InuYasha Fan Fiction ❯ Purity 9: Subterfuge ❯ Conjugal Visit ( Chapter 76 )

[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]

'Five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . .'

"And just where do you think you're going, Roka?"

'. . . Damn it . . .'

Slowly turning on his heel, pasting on a tolerant little smile when he came face to face with the foreboding head of his security team, Evan shrugged offhandedly and tried to affect a nonchalant air.  "Hey, Bone.  What's up?"

Bone crossed his arms over his meaty chest and leaned back, eyeing Evan through half-closed eyes.  "They don't need you," he stated flatly, seeing right through Evan's show of feigned innocence.  "Besides, weren't you supposed to be doing an interview or something?"

Evan wasn't about to give up, though.  "Eh, come on . . . you still pissed off about that door thing?"

"Not really," Bone replied with a grin.  "Pretty good one, if you ask me.  Now that pillow business, that was pretty awful, you little shit . . ."

Evan broke into a wide smile and slowly nodded.  "Yeah, that was wicked, huh?"

"It was something," he retorted.  "Now suppose you tell me where you think you're going?"

"Hell, I've got to get out of here, at least for a little while," Evan said.  "Just pretend you didn't see me."

Bone sighed and shook his head, grabbing Evan's shoulder before he could try to slip out the service door in the back of the hotel.  "Sorry.  Can't do it."

"If this is your way of getting back at me for that prank, man—"

"Nope.  I just happen to agree with Mike on this one.  Ain't nowhere you can go without drawing notice.  Zel Roka's name is money, ya?  You don't want to cause that much trouble, now do you?  'Sides, I happen to agree with V on this one.  You really, really can't afford to cause any kind of uproar right now, you dig?"

Evan shot Bone a scathing glower, but he couldn't say that he disagreed with either Bone or Mike, not really.  He knew better than anyone that there were hundreds of kids out there just dying to get a glimpse of him.  He also knew the kind of madness that could happen if he actually did try to leave the hotel.  He loved what he did for a living, sure, but sometimes he hated the restraints that went along with all the success, and even reminding himself that he'd ultimately chosen his own lifestyle didn't always remove the sting at moments like this one.  Add to that the absolute microscope he was currently being examined under by the court back home, and, well, sure he could see it even if he hated it, too . . . "Damn," he muttered.

"Mike still pissed off at you, ya?"

Evan grinned and shrugged.  "I don't know," he said, his grin widening.  "He hasn't spoken to me since."

And that, as far as Evan was concerned, was worth far more than the price of a silly prank.  That Mike was going out of his way to keep from having to speak with Evan was gold, pure gold . . .

Well, he did go out of his way at three a.m. when he'd come around, pounding on Evan's door to bitch him out for the incident that he'd said had Evan's name written all over it.  Evan wasn't very successful in hiding his amusement, which only served to piss off the manager a lot more, and after proclaiming Evan to be a menace to society, he'd stomped off down the hallway, and that was the last time Evan had really talked to Mike in several blissful days . . .

"You know, you could always come with me," Evan suggested, knowing that Bone wouldn't go for it.  He still had to try, didn't he?

"You know I can't, man," Bone said, his tone taking on a slight hint of apology.  "Just chill, can't you?  You only gotta be Zel Roka for another three weeks, right?  Then you can be Evan again, and Evan can go anywhere he wants to."

The little pep talk didn't really achieve the desired results.  They were holed up in Indianapolis, Indiana because Evan's bus had started to overheat and probably wouldn't be fixed until later on in the evening, and when Madison had showed up, only to whisk Valerie off to a spa in the city, Evan had felt unaccountably betrayed and lonely.

"You know, it ain't really that surprising that V took off with Maddy.  It's a woman thing, isn't it?" Bone mused.

"Is it that obvious?" Evan grumbled, giving up as he turned around and headed back down the hallway.

"Maybe just a little," Bone allowed with a rumbling chuckle.  "Anyway, don't worry.  Think about it, okay?  She's been cooped up with you on that bus for the last three weeks, and as much as you might not like it, you're just not a woman.  Women need to spend time with women.  It's a character flaw."

Laughing despite himself, Evan shook his head.  "Character flaw, eh?  I don't know if I'd go that far . . ."

"That's because V's totally got you whupped, man.  I don't blame you, ya.  She's a fine, fine piece."

"I'm not whu—maybe a little," Evan said then heaved a rather dejected sigh.  "I just don't get it.  V's been having fun with me, right?  Right?"

"I'm tellin' you, Roka.  It's because you've got the penis."

Evan snorted and pushed through the doors that led to the foyer of the hotel.  "Yeah, well, it's not like I can do anything about that."

Bone laughed and clapped Evan on the back.  "Don't worry about it.  They'll be back after they finish up their girly-thing.  'Sides, did you really want to follow them to the damn spa?"

Evan shrugged.  "Hell, yeah!  Maddy said something about massages, damn it, which means that they're going to be naked!  I wanna see naked, Bone!"

Bone's laughter escalated.  "What?  You tellin' me you didn't see enough naked Bone the other day?"

"Ugh," Evan groaned, shaking his head.  "That's just so wrong . . ."

"Yeah, you walked right into it, little man."

Hitching his shoulders, Evan veered off toward the bar.  At least he was allowed to go there without being watched like a hawk . . . "Nasty . . . Oh, hey!  Meant to ask you.  Where'd you get the dayglo orange condom?"

Following him into the bar, Bone chuckled.  "It wasn't dayglo; it was just orange."

"Well, whatever," Evan retorted as he slid into a booth near the back of the room.  "It looked good on you.  It really, really did."

Bone grinned and sat back, his huge frame taking up the whole side of the table.  "What can I say?  I wear my colors well."

Waving a waitress over, Evan laughed then heaved a sigh.  "So what do you suppose they're doing now?"

Bone rolled his eyes and slowly shook his head.  "Get off it, Roka.  Mooning over some honey is just not rock, ya."

"Yeah, yeah," Evan muttered, checking the clock on the wall: only three in the afternoon.  With his luck, they wouldn't be back for another couple hours, tops, and if they really were gone that long, there was a good chance that he'd be completely bored out of his damn mind by then . . .


"Hmm . . . You're not really still pouting about us taking off for the spa," Madison asked, watching Evan as he prowled around the bus for a moment.

"Don't care," he muttered, opening the cupboard over the sink and rummaging around for a minute before closing it with a crisp crack.

Valerie grinned, fussing with her hair in the small portable mirror that Madison had set on the table.  "Oh, come on, Roka.  I'm sure you found some kind of mischief to keep yourself busy today."

"Course I did," he retorted baldly.  "Her name was Bunny, and she gave great head."

Madison's lips twitched, probably a little too tickled by Evan's warped sense of humor.  Valerie, however, didn't look nearly as amused.  Turning her head sharply, she nearly got about four inches more of her hair cut off than she wanted, and Madison sighed.  "Hold still, V, or you're going to end up with the worst 'do, ever, and it won't be my fault," she warned.

"You'd better not ruin her hair," Evan grumped, his voice distorted since he was holding a guitar pick between his teeth as he tuned the acoustic.  "That would be an act against God."

"What do you care?" Valerie shot back mildly.  "You have Bunny, remember?  And just what the hell kind of name is that, anyway?  Did her parents want to doom her to a life of strippery?"

Evan blinked at Valerie's choice of coined words, and he slowly pulled the pick from between his teeth. "Strippery?"

Valerie snorted and slapped her hand on a newspaper that someone had picked up before leaving the hotel.  "Yes, Roka: strippery."

He pondered that for a full minute before breaking into a cocky grin.  "Are you jealous, V?" he asked a little too hopefully.

She snorted and flicked a hand to dismiss his question. "Of course not . . . Are you seriously trying to tell me that you broke the conditions that you agreed to?"

That wiped the grin off his face, and he snorted.  "I sat in the bar and had a couple beers with Bone, who looks nothing like a stripper named Bunny, if you must know," he muttered.  "Geez . . . Get a grip, woman."

Valerie only looked slightly mollified, but at least she turned her head forward once more.  "Considering what a whore you are, it wouldn't surprise me if you had gone looking for some girl with more silicone than brains in her body."

"You really sound jealous, baby," he pointed out, his mood improving by the second.

"Shut up," she shot back, cheeks pinking prettily.  "As if!  The day I'm jealous of some hussy is the day I fall over, dead!"

He opened his mouth to say something.  Valerie's eyes narrowed first.  "And I'm not your baby."

"It's just a matter of time," he scoffed airily.  "Before long, you'll be calling me 'baby', too—as in, 'Oh, baby, harder, harder, harder! A-A-A-Ah-h-h-h!'"

Valerie managed to stare rather blankly at Evan for all of thirty seconds before she burst out in laughter at his over-the-top silliness.  "Leave you alone for a few hours, and you completely lose your mind," she replied between bouts of giggling.  "Nice . . ."

Madison shook her head, smiling as she carefully trimmed the ends of Valerie's hair.  "No, he's always been like that," she maintained, "especially when he's sulking."

"I'm not sulking," he insisted, strumming the guitar as he pinned Madison with a baleful sort of look.  "I'm a brooding artist.  You've heard of that before, right?"

"Brooding?  Pfft!" Madison shot back.  "You're sulking just like you did when you were little, and you got in trouble for being a pain in the ass."

"Evan?  A pain in the ass?  No-o-o-o," Valerie drawled sarcastically.

Madison laughed.  "He was always a pain in the ass."

Evan snorted loudly.  "I'd like to be a pain in the ass," he countered.  "I've offered lots of times, if you remember, Maddikins.  You always said that you might be twisted, but you're not that twisted."

"Sorry, Evan, but there are some things that I'd just rather not experience, and that's one of them," she replied sweetly.

He heaved a long, loud sigh.

Valerie wrinkled her nose.  "Ugh.  That's so gross."

Evan's wicked little grin resurfaced.  "Oh?  Really?  Do you know that from personal experience?  And by the way, thousands of gay men seem to think that anal sex just dandy, I'll have you know."

"No, I don't know from personal experience.  It just sounds gross, rocker-boy," Valerie replied, "and since I'm neither a guy nor am I gay, then I wouldn't know about that, either."

Evan nodded slowly, a thoughtful frown gracing his features.  "So . . . I see . . . and here I thought that good ol' Orville was a kinky kind of guy . . . Of course, he's not very big, so his winkie is probably, you know, a winkie, so if you did have a hankering to try it, he'd be your best bet for the first time."

"You're not really going to go there, are you?" she asked, cocking an eyebrow in a silent warning.

Evan grinned and chuckled unrepentantly.  "I think I already did, V."

She stared at him for another minute then heaved a sigh and opted to ignore him instead.

"All right, so what did the two of you do while you were gone—you know: not hanging out with me," Evan finally asked, carefully turning a string to tighten it a little bit.

Valerie turned her head, glanced up at Madison.  She grinned and blinked innocently at the surly man.  "Nothing, nothing . . . Just went to the spa and had dinner at Cheeks."

"Cheeks?" Evan echoed, eyebrows lifting, disappearing under the fringe of his bangs.  "You went to Cheeks for dinner?  Without me?"

"That's right," Madison replied sweetly.  She was only half-joking when she'd suggested the restaurant to Valerie.  Valerie, however, had actually looked rather intrigued.

"You mean the place where the waiters all wear those little, tiny g-string things?" she asked, her eyes sparkling mischievously.  "I've never been to one of those places before . . ."

Madison laughed.  Cheeks was basically the women's answer to Hooters, and while she'd only eaten at the one in Miami before, she had to admit that, eye candy aside, the food really was quite good.  "Come on," Madison coaxed. "It'll be fun."

"I don't know," Valerie hesitated, tapping her freshly manicured nails on the white marble table where they were drinking tea.  Madison could sense it, couldn't she?  Valerie's sense of propriety versus her inborn curiosity . . . "Don't you think that places like that are kind of sexist?"

"Well, of course," Madison said, tugging on the lapels of her thick, pink robe.  "Isn't that the point?"

Valerie sighed as the PC part of her personality warred with her absolute intrigue at the very idea of being served by buff men wearing very, very little.  "I don't know . . ."

Madison grinned.  "Just think of the look on Evan's face when you tell him where you went to have dinner," she goaded.

"Like he'd care if I saw a thousand nearly naked men," she scoffed.  "If it were women, it'd probably be different."

Madison snorted as she lifted a glass of white wine to her lips.  "Are you kidding?  He'll be jealous, all right—jealous that you weren't ogling him in a g-string."

Valerie giggled, her cheeks pinking slightly as she quickly shook her head.  "He won't even wear underpants.  He won't care, I'm telling you."

But he did care, if the expression on his face meant anything at all.  The sulking had escalated into a full-blown pout, and he set the guitar aside, slumping back in his chair as he crossed his arms over his chest and snorted loudly.  "Like you needed to go there to watch some guy parade around in that," he scoffed.  "I would have been more than happy to do that for you.  Hell!  I'd have done it naked—and I wouldn't charge you an entrance fee, either!"

"No one would want to see something like that, especially when they're eating," Valerie pointed out.  "Besides, just because you're a rock star doesn't mean that you know a thing about that sort of job, anyway."

"We-e-ell," Madison drawled, running a brush through Valerie's hair and taking one last look to make sure that her hair was even.  "He might know more than you think."

Valerie snorted indelicately, clearly not ready to agree with Madison's assessment.

Pulling the cape off of Valerie's shoulders, careful not to dump hair trimmings on the floor, Madison laughed as Valerie stood up and moved off pull a sweatshirt out of the closet.  "You did know that he used to be a stripper, didn't you?"

Pausing for a moment before she tugged the pale gray garment over her head, Valerie shot Madison a distinctly wary glance.  "Why doesn't that surprise me?" she muttered under her breath.

Evan chuckled, looking entirely too amused at his own antics.  "Those were the days . . . young and dumb and full of co—"

"I think we can all figure out what you were 'full of'," Valerie interrupted dryly, striding over to the wet bar and pulling open cabinets.  Usually, Evan kept it pretty well stocked, but since Valerie was along for the ride, he'd told Madison that he'd had to scale back on the contents dramatically.  Still, Valerie managed to find a bottle of red wine, and she nabbed a couple glasses before returning to the table once more.

"He really was pretty good," Madison went on thoughtfully as she folded up the plastic sheet she'd placed on the floor under Valerie's chair.  "Tell her your stage name, sweetie," she prompted, winking at Evan, who was still mid-pout.

Her question made him perk up pretty quickly, however, and he grinned.  "You mean, you can't figure it out?" he teased.

Valerie took her time, pouring wine into the glasses  before  setting the bottle aside.  "Mini Me?" she asked without missing a beat.

Evan's grin widened.  "No, but that would have been a pretty good one . . ."

Madison stuffed the sheet into her travel kit—she'd clean it off when she got back to the city tomorrow—and took the glass of wine that Valerie offered her.

"My stage name was 'The hEvan'," he replied happily.  "Spelled little 'h', big 'e'—'v'—'a'—'n'."

Valerie was completely nonplussed as she sipped her drink and slowly blinked at Evan.  "And that's why you just had to put it on my caller ID?  Figures."

"Totally fitting, eh?" he prompted.  "My thong even said it, straight down the front of the pouch . . . You know, most of the guys could only have a letter or a shape on their pouches, but mine was so big, I got the full name treatment."

Valerie blinked once, twice.  ". . . Sure."

Slipping onto Valerie's lap, Madison giggled and kissed her friend on the cheek.  "He should show you, V," she suddenly said, her violet eyes sparkling with a mischievous light.

Valerie kissed Madison's cheek in return and slipped her arms around her waist.  "No, he really shouldn't," she replied.  "We didn't eat that long ago."

"Do you have the thong with you?" Madison asked, leaning forward, staring at Evan in an anticipation.

"Not on this bus," he drawled.

"There?  You see?  No thong.  Can't do it.  Sorry, Roka.  I'm sure that the show was just peachy," Valerie said.

Evan chuckled and stood up, ambling toward the front of the bus where he tugged open the door and said something to the driver.

"What are you doing?" Valerie asked dubiously.

The bus started to slow down, and the wine bottle slid precariously as it abruptly jerked over off the side of the road.

"Well, I don't have the thong, but I do have a thong," Evan said.  "Lemme go get it."

Madison got up and slipped into the seat that Evan had vacated, reaching for the wine bottle to refill her glass.  "You know, I didn't think he'd actually do it."

Valerie got up on her hands and knees, narrowing her eyes as she tried to see outside the window—pretty much an impossibility since it was already dark outside and since they were stopped in the middle of nowhere.  "Why does he have a thong?" she demanded.  "He hates underpants . . ."

"He doesn't really consider a thong to be 'underpants'," Madison stated.  "Besides, Mike has a fit if Evan drops his pants onstage without having something on under them.  He's been banned from way too many arenas for showing the audience his junk . . ."

Flopping back in her seat and apparently giving up in her mission to figure out exactly what Evan was up to, Valerie rubbed her forehead, looking anything but amused at Madison's confession.  "Why doesn't that surprise me, either?  That man . . ."

"Isn't nearly as bad as you thought he was, right?" Madison cut in when Valerie trailed off.  Arching an eyebrow, she smiled as Valerie heaved a long, drawn out sigh and slowly shook her head.

"He isn't . . . and he is . . ." she said slowly, as though she were trying to figure out exactly what she meant as she said it.  "He can be fun, sure, but sometimes . . . Sometimes he's so infuriating that I just don't know why I bother with him."

Madison considered that for a long moment, nodding as she conceded Valerie's observation.  "He's not what you thought he was, is he?" she asked gently, a tender little smile toying at the corners of her lips.

"Sometimes," Valerie allowed.  "Sometimes I think I understand him.  Others . . .?  I have no idea . . ."

"Is that so bad?" Madison challenged.  "V . . . Why is it that you always think that you have to understand every single thing about every single person?"

"I don't—" Making a face, she suddenly smiled a bit sheepishly.  "I do, don't I?"

"Give up, sweetie," Madison remarked as she leaned over to refill Valerie's empty wine glass.  "Even if you understand him today, he'll change the rules tomorrow.  He's always been like that."

"But you still say he's your friend," Valerie pointed out, taking the glass and draining half of it in one long quaff.

"He is," she replied simply.  Of course she knew that Valerie had never really understood the connection that Evan and she shared, but maybe in time, she would, just as Valerie had never fully believed Madison when she'd said often enough that she had never been 'in love' with Evan, even if she did adore him more than anyone else on earth.  But that wasn't her story to tell, was it?

And even if she felt that Valerie deserved to know, there really wasn't any way that she could tell her a thing about it.  The biggest secret of them all—that she and Evan were both youkai—wasn't something that could be divulged lightly, and Madison understood that, too.  She'd been powerless at the time when Evan's cousin, Samantha had disappeared, only able to stand back and watch as the entire family—one of the most powerful families on the face of the earth—had nearly fallen apart, and though no one had ever told her exactly what had happened to Samantha during those months when she couldn't be found, Evan had said that it was some of the worst shit he'd ever seen.  Coming from a guy like him, Madison figured that she didn't want or need details; not ever . . .

The thing was, Madison knew that Valerie's biggest problem was the insecurity that she carried around—insecurity that Valerie thought she kept hidden.  It wasn't that she was so in love with Marvin Pinkle that she couldn't stand the idea of being without him.  It was that Valerie knew she could be without him and felt safe in the understanding, as ugly as it might be, that, even if he tried, Marvin would never, ever be able to hurt her.  Oh, sure, Madison didn't doubt for a moment that Valerie loved him on some level.  She wasn't such a horrible person as to agree to marry someone for whom she bore no real feelings.  In fact, Madison thought it was kind of interesting, really.  Valerie, who professed not to understand whenever Madison had said that she loved Evan but had never been in love with him, still had yet to comprehend that her feelings for Marvin were probably very close to the same.  It was just that she didn't want to understand, Madison figured.  She only hoped that Valerie would before it was too late.

Evan dashed through the bus with a goofier than normal grin on his face.  He didn't stop to say a word, making a beeline for the bathroom as Valerie and Madison exchanged glances.  Valerie looked like she was dreading whatever the man had in mind.  Madison giggled, figuring that he must've found the aforementioned thong.

"He . . . He's not really going to strip, is he?" Valerie asked, unable to hide the abject dread in her tone.

Madison winked at her.  "Probably."

"Oh, boy," Valerie said, tipping her wine glass to drain it before setting it on the table with a dull thud.  "Fill it up, quick," she muttered.

Madison laughed, but did as Valerie demanded.

Valerie proceeded to suck down a couple more glasses of wine before she spoke again, and by the time she did, her cheeks had taken on a slight flush, but her voice was fairly steady.  "Do you really have to get off the bus in Cincinnati?" she whined.  "You can't leave me alone with him!  You can't!  When I'm alone with him, I do strange things!  Save me, Maddy!  Please?"

Biting her lip, Madison very nearly burst into laughter.  Valerie was completely panicked, if the look on her face meant anything at all.  "What kind of strange things?" she couldn't resist asking.  "You mean like going along with Evan's pranks?"

"Yes," Valerie insisted, looking anything but pleased about her role in the incidents that Evan had regaled Madison with over the phone.  "It's not just that," she went on slowly, knitting her fingers together in a knot of wiggling flesh.  "Sometimes I—"

The God-awful trills of the cheesiest sounding stripper music that preceded Evan out of the bathroom.  Valerie grimaced and groped for the nearly empty wine bottle, sloshing the liquid as she hurriedly tried to gulp it down before Evan actually emerged.

Madison giggled when he strode out, wearing a skin tight pair of black leather pants and a very, very orange satin shirt that billowed around him like a sack.  In fact, Madison was pretty certain that she'd seen it on Bone earlier, though she couldn't be positive . . .

Grasping the ends of a lime green scarf, he tugged it back and forth as he gyrated his hips.  Valerie looked like she wanted to close her eyes, but she peeked despite her resolve not to do so.

The shirt came off pretty easily, and Madison giggled as he whipped it over his head then dropped it on the floor.  Dancing closer, he flexed his pecs right in Valerie's face, bending his knees, straddling her legs and humping the air.  It was all Madison could do not to howl in laughter.  Valerie blushed but giggled, leaning back in a vain attempt to avoid Evan's attention.

"This is just really not sexy," Valerie murmured when Evan danced away, sticking out his ass and continuing to shimmy.

"Oh?  You don't think so?" Madison countered, pressing a finger to her lips to contain her own amusement.

"Not at all," Valerie replied, giggling when he grasped the waist of his pants and gave them a sharp yank.  The seams sides split open as the snaps that held them closed gave way, and he tossed them aside, doing his level best to wiggle his ass for their delectation.

"Look," Valerie said, pointing at Evan's backside, "he's got a wedgie."

Madison choked on a sip of wine, rubbing her nose when the liquid redirected.  "Now, be nice," she said, leaning toward Valerie without taking her eyes off the entertainment.  "I slept with that . . ."

Valerie shook her head but grinned.  "Sorry, aren't you?"

Evan pivoted around, leaning back, thrusting out his hips with his hands behind his neck in the absolutely garish, bright blue thong.

"Kind of," she allowed, giggling helplessly.

Evan stopped, straightening up, planting his hands on his hips and trying to look stern.  It didn't really work, all things considered.  "Hey!  You two hecklers!  Pay attention, will you?"

"I think he stuffs," Valerie whispered to Madison, who barked out another round of laughter.

"I do not!" Evan huffed.  "I can prove it, you know!"

"Ugh, no!" Valerie said, holding up her hands and squeezing her eyes closed.

Evan snorted and tried to look properly offended.  "You realize, right?  You've got to tip the dancer . . ."

Rolling her eyes, Valerie leaned forward, nabbing Evan's wallet off the table where he'd left it.  To Madison's undisguised amusement, she dug all of the cash out of it and carefully counted it before pulling a couple singles off the top then folding the stash in half and stuffing it down her bra.  "Okay, Roka," she said, straightening out the bills and waving them in his general direction.

Evan grinned and danced over to her, pivoting on his heels and grasping the cash with his ass cheeks.

"Eww!" Valerie squealed, letting go of the dollars and yanking her hand away.  "Eww, eww, eww, eww, eww-w-w-w-w!"

Madison giggled and reached over to slap his ass.

He shot her a grin and kept dancing.

"I can't watch anymore," Valerie insisted, crossing her arm over her stomach as she half-groaned, half-laughed, only to groan again.  Wiping her eyes, unable to staunch the flow of tears that literally poured down her cheeks, she gasped for breath, tried to stop laughing, only to howl even louder.

Evan hooked the sides of the thong and started to edge it lower as he did a very raunchy bump and grind.  Madison stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled as Valerie groaned and giggled in turn.  Suddenly, though, the attorney bolted out of her seat and toward the bathroom, covering her mouth with her hands.

Evan blinked and stopped dancing.  "Uh oh," he drawled, glancing a little nervously at Madison.

"She laughed herself sick?" Madison asked quizzically.  "Is that even possible?"

Shutting off the music, Evan grimaced though his grin hadn't disappeared altogether.  "Seems so," he said, taking a step toward the bathroom.

Madison stood up and hurried around him.  Between the wine and the laughter, Valerie, apparently, had reached her limit.  "Back off, Cassanova.  Do you really want her laughing herself even sicker?"

Evan winced then chuckled, apparently deciding that Madison might be on to something.  She smiled and shook her head.  Leave it to Evan to accomplish something that she really hadn't considered before.  "Do V a favor and put some clothes on before she comes back out here," Madison called over her shoulder.

Evan sighed, but the sound of his laughter followed her into the bathroom.