoughts just freely fly around in my head.

He raises his brows. “You look all partied out.”

I chuckle and rub a hand over my face. “Is that another way to say I look like shit?”

He shakes his head. “Just tired. I don’t think you know how to look like shit.”

I stare. Is that a thing we say now? Is this what friends do?

Instead of asking, I look around. The party doesn’t exactly seem like it’s winding down. Honestly, from what I can see, it’s just getting wilder.

“You want a ride?” Nick asks.

I throw him a surprised glance. “From you?”

He looks around pointedly before aiming his gaze at me again. “Yes?”

I have a few fleeting thoughts about my job and having to stay here and make sure everything goes well.

And then I look at him, and I think, fuck my job. Fuck this thing. Fuck everything else.

He stares at me, and he has bad decisions written all over him, and I don’t care.

“Yeah.” I nod. “Yeah, I really do want a ride.”

I grab my stuff and we head outside. I pause when I see his car.

“What happened to the Toyota?” I ask. He’d been driving that thing forever. It was his mom’s car.

He waits until we’re both in the car, then he pulls out of the parking lot before he answers.

“Died on me on a cross-country road trip a few years ago,” he says. “And repairing it was going to cost about three times as much as the car itself was worth.”