Free Overnight Male by Elizabeth Bevarly Page B

friend and snatched the controls Hobie held.

    “Hey!” Hobie objected eloquently.

    “I’m Knuckles now,” Donny announced. He tossed the controls formerly known as Chuck’s to Hobie. “You be Tails.”

    “Tails sucks, man,” Hobie said. “He don’t do Jack.”

    Adrian closed his eyes in a silent plea for patience. Oh, what he wouldn’t give for a good, solid two-by-four at the moment. How could people who claimed the IQs of NASA engineers have the maturity of eggplants?

    “Boys, don’t make me separate you,” he said as he pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger. “You know how much you hate being put in time-out.”

    They, of course, ignored him. Worse than ignored him, actually. They didn’t even hear him. And if there was one thing Adrian hated more than anything in the world, it was going unnoticed.

    He opened his mouth to say something that would, he hoped, wrest their attention from the colorful graphics zipping by on the TV screen for even a moment, when the door to the hotel suite beeped at the use of a key card, then opened to reveal the final member of the group. She, too, barely acknowledged Adrian as she strode by him, tossing a halfhearted “Hey, Nick” over her shoulder at him as she approached the boys instead.

    Ah, Iris, he thought as he watched her take a seat on the sofa, thrusting one long leg over the arm to swing her foot anxiously above the floor. She was always doing something anxiously. The antithesis to the boys, who could sit idly for hours in front of their games, Iris Daugherty could never be still for more than a few minutes at a time. She was an icon of her generation, too, though she took greater pains to establish her own identity of Goth Girl. She was dressed today as she always was, completely in black, from the cropped T-shirt to the baggy, zipper-ridden cargo pants to the studded belt and high-top sneakers. Her ears were pierced probably a dozen times, as was her eyebrow, her nose and her navel. Scores of black rubber bracelets encircled one wrist, and a black studded wristwatch was wrapped around the other. She carried with her, as she always did, an enormous black bag, chunky with its contents, slung diagonally over her shoulder and torso. As he always did, Adrian wondered what she could possibly have it filled with, as it was indeed always completely stuffed. She dyed her straight, chin-length hair and eyebrows black to match her clothes, even painted her bitten-down nails black. Heavy black liner encircled pale blue eyes, and black lipstick stained her mouth.

    Whenever Adrian saw her, he couldn’t help wondering what she’d looked like before the transformation. Especially since she was an aging Goth Girl who couldn’t hang on to this persona much longer without looking ridiculous. At twenty-six, she was older than the boys by half a dozen years, having started college a bit later than the others and taking her time to complete her degree. Adrian didn’t know a lot about her, but from what he’d heard and observed of her, he’d formed an impression of a rich kid who was even more bored by life than he was. He’d been around wealth often enough as an adult that he was reasonably adept at recognizing those who were born to it. Perhaps because his own background was so completely opposite to theirs.

    Although Iris was certainly as comfortable around computers as the boys were, Adrian had come to the conclusion that the main reason she hung out with them was that she was a geek groupie. He’d overheard enough conversations between the young men when she wasn’t around to know that she’d slept with all three of them at some point—and more than once with all of them at the same time, something that intrigued Adrian rather a lot.

    Ah, well then, he thought as the realization formed. He stood corrected. There was something—or rather, someone—he found intriguing after all. In fact, he found Iris rather fascinating. Rather