Roll the Dice

ten. the hot box

[Dedicated to Ameera, whose constant support throughout this book really inspires me to keep going on. Thank you so very much.]

"You realize that the parking situation in Washington, D.C. is shit, right?" Dom said as he turned the steering wheel sharply, cutting off a car that immediately honked at him. He muttered something that sounded a little like "fuck you" and turned his head to meet my eyes. "When I agreed to listen to you talk about that musical, I didn't mean that you can drag me out for field trips whenever you wanted."

My face felt incredibly hot as soon as I met his eyes, but I immediately fumbled for an excuse to the right question (because I really wanted to answer the question of why his gaze was so intimidating to me – he'd implied it to me at least five times on the way out to the interstate beltway). "You won't really understand the significance of culture unless you experience it in person."

"Your logic then states that I've already experienced the essence of culture because I did see Dudes and" – he cleared his throat as soon as I sent him my most venomous glare – "um, Guys and Dolls on stage."

I had a split second delay before finding a suitable answer in my head. "Well," I said, holding up a hand, "you can think about it this way. Brilliant children don't need supplements in their learning regime because they find out information by themselves anyway. Other children need some extra encouragement and special activities to really understand something."

Dom rolled his eyes. "I get the insinuation."

I snapped my fingers as sharply as I could, which wasn't too sharply since I absolutely sucked at snapping. "Keep your eyes on the road. I don't wanna die yet." I put a finger on my chin. "Actually, if we do die, I know what our last words would be."

Glancing over to his profile, I felt even hotter. God, I was actually alone in a confined vehicle (well, the windows were rolled down, but I didn't think that counted) with Dom Amaro, the guy I'd crushed on since forever. And so far, I hadn't really insulted him. All right, maybe I did. Just a little.

Dom stared ahead of him, duly keeping his eyes on the road. "I actually don't want to know what your last words would be."

"'Everybody in the whole world who hates me is now here,'" I said, nodding my head in satisfaction as I repeated it to myself in my head.

"What?" Dom looked over to me like I was a lunatic who'd just gotten out of a sanitarium.

I shrugged. "It's a quote from Nathan Detroit." I pursed my lips a little, feeling the leather seat on which I was sitting as Dom's car zoomed past a couple of other cars. "It's from later in the musical, but I guess I'll explain it to you when we get there."

"When we get there?" Dom swerved to avoid a car that was creeping onto his lane.

I squealed, holding on tightly to my seat belt. Once I recovered, ignoring Dom's pointed look, I let out a very long sigh through my nose. "We'll be going through the musical's sequence of events in order so that I don't blurt out random facts at you. So we've already briefly been over the opening sequences, and if I'm right, we're going to talk about Miss Adelaide next."

Dom jerked his hands up from the wheel, holding them up as if a police officer had asked him to show that he wasn't in possession of any weapons. The car swerved again, and this time, I let out a screech that probably deafened him for a couple seconds. "Drive properly, would you?"

Once again, Dom rolled his eyes at me. "All right," he said, turning his head fully to make eye contact with me, "I didn't ask for a full-on curriculum or anything. Like, I was expecting for you to spit out some random-ass facts that would maybe make me more interested in the musical."