Oh no.

“How many people is that, then?” Gordo asked. I didn’t miss the smug look he threw my way after he asked.

“Eleven,” one of the TCC guys answered.

Gordo let out the most exaggerated sigh I’d ever heard in my life, even going as far as to make his eyes go wide. “E-lev-en? That’s an odd number. We can’t have an odd amount of players in the game.”

This motherfucker.

My brother turned to look at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Flabs, I guess that means you have to play.”

“The hell that means I have to play. I’m not playing,” I said in a careful, controlled voice before taking a too casual sip of water, making sure to keep eye contact with him.

“You have to,” Eli repeated.

“Odd numbers,” Gordo piped in like a little shit.

I shook my head, making sure to keep my features even. If I was careful and really nonchalant about it, my chances of getting out of this were higher. Eli knew too easily how to pull my strings at the right time, and I sure as hell wasn’t going there. “It’s not happening.”

Carter shot me a curious look. “You don’t like to play?”

I glared at the two idiots when I answered. “I don’t like to play with them.”

The scoff that came out of Eli and Gordo was impossible to miss.

“C’mon. Don’t be a party pooper,” my twin muttered.

“I’m not being a party pooper. I just don’t feel like getting the crap beat out of me,” I explained to them. Glancing back at Carter, I sighed. “Every time we’ve played in the past, I end up getting hurt. My lip got busted last time, and I’m pretty sure my tailbone was fractured. I also had this bruise bigger than Eli’s head—”

“We need you on a team,” Gordo insisted.

I just shook my head.

“Quit being a baby and play. Gordo promises not to knee you again, don’t you, Gordo?” Eli asked.

The dark-skinned man next to him nodded almost enthusiastically.

They were so full of shit.

“I promise not to knee you either,” Eli amended next. “We can be on the same team if it makes you happy.”

Well, that was part of the problem when we’d played in the past too. I wasn’t usually a competitive person—a game was just a game and if it made someone’s day to win, so be it—but when it came to doing things against Eli, that was a whole different story. We’d been competing for attention, love, food and just about everything else from the moment we’d been born. Arguing and fighting over stuff was second nature for us.

But still. The memory of my bloody busted lip was still fresh in my mind two years later. Before that there had been a visit to the dentist for a new filling, a bloody nose, a sprained back, an ankle I couldn’t walk on for two weeks… the list was endless.

Then there was whatever crap the losing team had to go through. It was the whole purpose behind playing: to embarrass the loser.

“I’ll tell Mason not to purposely trip you anymore,” Eli finally added with an expectant look on his face. “Deal?”

I hesitated. Along with the bloody lip in the past, there had also been a black eye, an elbow to the center of my chest…

“It’ll be fun,” Bryce, the TCC light guy, suggested.

* * *

It’ll be fun, they said.

Just a friendly game, they said.

Well, they were fucking liars. All eleven of them.

Two hours after I was finally guilt-tripped into agreeing to play, the bus made a detour on the journey from the parking lot it had sat overnight to the park it dropped us off at. The drive had only been four hours long, and in the middle of the night, we arrived in Houston, Texas. Unfortunately, there was more than enough time to kill before we needed to get to the venue, so I couldn’t use that as an excuse as to why we couldn’t play. We all piled out, dressed in shorts, T-shirts and an array of tennis shoes.