So there was nothing to do now but wait around with Shawn's friends, who of course had been at the beer garden for at least an hour by then.

Jason Gibbs was already mostly drunk. Right away he bought me and Shawn a beer.

Jason was a few years younger than us. I even used to babysit him. In high school, he was the basketball star, but of course no one from Muldoon ever gets a scholarship anywhere so he'd worked at the mill for a while with Shawn. Now he was a highway patrol cop; I had no idea how he'd gotten the night off. He was always a little jerk as a kid. He used to try to take pictures on his phone of me peeing from outside their bathroom window. For a while, though, I'd hoped that maybe he'd influence Shawn to go to the patrol academy too, and I guess I still did, so mostly I tolerated him as one of my husband's friends.

Shawn drank his beer down as fast as I'd ever seen him drink. I bought the next round, getting a vodka tonic for myself this time.

"Whoa, Ashley!" Jason pressed his plastic beer cup into my drink. "Somebody's partying tonight!"

"It's been a long day," I confessed.

Jason tapped Shawn's arm. "You better watch your wife, bro. It's fair time. She keeps going like that, might end up in somebody else's bed. Not saying whose, I'm just saying."

Shawn finished the last of his second beer. "You might end up with somebody's fist down your throat, dude," he said. Some of his color had come back. "And I'm saying whose. Mine."

"Charming, as ever," I said to both of them. But I didn't mind that Shawn had actually sort of stuck up for me, even if it was by threatening his friend with violence in the middle of ordering more beer.

I tried to express as much of my annoyance with Jason as possible, but I was distracted by the way his long, horsey face was capped by whatever spiked thing he was trying to do with his hair. A couple of strands actually kept bobbing up a down idiotically whenever he laughed, which I don't think he was aware of.

"I don't know, bro," Jason said, now without taking his eyes off me. "We have a history, me and Ashley. She told you didn't she? She used to beg my parents to go out of town. She said I was the best in bed of all the kids she babysat for. When they got home, she used to be, like, 'No Mr. And Mrs. Gibbs, you don't owe me anything. Little Jason took care of all my needs.' Your wife's a nympho, bro! Seriously!"

Apparently my husband thought the high-pitched voice Jason used to impersonate me was the funniest thing in the world. Shawn was laughing, and now Jason started laughing at his own joke, and this only made Shawn laugh harder. Apparently this was how much easier it was for Shawn to put the locker room out of his mind than it was for me.

"No, dude!" Shawn said. "You don't even know! I mean, she kind of is a nympho!" My husband laughed hilariously at this revelation.

All I'd wanted was to have a drink and to try to calm down a little. And now I had to deal with this.

The worst part was that I didn't even know what to say. I thought about bringing up how I knew Jason used to sneak Tina Frame's yearbook picture into the bathroom with him, but I didn't have it in me. I was too mentally fried, and I didn't care. I just sat there shaking my head like some prudish idiot.

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