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AUbrY

I flip down my visor and lean back to inspect myself in the mirror. This damn piece of hair refuses to do anything but stick up. I fought with it for an hour in the bathroom and hoped it would just figure its shit out on the drive.

“This is insane. Why am I nervous?”

Probably because there’s a long list of rules she sent me. If I break even one, then it’s all over.

One. I take her somewhere nice in public.

Two. I am to reply to her texts and not leave them to be answered a day or two later.

Three. No sex.

I’ve got the first covered, and have been keeping up with the second to the point Astin goes running if I pull out my phone. But the last one is going to be worse torture than when the Brussels cornered me in an abandoned warehouse and tried to send a message to my boss. I still limp when it rains.

“Okay. I can do this. Just…don’t look at her breasts, or ass, or those juicy thighs I want to wrap around my head and—” I spy a face on my periphery and put on a smile. “Hi,” I call out then check my watch.

Seven oh five.

Fuck. I’m late!

I leap out of my truck and nearly walk into the street.

A pair of motorcycles go blaring past at eighty.

We’re not in Loomis anymore. A handful of blocks down is housing for a local college with lots of jacked up twenty-year-olds puking on their front lawn.

The chances of any of the old crew stepping foot here, much less staking it out, feels impossible.

Goji wrinkles if he so much as smells stale vomit.

Still, I check both ways, then snap to check behind me. No shadows duck into a corner to hide. The weird thing about being followed is, after a while, you kinda miss the feeling. Like if you’re not being trailed by a mob enforcer, are you even real?

Not the time for a philosophical debate. I need to do some groveling. Apology flowers in one hand, I approach the crowded duplex with cars double parked until one’s nearly in the street. After ringing the bell, I slick back down my hair and wait.

I was halfway to Mexico, parked on the side of the road in my vegetable form.

Sleeping wasn’t an option, but at least as an eggplant I could rest my nonexistent eyes.

My brain could have tumbled over a thousand jobs, the ones that went wrong, the ones that went right.

The last one that’s been haunting me every night since.

Or the fact that the men who I swore my life to, who adopted me into their family, who let me into the truth of my condition are hunting me to the ends of the earth.

But no. All I could think about was her.

Massive criminal guilt versus hot girl in a white dress.

When I’d worked through every permutation of her face as she came, my brain invented more.

Like those thighs of hers squeezed into tight shorts, the pockets straining across her ass.

Her little smile giving way to a huge one while talking about anything.

That perfect little divot on her left cheek, like a spherical dimple.

How silky her hair felt wrapped around my fist.

Then the guilt shifted. Sure, I may have been a fixer for a man who runs an illegitimate business and have had to do things that’d make people faint to hear about, but how could I live with myself for ditching Sadie?

I made it to Mexico, doing all I could to be caught on cameras and said hello to a few old cartel contacts. I led my family on a wild goose chase down south as I snuck back into California because I couldn’t stand the idea of making her cry.

Also her tits.

The door to her place opens. I smile and lift the flowers. “You look—” I begin before my brain jumps.

Instead of the radiant and curvy Sadie, a pale woman with dirty blond hair in all black stares up at me. “What do you want?”

“I’m here for Sadie,” I say. She has roommates. Of course.

So there won’t be any fucking her on every surface in her place. Because I’m not supposed to anyway. Fuck, I hate rule three.

The woman stares me up and down, snorts, and steps back. “She’s up the stairs, second door on the right. What are those?”

Before I can argue, the woman grabs the flowers out of my hand. She takes a deep whiff then trots off. “Excuse me,” I call out, but she doesn’t look back.

Great. I could take them from her, but I’m guessing getting into a fight with her roommate is against the dating rules.

Ducking into the generic bungalow, I make for the staircase.

I catch a glimpse of the hodgepodge of decor in the sitting room.

It looks like garbage taken off of the street corners after a flea market.

Standing outside of Sadie’s door, I take a deep breath. Okay. I have this. I will win her over, get her to like me again, then I’ll tell her everything.

Well…maybe not everything . But at least about the Nightshades and the reason I was in them to begin with.

Here goes…

“Yes!”

Sadie?

My fist pauses right before striking the bedroom door.

“Oh fuck, that’s perfect,” she cries out. It’s her. I’d know that exclamation of bliss anywhere. What is she doing?

A smile winds up my lips. Is she trying to alleviate any tension before our date? That sneaky little minx. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?

“Okay.” Her voice strains as if she’s wiping sweat of her brow. “One more time.”

I slam my hand to her door, the knock far harder than I meant it to be. But my body’s begging to join in and see how many she can go for. “Sadie?” I call out.

The door opens a crack and her eye meets my chest. Slowly, it wanders up and the sliver of her face I can see turns beet red. “Oh… Shit, is it…?”

She throws open her bedroom door. I expected a repeat of the white dress and hoped for something sleek and red. But finding her in a long sleeved t-shirt and jeans throws me for a loop.

“The date tonight. Right. But you’re early.

” Her face winces as she keeps contorting to look at one of the five clocks in her room.

“Seven-ten. Cool. Come on in. There’s, um, tap water in the bathroom over there.

Or I could go get you a soda in the fridge.

Uh, sparkling water too—if Olivia didn’t drink them all. ”

I step toward the sunset colored bed, noting the tangled sheets, but there’s no sign of a quickly stowed toy or a wet spot.

It’s also distressingly small. Then again, it might be a fun challenge to fuck her on that twin while being unable to make a sound.

Beside the bed are stacks of milk crates overflowing with books, papers, and more boxes.

She’s crammed damn near everything into one side of the room in service of the other.

As I turn, the chaos and color gives way to sparse white light. There’s so much light I wince and raise my hand. Blinking, I can finally see a white box five feet across. Gigantic stadium lights are aimed at the center of the box where, resting on a turntable, is a single, perfect tomato.

“I’m sorry. I was trying to get caught up with work, and I fell into one of my time holes. Um…” Sadie rushes over to the tomato and carefully places it in a box of other produce.

I glare at the fruit sitting among its brethren. The very first meal I had once I was out of Mr. Ato’s clutches was a whole lasagna—extra tomato sauce. Marinara dribbled down my chin and collected on my palms staining them as red as blood. They didn’t want me back at that Olive Garden.

“Are you playing hard to get?” I ask, tearing away from my past to the woman standing before her bed.

She’s in a baggy shirt with a hole on the bottom and the screen image so faded I can barely make it out.

It’s a far cry from the skin tight silk dress that’d haunted me since Sacramento.

But—I dig my palm into my pocket—it’s taking everything in me to not tear that shirt off of her and fling her onto the bed.

“Huh?” Sadie gulps like she isn’t playing with fire.

I lick my lips, sizing up the situation and prepared to challenge her. “Pretending you forgot. Making me wait…” I bend down toward her and she gazes up, her eyes shining. “Leaving your camera out.”

She gasps as if no one would want to watch her, tits bounding as she bounced on my cock. “I, uh…”

I’m about to shatter rule three and leave it in a shallow grave. “Because no matter how hard you play, I always get what I chase.”

Sadie’s mouth parts, calculations running in her eyes. I cup her cheek and brush my thumb against her lip. With each pass, I press harder, giving her a taste of what she can have. Then I glide my thumb between her parted, wet lips.

A loud ding sounds from her desk.

“Oh.” She wrenches away and damn near shoves me aside. Cradling her phone, she scrolls through the screen and says to herself. “They liked the pictures! Except for one. Um… Do you mind if I retake a few shots? Real quick. I promise!”

Before I can answer, she’s already digging into the box of vegetables. I can’t exactly stop her and am curious what all goes in to this work. The idea of having to watch a tomato glamor shoot isn’t exactly sitting right in my stomach, but I drop to the edge of her bed and watch.

“Do you do this a lot?” I ask inspecting her set up when she has to dig deep into her box. The shirt might hang off her, but her jeans cling to every curve swaying right before my eyes. I slap my hands to the bed instead of her ass and she turns around. “Take pictures of food?”

“Oh. It depends. If clients get in new product, or someone needs a specific stock photo. I do a lot of cookbooks. Used to do a lot of cookbooks. You wouldn’t believe how many people use AI now.

” She fiddles with one of the two tall lights in the room.

“That has to be illegal, right? They didn’t even make it with their recipe. A computer did.”

I nod as if I understand her frustration. It’d be interesting if robots tried to come for my job—my old job. A cyborg mafia? Is it any weirder than a vegetable shifter?