Free Shameless by Tori Carrington Page B

life had been full of similar such declarations. Sometimes it took a month. Sometimes three. Then there were other times when only a day was needed before Gauge was packing the truck again and he and his dad were rolling on down the road to the next stop.
    Maybe the time had, indeed, come again….

    N INA RESET the treadmill to a lower speed, sweat dripping from every pore as a result of her running for the past twenty minutes straight. No jogging. Running, flat out.
    “Hey, what are you trying to get away from?” one of the girls working out next to her had asked ten minutes in.
    She’d smiled at her and then kept her gaze forward.
    It wasn’t so much what she was running from, but what she was running toward.
    More specifically, she needed completion on this entire matter before she went postal. And the only thing capable of keeping her mind off Kevin and Gauge was a good visit to the gym.
    So she’d gone to the gym on her dinner break, trying to ban her conversation with Kevin at the bar last night and the day full of unanswered questions from her mind.
    This was driving her nuts.
    Especially since both Gauge and Kevin were now openly going out of their way to avoid her at every turn.
    In the beginning they’d been a little subtler about it.
    Now, when she entered their sections of the store, they made a beeline for another area, or approached a customer, or took some other sort of evasive action that sent her straight back to the café.
    Judging that she’d cooled down enough, she grabbed her towel from the handle and shut down the treadmill, wiping the sweat from her face. She’d had much more alcohol to drink than she’d planned at the bar and now she shook her water bottle to find it empty. She filled it at the water fountain before she headed for the showers, drinking as she went.
    It was after nine and the place had pretty much emptied out while she ran. She liked it like that. She wouldn’t be required to make conversation with anyone and thus wouldn’t be at risk of blurting out her current dilemma.
    She inwardly groaned and she took another deep drink from her water bottle and then began stripping out of her shorts and T-shirt as soon as the locker-room door closed behind her.
    She could just imagine the small town’s reaction to the news that she secretly fantasized about sleeping with her two business partners, and that the other night they’d redefined the meaning of “best” friends. BMC would go out of business overnight. And something similar to the letter S would be stamped across the front window, labeling them all as sinners.
    But they weren’t really sinners, were they? Okay, so she didn’t know which man she’d slept with, but they were all three friends and she knew it was one or the other of them. There was nothing wrong with sleeping with one of your friends, was there?
    Another twenty minutes later she was back at her place, showered and sitting at her kitchen table eating a bowl of granola even as Ernie crunched on his food nearby. But her mind wasn’t on the food or her cat. Instead, she was thinking about the shop’s parking lot and the fact that Kevin’s car was gone while Gauge’s car still there.
    Her chewing slowed. Was that music she heard?
    Her apartment sat over the music center, Gauge’s area of the shop. And while it wasn’t unusual to hear strains of whatever new CD he’d gotten in, she seemed especially tuned in to the sounds now.
    Only it wasn’t a CD, was it? Rather, she heard only a guitar. His guitar, she suspected.
    She shivered and tossed the remainder of her cereal then stared down at Ernie who had finished eating and sat staring up at her.
    “What?” she whispered. “I’m not thinking of doing anything stupid.”
    He flicked his tail as if to say, “Yeah, right,” and then left the room, probably to find a safe spot that wouldn’t result in him being locked in the kitchen again.

11
    G AUGE SAT on a stool in the back area of the music section,