Until the World Stops - L.A. Witt Page 0,64

experimenting more in the name of adding variety and cutting out some of the garbage.

And of course there was plenty of sex going on. I’d always been an unrepentant horndog, but with Tristan? Oh God, I could not get enough. I’d thought at first it was just because I’d been going crazy staying six feet away from everyone, but no—there was sex, and there was sex with Tristan, and whoa, I wanted as much sex with Tristan as I could get.

I’d been with guys who talked dirty, and it didn’t usually do anything for me. They either tried too hard or sounded like they took their cues from bad pornos.

Tristan? Oh my God. Just… The mouth on that man. When he wasn’t working his oral magic on my dick, he could growl me into an orgasm any day of the week.

“Casey?”

I blinked and looked at him over the game. “What?”

He quirked a brow. “C2. Hit or miss?”

“Uh.” I stared blankly down at my array of ships and pegs, finally remembered what we were doing, and shook myself. “Miss.”

“What?” He rolled his eyes theatrically. “That’s some bullshit.”

I laughed as I placed the white peg beside my floundering submarine. “You’ll just have to aim better.”

“I’ll show you aiming better,” he muttered.

I snorted. “Uh-huh. Anyway. E9.”

“Nope. Miss.”

“Is there a joke in there about how I almost dropped a bomb on a master chief?”

Tristan laughed, and I pretended I wasn’t getting goose bumps. “My roommate in A-school always put a ship across E-7, E-8, and E-9. He didn’t even care that I always got that ship. He just loved making cracks about sinking the chiefs with their own anchors.”

“Didn’t like chiefs, eh?”

“Does anyone?”

I grunted in agreement.

He opened his mouth to speak, probably to make his next move, but right then, my phone lit up beside the Battleship game. My dad’s picture appeared on the screen.

“Hang on.” I reached for the phone. “I need to take this.” Into the phone, I said, “Hey, what’s up?”

“Hey, you have a minute?”

If I hadn’t before, I did now, because something in his voice made the hair on my neck stand up. “Yeah. Sure.”

“Okay, well…” He paused. “Listen, I, uh, I wanted to keep you in the loop.” My dad sounded worried. Like, really worried. In a way I hadn’t heard in a long, long time.

I swallowed. “About what?”

He took a breath. “Someone at your mom’s work tested positive.”

My heart dropped into my stomach. “What… What about Mom?”

“We don’t know yet. They’re playing all kinds of games with testing. One minute, it’s only for people with symptoms. The next it’s for people with confirmed exposure. Then it’s…” He exhaled hard. “She and I have been on the phone all morning, trying to find someone who will test her.”

The rush of shaky panic was not a familiar feeling. I’d been in some hairy situations as a cop and also during my combat tour, so I knew what fear felt like, but this was… This was my mom, for God’s sake. It didn’t matter that I’d been to a warzone and I was a grown man who was damn near thirty. Just thinking about something happening to my mom made me eight years old and terrified.

My teeth tried to chatter as I asked, “What about you and Sean?”

“We’re working on getting us tested too, but unless your mom is a confirmed positive, no one’s willing to waste a test on us.”

I rubbed my eyes with my thumb and forefinger. I’d known for a while that states were trying to conserve and ration tests, but damn if that didn’t land differently in my mind when it meant my brother and my dad couldn’t get tested despite living with someone who had almost certainly been exposed. Dropping my hand to my lap, I said, “They won’t even test Sean? Doesn’t his asthma make him high risk?”

Dad just sighed. “It does, and they’ll test him right away if your mother starts showing symptoms, but…”

“Shit,” I whispered. I could feel Tristan’s gaze on me, concern radiating off him. “So… I mean, what now? They just wait?”

“That’s about all they can do right now.” He sounded utterly exhausted. “I’ll keep you posted as we hear anything, but I wanted to keep you in the loop so you’re not blindsided.”

I kneaded my neck. There was no way to not be blindsided by this. It was like being in the middle of a goddamned warzone and taking a bullet or getting hit by shrapnel—it made sense because of