“Neither of us is answering,” he said what I had already come to assume after the fourth time his phone had rung since I’d gotten released from the hospital.

What seemed like every five minutes, the trauma had started all over. Beep, beep, beep. The most boring ringtone ever created had been on a constant loop.

“Who’s calling?” I finally asked.

“My publicist. Cordero. Sheila.”

Oh brother. “You mean Sheena?”

“Yes. Her.”

“What do they want?” No one had called me. The only person I had spoken to was Gardner, to let him know that the doctor had come in that morning and said I was free to go. But it had taken hours to get discharged. Holy crap. The team had flown back without me, a van dropping my things off before heading to the airport. Gardner had said he’d let Kulti know what was happening since he apparently decided to miss the flight and catch the next one with me.

He sighed. “They don’t want us to get on the same flight together.”

That had me turning in the cab’s old leather seat. “Why?”

He made a face that said how stupid he thought this all was. “The photographs.”

The photographs if someone realized who he was. I wasn’t anything special to look at, no one would recognize me, but he was a different story.

It was my turn to sigh. “I can sit by myself.”

“Don’t start, Sal,” he grumbled, still not looking my way.

“What? I get it. It would be less crap for them to deal with.”

That had him glancing over, his mouth set into a firm line. “This isn’t ‘crap’ and I’m not going to pretend like we don’t know each other. I’m not a child and neither are you.”

Jumping to agree to their terms so quickly made me feel like a guilty asshole. I hated saying he was right, but it was the truth. What did I have to hide? I looked at the hazel-green orbs staring at me and remembered that this was the person that had spent the night in a chair too small for him, and woken up every time the nurse checked on me. That made me feel like that much more of an ass-wipe.

For one brief moment I asked myself what the hell had I gotten myself into. This was the equivalent of being scared of heights and getting a job window-washing skyscrapers.

But as I took in his thirty-nine-year-old face that had been such a huge aspect of my life when I was younger and had somehow become an ever larger figure now that I was a lot older, I accepted the fact that there wasn’t much I wouldn’t do for him. I wasn’t positive whether to let that make me feel weak or to accept it for the gift it would have been if I let myself think of it that way.

I had a man I respected that respected me, and he didn’t care if the world knew we meant something to each other. Our friendship hadn’t been given to either one of us, we had worked at it. On top of that, I felt something for him even if he was an egotistical, arrogant, stubborn pain in the ass. He was my egotistical, arrogant, stubborn pain in the ass.

So, yeah, I wasn’t about to let someone—anyone—cheapen our friendship. That person sure as hell wasn’t going to be Cordero either.

“I’m sorry. You’re right.” The only thing I didn’t want and wouldn’t want, would be to get stared at. That was all. A thought entered my head. “Does your publicist hate us hanging out together?”

“My publicist hates most things, schnecke, don’t worry about him.”

That wasn’t super reassuring but all right. I smiled at him. I guess his publicist could sign up on the long list of ‘People Who Aren’t Fans of Sal.’ Someone had told me once that you couldn’t make everyone happy, and I’d kept that close to my chest for a very long time. Once you reluctantly accepted that people were always going to judge you no matter what, it got a little easier to deal with having people dislike you.