Page 121 of The Forever Vault

“Okay.”

He left to greet a new group of guys.

“Maybe we come back? You said you wanted a hot tub,” Luke said.

“Ha ha. Not bad enough that I’m going to strip for it. We have enough anyway with my medal winnings.”

“Oh yeah. Where are you taking me to celebrate your victories?”

“Here’s where you’ve been hiding!”

I rotated the stool to greet Ty and Declan.

“Wait a minute. Something’s different.” Ty stopped a few feet away. “You got matching tattoos! Aw, little platypussies. Platypussy?”

“Ew, don’t say that,” Luke said.

“Platypus or platypuses, babe,” Declan corrected him.

“And they make a heart when we put them together,” Luke said before demonstrating by touching elbows and lining up our biceps.

“Aw!” Ty fawned on it for a sec before yelling, “We did too!”

“You did what?” Luke asked.

“Tyler! We said we weren’t going to tell!”

“Oh, come on, Dec. It’s Cam and Luke.”

Arms crossed, eyes rolled, Declan relented. “Fine.”

“It’s covered in a bandage, so I’ll show you later, but I got a little crab on my butt.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking, and Luke was staring at him, just like I was.

“I’m a Cancer. You know, the zodiac.”

“You know people are gonna say you have crabs, Ty.”

I was glad Luke pointed it out and not me.

“I told you so,” Declan said.

Ty punched Declan in the arm. “Declan got a scorpion right above his dick!”

“Also bandaged, before you ask to see it.”

“I wanted something funnier, like, Open wide for Dec and Fuck me! on my ass, but Dec said those weren’t forever tattoos, so we went with the Zodiacs.”

“It took some convincing,” Declan said.

I smiled at the thought. “I bet.”

“I don’t know what the big deal is, no one would’ve seen them.”

“Ty, you show your ass all the time. You’re at the beach constantly, in skimpy speedos that you pull up to keep your tan lines mobile. Everyone would’ve seen yours,” Luke said.

I added, “If you had any sense of humor at all, you should’ve put the crab in your