Chapter 38
Mari
Kas and I didn’t fuck once—we fucked three times. Not consecutively, of course. We had breaks for other stuff, like showering off bodily fluids, sleeping, and on one occasion, getting burgers from a shady twenty-four-hour joint.
Last night explains my severe acid reflux this morning, and why I’d almost forgotten that Davina emailed us to meet at the gym this morning for a meeting—the first one since Kas found PEDs in his bag.
The morning sun beams through a fractured gap in the curtains of the hotel and bathes Kas’s outstretched body in a warm glow.
I pace alongside his bed with my toothbrush hanging out of the side of my mouth. “What happens after this? I don’t know if I can interact with you the same way I did before this trip. Plus, you’re perfect, like actually perfect. And we work together, so...” I say. Kas cracks open his eyes and stares at me rambling with a small grin. “Kas?” I ask, pulling him out of his silent admiration of my naked body.
“We were friends before the trip. Now you’re more than a friend to me, you’re the woman.”
I reel back. “I’m the woman? You wanna explain?”
“As in, you’re it, you’re her ... mine . I don’t want you with anyone else.”
I’m about to reply when my toothpaste froth threatens to overspill. I cup my hand under my mouth and tilt my head back.
“I don’t want you with anyone else either,” I garble incomprehensibly on my way to his bathroom.
“What?” he asks.
I spit out my toothpaste, gargle loudly, and repeat my sentence. “I don’t want you with anyone else either.” I stalk back into his bedroom with my toothbrush in hand.
“What?”
“I don’t want you with anyone else either,” I say exasperatedly. “I like you a lot, Kas. Last night was just perfect.”
Kas’s face stretches with a mischievous smile. “One more time?”
I drop my arms, sighing loudly as I head into my room to get ready for the day with a smile of my own.
“I don’t want you to do what we did last night with anyone but me,” I clarify.
The mere thought of Kas doing what we did last night with another woman makes me furious at my own brain for imagining such a situation.
There’s a rustling of sheets from his bedroom.
“I don’t put three fingers inside of just anyone. Only you,” he calls.
My cheeks heat at the reminder. “And I’m not worried about anyone finding out about us because they won’t. We’re tight,” I tell him.
“You’re tight,” he replies instantaneously.
“Hilarious.”
I return my toothbrush to my bathroom and shove on a sundress I dig out from the depths of my suitcase before reentering Kas’s room. I scan his floor for any of my clothes that have made their way in here. I vividly remember getting dressed to go out for those greasy burgers and I have no idea where those clothes went. I don’t want any random drug testers to come in and see my abandoned underwear in his room.
My brows scrunch as I reach under the chair in his room and fist a pair of his dirty boxers. I ball them and aim for his face before continuing the search for my underwear on my hands and knees under the desk. I grasp the edge of the desk and hoist myself up when I find nothing else.
“Have you seen my panties?” I ask.
Kas reaches under his back, pulling out what appears to be a pair of my panties. He stretches them between his fingers, and I duck out of the way when he slingshots them at me.
“You know when you said we didn’t mesh at Women-troduction ? I think mesh now,” he says. “I like it when we mesh.”
He rises from the bed, simultaneously tapping my ass and pecking my cheek when he passes me en route to the bathroom.
“The meshing is a result of my inability to not overshare and your inability to be anything but direct and blunt.” We’re two sides of the same coin, both of us way too honest for our own good. “I love it,” I admit.
“I’m going to lay my cards out,” Kas says, scrubbing his teeth. “I think we should keep fucking because it’s fun.”
“I ... I also think the sex is fun.” Kas smirks at my admittance before spitting into the sink. “But!” I say loudly. “But I do mean it when I say I don’t want us seeing other people if we’re going to get down and dirty on the regular.”
“So, a relationship?” he suggests.
I pause at the threshold of our rooms before rushing forward into mine to brainstorm what to do with my hair. “A relationship? After almost six weeks? Or almost five if we aren’t counting before Vegas.” I assess myself in the bathroom mirror as I scrape back my hair, rethinking my own statement with a thoughtful hm . “Maybe, informationally and physically, we’ve known each other for longer. If we do the math, the amount of time we actually spend together could be equal to, say, three months?”
I’m terrible at math.
I slick the front of my hair with gel and reach for the thick hair tie on my wrist to secure the rest into a puff; my finger skims bare skin. Goddamn disappearing hair ties.
“What is that meant to mean?” Kas asks over the soft hiss of his deodorant.
I scamper around my room, trying to find a hair tie I swore I left in the shower. “We spend most of our time together, even when we don’t have to. We choose to talk to each other every night, we exchange traumatic stories like we’ve been together for years, and before we sleep, you squeeze all the dregs of my almost-empty toothpaste to the top of the tube so that I don’t struggle with it in the morning.” I scan the area around my bathroom sink for any sign of the hair tie, noticing the curled tube of toothpaste I just referenced. “We know each other really well, almost too well. Sometimes, I think you know me more than I know mysel—” When I turn to leave the bathroom, my voice catches in my throat.
Kas stands a couple of steps away dressed in shorts and a compression tee. His fingers pinch the very hair tie I was looking for, dangling it in front of my face.
“And I’m not mad about it at all, or the idea of a relationship,” I finish with a whisper.
His eyes do that thing where they frantically flicker between each of my facial features. “That’s because you’re my business. I like you in my business.”
Kas’s eyes glisten the same way the sun’s rays make the surface of a bright blue sea shimmer. He’s honest, so honest. It’s like he wants me to fall in love with him.
He places the hair tie in my hand and closes my fist around it. “We’re late,” he prompts, turning away. “We’ll continue this later.”
I fan myself and dart around the room, snatching up both of my phones, my laptop, and chargers—I haven’t even checked the phones.
I silenced both of them all night for some work-life balance, noting the irony that last night Kas was a weird mixture of both. Upon unlocking my personal phone, I’m assaulted by a bunch of notifications, plus several missed calls.
Violet: Have you seen this?!
Quinn: Dude. Please answer.
Freya: UMM
Davina: Come to the gym as soon as you can. It’s urgent.
Every single message except Davina’s contains a link to an account. I wait impatiently for it to load and stare vacantly at my phone as a social media page filters onto the screen. I select a pinned video. It shows me fighting Olive Ward with an obnoxious watermark pasted over the top. Even worse, the entire account is filled with damning footage of every single person on the team.
There’s a mugshot of Bill dated from over two decades ago, and grainy CCTV footage of him fighting bouncers from my birthday night out. Another photo is of Davina around a poker table. Her pregnant stomach is in full view, and the image makes it look like the alcoholic drink near her hand belongs to her; she doesn’t drink, at all.
If that wasn’t enough, there’s a recent video of Dash. It’s one of those street interviews that are all over social media. You know, the ones where they catch vulnerable drunk people and ask them misleading questions.
The interviewer asks him very basic questions: What brings you to Vegas? Business or pleasure? Dash uses the interview as an opportunity to promote Kas’s fight. A big fan of Ward’s must’ve overheard and became riled up because Dash is promptly shoved by an aggressive bystander. He, of course, shoves him back and a fight ensues ending with Dash being escorted away in a cop car.
Panic grips me harder and tighter until my breathing stutters and my eyes mist.
“Mari, did you hear what I said?” Kas asks. He pauses and bends down to assess my face, eyes growing hard as he watches me. “What’s wrong?”
I jump over to the business phone and Kas’s notifications have my stomach scrunching itself up. There’s not one positive comment. Everything Kas is being tagged in is hate posts and comments berating the entire team.
It’s like everybody has decided to hate us.
I quickly return to my personal phone just as another message from Quinn pops up.
Quinn: Kas is taking steroids?
The screenshot she’s sent is from a different social media site and the image of it is some sort of steroid documentation with Kas’s name on it. The documentation states that Kas’s results show no trace of PEDs, but it’s still bad enough that the documentation has a comment section with short written statements by the association members about what they saw that day.
“Oh my god,” I whisper.
It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Kas appear both panicked and angry. His nose flares and he rips the phone from my limp grip. “What the fuck is this?”
My developed sense of unease catapults into an onslaught of panic. I snatch the phone out of his hand and immediately disable comments on every one of his accounts.
“What do I do? What do I do?” I say shakily.
I should have prevented this. It’s my responsibility to make sure Kas’s reputation doesn’t plummet. If I had been awake, I could’ve seen this last night.
“If we weren’t—I could’ve seen—fuck!”
I lock the business phone and throw it to the foot of the bed with a gruff scream, staring at it like it’s about to detonate.
“It’s not your fault,” Kas says.
“It is my fault. One night of being away from my work phone and everything decides to happen.”
“It’s fine.”
“I’m meant to be saving your image,” I whisper guiltily.
I’ve let Kas down. I sniff in an attempt to soothe the burning in my nose. My sinuses feel like they are congested with unshed tears, each anticipated droplet holding a feeling of failure I already felt with the Isaac situation and now with Kas.
I ignore every single message I’ve received and settle on sending one to Quinn. Her answer will either provide me with some hope or destroy me completely.
Me: Has Auntie seen?
Quinn: Yes.