I was having fun.
Drix and I sat side by side on the blanket we’d brought, leaning against one another. I was half-dressed—still sans shirt. Gould was stretched out beside me, covered with a jacket. The light rain had stopped, and the sun was shining faintly. I’d called my mother half an hour ago to check on things, and she’d put Zac on the phone. He’d told me about the cartoons he’d watched, and about how he and Grandma were going to make popcorn tonight. As far as I could tell, there were no hard feelings between us.
“He forgives so easily,” I’d said to Drix.
“He’s seven. He doesn’t have the attention span to hold a grudge.”
Thank goodness.
So that left me free to concentrate on Drix for the time being. Drix, who was going to live with me. Drix, who had just vampyre-magicked my dear friend into a deep sleep. Gould didn’t even stir when Dave walked over to us.
“This is the best pile of people I’ve seen in a while,” Dave announced.
I looked up at him. “Hello. Your pants are trop grand.”
“They’re D’s.” He shook his own blanket out and sat on it. Nodded toward the snack table. “Look at him in his undies. Isn’t he stately?”
I turned and saw D in his navy boxers, loading up a plate with pretzels and chips. “Uh. Sure.”
“He’s my fucking man.” He turned back to us. “Drix, I heard you shot like five slaves.”
Drix smiled. “I got pretty lucky.”
“Enjoy that gift card, man. You earned it.” Dave dipped his head toward Gould and mouthed Thank you to Drix. Drix nodded.
Gould woke up after a few minutes and crawled over to Dave’s blanket to sit with him. I could hear them talking—loudly.
“Look at Miles’s body,” Dave was saying. I assumed he meant my nettle welts and nipple bruising, but he went on. “I’ve never thought about what’s under Miles’s sweaters. I think I assumed it would be like Sammy from Wayside School, and he’d just keep taking off cardigan after cardigan until we discovered there was just a dead rat underneath. But he’s ripped.”
I rolled my eyes at Drix. He raised his eyebrows and flicked his gaze to my abs as though to say, He has a point.
Gould plucked a blade of grass and folded it. “You’ve seen him do scenes at Riddle.”
“Are you kidding? I avoid watching his scenes at all cost. It’s like a Tarantino movie. You have to watch eighty percent of it through your fingers.”
“You’re an idiot.”
I turned to them. “I can hear you, you know.”
Dave grinned. “I know. We’ll leave you to canoodle with your vamypre.”
I shook my head. Bête, the both of them. I studied the entrance to the woods. “Where are GK and Kel? Are they the only ones not back?”
Dave stretched, cracking his knuckles. “Maybe it was too far. And Kel was just too old.”
Gould slapped his arm. “Shut up.”
Kamen staggered over and collapsed on Dave’s blanket, still wearing nothing but panties. “This is the best day of my life. This hunt was so fun. I love everybody.”
Dave high-fived him. “Did you know Gould took a bullet for me to keep me from getting caught by Cinnamon? It was actually Drix’s bullet, but the point is he was willing to die for me.”
“Whaaaat?”
“Yeah, I was on the ground, and Cinnamon was about to shoot. And Gould just, like, somersaulted across the ground and shielded me.”
Kamen stared at Gould. “You barrel-rolled?”
“Uhhhh . . .” Gould said.
“Like in movies when people barrel-roll to get out of danger?”
“Well, to be fair, I barrel-rolled into danger, not out of it.”
“But you barrel-rolled to be a hero?”
“Yes.” Dave knocked Gould with his shoulder. “He barrel-rolled to be a hero.”
“What can I say?” Gould shrugged. “I’m a badass.”
Dave turned to him. “You know what you could do next time, though? To make it just a tiny bit better?”
“You’re giving me advice on how to save you?”
“No, just think about this, though. How awesome would it have been if, right when she was about to shoot, the triumphant Jurassic Park music had started to play—you know the music when the raptors leap onto the T-rex and attack it?—and you’d run at Cinnamon with your hands out like claws and jumped on her?”
“Who’s gonna play the music? God?”
“Uh, yeah. If God looked down and saw a situation like that unfolding, he would totally DJ.”
I sighed and rested my head against Drix’s arm, tuning my friends out. I scanned the field, enjoying the sight of so many happy people. Maya was laughing with the two pups and their owner. Even Cinnamon looked to be having an amicable chat with other hunters.
Eventually Kel and Greg returned to camp, and Kel revealed the hunt’s winners. Drix had taken the Ultimate Hunter award. Dave and two other slaves got gift certificates for eluding capture. My group ended up staying almost an hour after the hunt to talk and eat and help clean up.
Finally, the meadow looked like an ordinary meadow again—no banners or tables or dog runs or whipping posts. I helped load the last post into Regina’s truck, then turned to Drix. “Well. Shall we head home?”
I’d called my house “home” in conversation with Drix before, and so had he. But it felt good to say it and . . . mean it on a whole new level, I suppose.
“I think we should stop at the Pleasure Center on the way.”
“We shouldn’t. Not yet. We don’t have enough—”
“Miles. There will always be something else we should spend our money on. But today, we’re going to spend it on this.”
I sometimes quite enjoyed it when he took charge.
Dave held something out to us. “I’ll help.”
His gift card.
“Absolutely not,” I said. “That’s yours.”
“I’m not gonna use it. D makes all our stuff. Put it toward your damn vac bed.”
Drix reached out and plucked the gift card from his hand. “Thank you.”
I sighed. “All right. We will stop at the Pleasure Center on the way home.”
Drix put an arm around me and kissed my temple. “That’s more like it.”