Page 85 of Fourth Base with the Alpha

At midday, we break.

“I’m starving,” I tell them all as we trek through to Ash’s kitchen.

“Must be all that sex.” West grins.

“It’s the jet lag.”

“And the sex.”

“Not everything is always about sex.” I help myself to a bottle of water from the fridge.

“Has the sex … stopped?” Trey asks hesitatingly from a chair at the table.

“What?”

“You just seem tense today, man. We were wondering …” he glances around at the others, “if something happened between you and Isabella.”

“Nothing happened.”

“Then what’s with the long face today?” Ash asks.

“You assholes are always telling me I have a long face.”

“You do. You’re like our own personal Eeyore, and we love you, man. But since you’ve been seeing Isabella you’ve turned into Tigger. Bouncing around with a big I-just-got-laid grin on your face.”

“But then today you’re back to being an old sad-sack.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say, dropping into a chair at the kitchen table and hooking a foot up onto an empty seat.

“Hunter, man,” Trey says, leaning over the table and meeting my eye, “you can talk to us. We all love Isabella and if–”

“We broke up.”

“Shit!” Trey falls back in his chair with real disappointment on his face. “I’m sorry, man.”

“Why?” Ash asks, dumping a plate of cold meat and cheeses on the table and pulling out a chair.

I hook up a piece of ham, rolling it into a tube between my fingers.

“Hunter …” Trey prods.

“It was never real in the first place.”

“Isabella’s genuine, man, she’s not–”

“The relationship wasn’t real. We cooked it up to get me out of that hole with that interview.”

“What?” Trey says.

“I lied on that interview–”

“We know that, man but–”

“The interviewer was pissing me off and so I made up that stuff about having a girlfriend. Our own personal hellhound was not too pleased about the mess it caused.”

“Kim?”

“Yeah, she convinced me to fake a girlfriend for a bit until the story blew over.”