Page 59 of Revelry

Levi strokes his pants affectionately. “You’re really hurting his feelings now.”

“Shut up and kiss me, you big, stupid freak.”

He does. And it’s one hell of a kiss. It’s so amazing that I don’t remember anything after it.

“Wake the fuck up, Quinn,” I shout, banging on Levi’s door for the fourth time in a row.

Our driver, Bob, or Billy, or whatever the fuck his name was, told me this morning when he’d picked me up from the MGM Grand that he’d taken Levi and a redhead matching Ali’s description to a house out in the middle of nowhere last night, and that he’d picked them up again and delivered them back to this hotel after three am. I’d already been all over the hotel looking for her this morning. This was my last resort.

I’d kissed her, dragged her up to that room, and then I’d been too fucking paralytic to function. She’d left in an awful hurry, which means I must have done something wrong, other than being an insensitive cunt, that is. But for her to leave with Levi?Jesus, that was a blowtorch to the fucking balls.

Guilt, fear, dread, rage. All of these emotions settle in my gut like a lead weight. She left with Levi, and if I know that fuckrag, I know that she didn’t come back to her room at all last night.

I’m just about to start pounding my fist into the wood again when he opens it and stares out at me, one eyelid cracked, the other completely closed.

“What the fuck, man?” he groans, leaning into the doorjamb.

“Where is she?”

“Where’s who?”

“Ali,” I hiss. “She’s not in her room.”

“How the fuck should I know?”

Beyond him I hear the sounds of feminine groans and a voice that I haven’t known long, but I’m pretty sure I’d know anywhere, says, “Levi? Oh shit.”

I glare at Levi, ready to put my fist through his fucking face.

“Oh yeah, she might have ended up back here last night.”

I push him out of the way and shove into the room, because I like to torture myself, or I have to see it to really believe—I don’t know which.

I stare at Ali. She has a Kings of the Iron Age blanket wrapped tightly around her chest, her hair is wild and sticking up at all angles, and her eyes are heavily shadowed and smeared with makeup.

“Did he hurt you?”

“What?” she asks, and I get the sense she’s just as angry as I am. “No. He didn’t hurt me.”

“Did you drug her?”

“Of course I didn’t fuckin’ drug her,” he snaps. “Oh, well we did some blow. But that was her suggestion.”

“Levi,” Ali says, “stop talking.”

I glare at Levi. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“Man, what the fuck is wrong with you?” he snaps. His hands ball into fists at his sides. “You think just because some bitch doesn’t throw herself at you that I had to drug her to get a taste of that pussy? She came to me willingly and she came all night long.”

His words eat me alive. They surge through my blood like acid, consuming everything in its path until I explode with rage. I swing my arm back and punch Levi in the face and then I lunge at him, tackling him to the ground. It doesn’t matter that he’s completely naked and I’m fully clothed. All I want is to beat the shit out of him for being where I wanted to be. It’s fucking Jackson Rowe all over again.

“Oh my god, get off of him,” Ali screams. Grabbing my arm, she yanks me away from him. I let her because I’m hungover, and tired as all fucking shit, and she’s completely naked, standing before me with so much fire in her eyes it could raze me on the spot. “What the fuck is your problem, Coop?”

“Oh I don’t know,” I snap. “Maybe it’s the fact that you left me in one hotel room and disappeared with this cock-fuck into another.”

“Okay, first of all, you were drunk. Not just a little drunk, but off-the-wall, mentally-purge-every-random-thought-in-your-head kind of drunk. You threw yourself at me—mauled me, actually—and know what the icing on the cake in that scenario was? You know what really made my night, Coop? When you called me Holly.”

My blood turns cold. “What?”