It’s getting cold here already. Keep soaking up the warm weather.
Jersey Boy
Miss you too, Memphis.
Jersey Boy
Especially on those days where Triss manages to keep her mouth shut for more than a few minutes at a time and there aren’t any women around to continuously pelt me with an attitude problem.
I shoved my phone right back in my pocket. Missing them wasn’t enough of a reason to ask them to come back here. We still had work to do, and Jersey didn’t need the stress that would come with it. If he was in a better place mentally, I wanted him to stay there.
I couldn’t spend too much time being upset about them. I needed to watch every video ever made about how a gun worked.
CHAPTER TWO
utah
“You’re trying too hard, hoss.”
I didn’t even bother to shift my gaze from watching Memphis walk away to gift my Judge with my full attention after that comment.
“Trying too hard? By letting her walk away? Never actually talking to her? Being busy away from the house just about every day?” I asked.
He didn’t appreciate my attitude any more than I did his.
“I don’t think she likes it when you touch her.”
“I don’t touch—” I stopped myself mid-thought. “Teaching her to shoot is nottouchingher.”
“Your hands were on her body,” he said and laughed. “I can’t stand here and recite the definition oftouchingfor you, but that probably falls under the umbrella.”
“How am I supposed to show her what to?—”
“I’m telling you, man, don’t touch her tomorrow and she’ll stay out here longer.”
Indywantedto learn to use a firearm. He’d been asking for this lesson for years. He’d also been telling me for years that the only reason he was a Judge rather than an Executioner was because he didn’t have any experience with weapons. He was never interested in hearing that it also seemed to require a very specific level of heartlessness and the ability to simply flip a switch to turn off your humanity. There was definitely more of a gray area in the kinds of jobs that were assigned to Indy and me than there was in the kind of work that New Jersey had done for our organization, but not by much.
Memphis and New Jersey seemed to hold down the top spot for finding people and things, taking them, and delivering them to whoever wanted them. His part specified that he wasn’t supposed to be in the business of murder, while the side of the job where Indy and I played stated very clearly that the occasional loss or taking of a life was just part of it. As long as it was done quietly, effectively, and without any chance of the action being linked back to the organization, I was free to do anything that was necessary to complete my tasks. New Jersey was a well-paid bounty hunter who had the privilege of being as reckless as he wanted. I was a one-man extraction team who had to be able to function like a ghost.
Indy was much too good of a person to be on the Executioner side of what our jobs entailed, but I had no interest in leaving him without a way to defend himself while I would be gone for several days next week. And he was way easier to teach than Memphis.
That girl had frustrating effects on me.
On my ability to function like a grown-ass man, mostly.
She took my brain and its power to form coherent thoughts and tossed it right into a blender.
When that was done, she dropped whatever was left into a food processor just for good measure.
Women didn’t usually make me nervous, if that was what this feeling was. I didn’t usually have to try this hard to understand them, either. I was normally the quiet one. The one who did most of the listening. The one who put the effort into seeing underneath. Except Memphis was encased in concrete. She didn’t speak in riddles or distractions. She just didn’t fucking speak unless it was about work or something snarky.
She hadn’t asked me to stop touching her. She hadn’t turned around and smacked me for putting my hands on her. But she did leave.
She was a confusing soul. She’d had no issue at all standing up to Jersey more than once just in the time that I’d been able to watch them together. She even tended to say whatever was on her mind when it came to Indy and Trista.
She also spent way more time around Indy than she did with me.
“You guys talk about me?” I asked Indy while he stepped up to aim toward the target in the distance.
