Read Online Experiment in Terror 04 Lying Season by Karina Halle - Free Book Online

pretending it hurt, and grinned at her. A grin I used to think was reserved solely for me.
    OK. This was hell. I know what I had imagined earlier but now that I was actually seeing it, it was causing an involuntary narrowing of the eyes. It wasn’t the jealousy so much (OK, it was), it was that feeling that Dex knew how I felt about him and yet, here they were...it was uncomfortable, to say the least.
    Jenn and Fat Rabbit left the room and Dex raised his ringed eyebrow at me. “How about you kiddo, you hungry?”
    Kiddo. Least I still had that. It was better than “Babe.”
    “ I’m freaking starving,” I admitted.
    He nodded. “I thought as much. I figured you’d be after the ride and shit and anyway so a bunch of people are going to meet us for lunch. That cool? They are all Shownet peeps, good people, and it will make the party on Friday a lot easier to handle once you know how retarded they are in real life.”
    I couldn’t tell if he was speaking quicker than normal because of his medication or if he was nervous. But I told him that was fine. Secretly, I preferred it. Being around other people would take a lot of the awkwardness out of the situation and as much as I’d like to think it was all in my head, as most things usually were, I knew both Jenn and Dex could feel it too. This was going to be one hell of a long week.
    “ Good,” he said, smiling at me in a calmer, more natural, way. He looked around the room briefly. “How do you like my man cave?”
    “ It’s very you,” I admitted and patted the bed. “Though I thought you’d have a Star Wars-themed bedspread.”
    “ Believe me, I wanted to,” he said.
    “ You’re thirty-two Dex, not eighteen,” Jenn chided him, now with the dog and a bowl of water in hand. She explained to me, “We have to keep Harvey in the bathroom when we’re gone or else he runs around and tears up the place.”
    “ And takes a dump in your shoes,” Dex added.
    I had to laugh at that. Jenn grunted. “It was one time, all right?”
    “ Easy for you to say. They weren’t your shoes,” Dex said, heading out of the room. I followed, still giggling.
    “ I hope you didn’t find that out the hard way,” I told him. He looked down at me, eyes sparkling.
    “ More like the soft way.”
    Even though the topic of dog shit wasn’t exactly sexy, I was standing next to him in the doorway and this was the closest I had been to him in weeks. He smelled good as always, and that damn current of electricity was sparking again.
    “ Don’t be disgusting,” Jenn said, placing Fat Rabbit down on the floor with the water and quickly shutting the door before he ran out of the room. The closed door was met with barks and the clattering of nails against it.
    “ He’ll stop barking after five minutes,” she said, and sashayed her way to the kitchen counter, pausing at a bowl.
    “ Your car or mine?” she asked him loudly above the doggy protests. In one quick motion she pulled a small bottle of hand sanitizer out of her purse, rubbed it on her dainty hands and put it back.
    “ It’s up to Perry,” Dex said, turning to me. “Do you like good music or bad music?”
    I opened my mouth to say something, or perhaps to just make a noise, since it felt like a trick question, but Jenn picked up a pair of keys out of the bowl and said, “We’ll take my car. You’re parked on the street and it’ll be hard to find a spot later.”
    “ Oh, how considerate of you,” he said sarcastically as we left the apartment.
    In the hallway, Jenn shut the door and locked it while Dex stood at her side, leering at her in a weird half annoyed, half playful way. I didn’t like it. This bickering seemed to be something natural to them, like an actual living and breathing couple who were in love with each other.
    That thought took my breath away.
    Jenn stuck her house keys in her purse and gave me a funny look, perhaps catching the expression on my face. I don’t know what face I was making, but