Dead in Bed by Bailey Simms, The Complete First Book Read Free Page B

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b ther soon wait 4 me
     
    So there was nothing
to do now but wait around with Shawn’s friends, who of course had been at the
beer garden for at least an hour by then. Jason Gibbs was already mostly drunk.
Right away he bought both Shawn and me a beer.
    Jason was a few years
younger than us. I used to babysit him. He was always a little jerk as a kid.
He used to try to take Polaroids of me peeing through
the bathroom window from outside.   He
was the basketball star in high school, but no one from Muldoon ever gets a
scholarship anywhere, so he worked at the mill for a while with Shawn. Now he
was a highway patrol cop. The fair kept cops busy in Muldoon; I had no idea how
he’d gotten the night off. For a while, I hoped that maybe he’d influence Shawn
to go to the patrol academy, too.
    Shawn drank his beer
down faster than I’d ever seen him drink. I bought the next round, getting a
vodka tonic for myself this time.
    “Whoa, Ashley!” Jason “clinked”
his plastic beer cup to my drink. “Somebody’s partying tonight!”
    “It’s been a long
day,” I confessed.
    Jason tapped Shawn’s
arm. “You better watch your wife, bro. It’s fair time. She keeps going like
that, might end up with somebody else’s dick in her ass. Not saying whose—I’m
just saying.”
    I tried to glare at
Jason and express as much of my annoyance as possible, but I was distracted by
whatever spiked hairstyle he was trying to pull off. A couple strands kept
idiotically bobbing up and down over his horsey face whenever he laughed. I
don’t think he was aware of it.
     
    Shawn finished the
last of his second beer. “You might end up with somebody’s dick down your
throat, dude,” he said. Some of his color had come back. “And I’m saying whose.
Mine.”
    “Charming, as ever,” I
said to both of them. I didn’t mind that Shawn had actually sort of stuck up
for me, even if it was by threatening his friend with forced fellatio in the
middle of ordering more beer.
    “I don’t know, bro,”
Jason said without taking his eyes off me. “We have a history, me and Ashley.
She told you, didn’t she? She used to beg my parents to go out of town. She
said I had the biggest cock of all the kids she babysat for. When they got
home, she used to be, like, ‘No, Mr. And Mrs. Gibbs, you don’t owe me anything.
Little Jason took care of all my needs.’ Your wife’s a nympho, bro! Seriously!”
    Apparently my husband
thought the high-pitched voice Jason used to impersonate me was the funniest
thing in the world. Shawn was laughing, then Jason started laughing at his own
joke, and that only made Shawn laugh harder. Apparently it was much easier for
Shawn to put the locker room out of his mind than it was for me.
    “No, dude!” Shawn
said. “You don’t even know! I mean , she kind of  is  a nympho!” My husband laughed
hilariously at this revelation.
    All I’d wanted was to
have a drink and to try to calm down a little. And now I had to deal with this.
    The worst part was
that I didn’t even know what to say. I thought about bringing up how I knew
Jason used to whack off to Tina Frame’s picture in the yearbook, but I didn’t
have it in me. I was too mentally fried. I just sat there shaking my head like
some prudish idiot.
    “ Ashleeeey !” Morgan’s arms suddenly wrapped around me from behind, almost
knocking me off my barstool.
    I stood and hugged her
back, spilling my drink. “Where the hell have you been?”
    Morgan was already
completely tanked. She gave me a big, whiskey-tainted kiss on the cheek. It was
weird how happy I was to see her. For a moment I almost started to cry.
    “ You  and  me ,”
Morgan said, shaking her hips with each word in a little drunken dance, “are
going  to …”—she held up the
back of her wrist, stamped with a green  T —“the Bryce Tripp concert!”
    Jason scoffed. “Bryce Tripp’s
a fucking faggot.”
    “And we’re leaving
these two  losers—” Morgan
traced a