I was talking with Heath when a gaggle of young interns from marketing approached us. “Adam, are you done with the sunscreen?” one of them asked.
I had no idea who she was. She was young—probably no older than nineteen or twenty—and had yards of wavy dark blond hair.
I turned to her, handing her the tube of sunscreen. “Here you go.”
Instead she turned and held her masses of blond hair aside. “Can you put some on my neck and back? Please?” She batted her eyes at me flirtatiously over her shoulder. I tried not to scowl, noting she was wearing a fairly skimpy tank top.
“So you know these things hurt when they hit you, right?” I said, squeezing a blob onto my hand and giving her a cursory rub down on the back of her neck. The minute I did this, three of her friends appeared next to her.
“My shoulders too, please?” she said. I almost told her I was busy and handed the tube of sunscreen to one of her friends to finish when I noticed out of the corner of my eye that Emilia was watching me with these girls. Intently watching.
So I finished up on Blondie and turned to her friend, a dark-haired girl with bright blue eyes who looked like Snow White. She smiled at me demurely. “Can you do me, too?”
Her friend next to her—an impossibly thin, tall young woman—snorted at the innuendo that Snow White had likely purposely dropped on my lap.
I shot her a devilish grin. “How ’bout you all do each other? I’ll, um…just watch.”
Four mouths dropped and they all started giggling at once. I couldn’t resist glancing at Emilia, who now looked incredibly pissed off.
The fourth girl in line took the tube after her friends were done. “Adam, do you need some on the back of your neck?”
I grinned. “Got it already. Thanks ladies,” I said, shooting them a mock salute and stepping off past Heath, who snorted at me. I pulled my mask onto my face and watched while Heath walked up to Emilia and they talked in low voices. Emilia sent death looks at the flirty interns a few times but never looked at me.
Interesting. She was clearly bugged by what she saw. And I would have actually felt badly about it had I done anything to encourage it. I’d once leveraged another woman’s interest in me against Emilia and it had not gone over well. In fact, I’d almost lost her before I pulled my head out of my ass and decided to go after her. I wasn’t inclined to pull another stunt like that again. Not with things so delicate between us.
I was a little glad to see her irritation, in truth. It was a good sign. She’d said she didn’t want my love life thrown in her face and I had not planned it that way. For once I wasn’t using it to be manipulative. But she had to understand that there were consequences in breaking us up—even if it was just “for now.” I almost wanted to ask her when “for now” would be over. Maybe then I could tell her I’d go to Maryland with her.
But I didn’t have time to think about any of that now. We were soon spreading out into formation to begin the games. I called us into positions with a battle shout, “Today is a good day to die,” borrowing the Klingon exhortation from Star Trek.
We started out easy—one round each of Capture the Flag and King of the Hill. The teams split on these, with us taking the first and Blizzard taking the latter. With this tie, we went into the third confrontation—the “long form” design.
During our lunch break, there was no end to the taunting and shit-talking. The Blizzard guys, as always, took it good-naturedly, but I think it lit a fire under them that we probably should have tried to keep cold.
Because the third scenario, based on a mission of gathering information, went long and was grueling. Hours past when it should have been terminated. The day before, each team leader—myself and an officer from Blizzard—had buried a lockbox in our own team’s territory
The locations of each lockbox were drawn on a map, which was then cut into six different parts and hidden on unmarked team members. Once a map carrier was taken out, he or she was required to surrender that portion of the map to the enemy player. Spies, snipers and guerrilla tactics were needed to get the map pieces off the enemy players while avoiding capture of map pieces by the enemy.
Once a map had been procured and pieced together, it was only a matter of time to locate the unguarded lockbox. Each one contained the plans for a fully catered theme party for the winning team thrown by the losing team. Tradition was tradition. But Draco was going to win this year instead of footing the bill like in the past.
An hour past when this whole scenario should have wrapped up, I called all my messengers to me to try and track down our team’s remaining map pieces and to discern what had been captured. At that point, as far as we knew, only two pieces had been procured by the enemy. But I ordered them to reconnoiter while I went to check out one of our heavily-guarded strongholds—an “abandoned shack” that hopefully still housed the player who carried a precious pieces of the map.