Page 4 of Back for Seconds

I gritted my teeth and met JoeyDaVegan’s gaze full on. Fuck this shit. I slipped my hand into his and gave him my most professional, powerful handshake. “Hi, Joey. Pleasure is all mine. And actually, no. I’m really enjoying my current weight.”

Then I excused myself and marched blindly into the doorless kitchen.

***

“There’s no place to hide in this fucking house,” I whispered to Daxton, Joanne’s seventeen-year-old stepson—a recent acquisition by way of her marriage to a man ten years her junior.

“Bro.” The boy shook his head, floppy hair bouncing around his forehead. “You’re telling me. She literally only kept the walls that are, like, mandatory.”

He added a confounding number of extra syllables to mandatory.

I pressed my back against the door of the butler pantry, attempting to hide in the refrigerator’s shadow. “You have no idea what just happened to me out there, Daxton. I was hoisted by my own damn petard.”

He scrunched his nose at me. “What’s a dampetard?”

“No, petard—forget it. Do you see a really huge, sexy man anywhere? Is he coming toward us?”

“Um…” Daxton craned his neck and leaned backward, squinting into the living room. “Yes.”

Before I could react, Joey was rounding the corner of Joanne’s bowling-lane-length kitchen island, wine glass in hand. “Any idea where I can get some ice?”

Daxton’s eyes doubled, then he skedaddled out from between us and down the hallway.

I swallowed against the humiliation bubbling in my throat. “Uh, probably the freezer. Or the garage. That’s what people do in these big houses, right? Have a second fridge for bevvies.”

“Bevvies?” Joey’s mouth twitched into a smirk—dark, deep-set eyes slipping over me again. He really needed to stop doing that. “June, right? You look…familiar.” He was sizing me up, every detail of me, tracing my shape, lingering on my neck and then on my waist. Eating me slowly, one bite at a time. Holy shit. As certain as there was ice in the freezer, my cheeks were flushed bright red.

“I’m a fugitive.” I’d never been very good on my feet. “They’ve had me on billboards for years.”

“Nah, you look really…” He clicked his tongue against his back teeth. “Are you on a TV show or anything like that? Maybe a weather girl?”

That was a compliment, right? Weather girls are hot. Famously.

I swallowed quickly. “Grand theft auto. Grandissimo theft auto, actually. I’m wanted in four states.”

Joey pursed his lips to keep from laughing and cocked his head to the side. “Wait, you’re that girl. The one that stitched me last night? It has to be—yeah, it is you.”

“Well, I prefer woman,” I said, feigning incredulity. “And I’m not sure. I think there’s probably a chance that ’twas me. I do that sometimes. Make, um, silly little videos and post them. Free speech and all that, super important to me. And furthermore—”

“Furthermore?” Joey lifted an eyebrow at me.

“Furthermore, I have a twin sister. Identical twin. Down to the nose piercings.”

“Really?” He smirked, crossing his arms over his chest, the well-worked muscles in his forearms contracting with the movement. “Wow. Ain’t that something. Well, you can tell your twin sister that it’s all good. I’m used to people being assholes about what I do. I guess we can’t all be into data science—what did you call it?”

I flared my nostrils. “Nerd shit.”

Joey flashed me a satisfied smile, a smile that looked victorious. He tilted his head to the side. “Right, nerd shit.” Then he began backing away slowly. “See you around town, Junebug.”

***

Joey was on the hunt for ice. So, I needed to go somewhere that screamed No Ice.

If only Daxton had stuck around and made himself useful. He could have pointed me to the warmest room in the house.

Instead, I was left to my own piss-poor sense of intuition. I darted across the kitchen and down the hallway, familiar enough with the general layout of a midcentury Jersey Shore rancher to know that the bathroom was most likely the last door at the end of a long, dark hallway. I slipped past what had to be Daxton’s room—judging by the profound sock odor emanating from underneath the door—and what appeared to be a workout room. The hallway came to an abrupt end, and I was confronted with three more closed doors. Three. The most destabilizing number.

A normal person would have just picked one, but not me. I was a data scientist—I had to think about it. Weigh my options. Idiot.