by JA Huss
But then again, maybe not.
I don’t have that feeling anymore. The one that demanded I make a change. The early mid-life crisis is over.
So I decide to just live the life I’ve been given with the woman I love.
Maybe Oaklee and I didn’t get the experience we signed up for a few weeks ago, but we did get an experience, didn’t we?
The deluxe version, for sure.
The Shrike Bikes show has me on as a guest four times this first season and they’re talking about making me a recurring regular next season.
And Oaklee is back, better than ever now that Hanna is out of her life. She’s already thinking about the label design for her fall and winter seasonals.
I think her mid-life crisis is over too.
Vivi Vaughn started my second tat on my other shoulder. It’s me in a suit, surrounded by a bunch of familiar faces.
That day at the festival is now a local legend. We don’t admit to anything, of course. But rumors fly about how we took down Hanna and saved the Colorado craft beer industry.
I think it was the hipsters who talked.
And that’s fine. Let people talk. Let them turn it into something more than it was if they want.
We don’t care.
We’re too busy planning the Husband Experience.
EPILOGUE - JORDAN
I live in a seven-million-dollar, ten-thousand-square-foot historical mansion next door to the Denver Botanical Gardens. I bought it last fall in foreclosure with the hope of…
What?
What was I hoping?
I live here now because I’m liquidating. I have hopes and dreams too. I need things. It’s all I’ve got left and I don’t want it unless…
There are seven bedrooms, eleven bathrooms, two media rooms, two offices, two kitchens, a game room, a library, and a ballroom.
And I live here alone.
There’s nowhere to drop my keys as I come in the front door because the place is empty. A family lived here before their luck changed. And they left everything behind when they sold it. Even photographs. The happy couple on their wedding day. Pictures of their kids, and I can only assume they did that because they have digitals in Dropbox or some shit, because that part is pretty cold.
Pretty.
Fucking.
Cold.
(But who am I to judge?)
They left everything like it was a holiday home and whatever they kept there was just… extra. Like they went shopping and bought two of everything and so all this was just… the spare set.
Except it wasn’t.
But it’s all gone now. I packed up the photographs in a box and gave them to Lawton. Did he ever return them? I have no idea because I never asked. Then I sold all the furniture in an estate sale last month and bought a desk, a bed, and a couch from IKEA and had it all placed in the fifteen-hundred-square-foot office on the main floor.
I’m pretty sure the IKEA delivery people thought I was crazy, but I don’t care. And anyway, it might be true.
I live in the office. I don’t even bother using the main kitchen because I don’t cook and the office has a wet bar—because all gentlemen who own ten-thousand-square-foot-homes have a wet bar in their office—and it even has a dishwasher to wash the cut-crystal glasses I drink bourbon out of every night before bed, so who cares about the industrial-sized chef’s kitchen on the other side of the house?
On the desk there’s a laptop and on the wall there’s a fifty-five-inch TV, except I don’t have cable, or Netflix, or Hulu, or even Prime, so why I bought the TV, I couldn’t tell you.
If anyone saw me these days I’d get a label.
If I was lucky that label would be… eccentric. But more likely than not, they’d call me…sad.
And that would be accurate.
I am sad. For all the things I lost. For all the ways I’ve tried to make up to the people who matter. For all the things I’ll never have—things that have nothing to do with the size of a TV or the number of bathrooms in a house I don’t even really live in, or a wet bar in the oversized home office.
I feel sorry for that family who lost this house. I really do. Because at least they treated it like a home. At least it was loved.
I don’t love it.
I kick off my shoes as I enter the office and pour myself four fingers of bourbon. I sit on the couch, facing the window that faces the front yard—visible because of the fancy landscape lighting—and think about the game that just ended.
Sometimes people ask me why I do this. Why I make up these games. Why I fuck with so many lives. And I say… why not?
I take a sip of my drink, still staring out the window, and ask myself that question now.
It’s not because of Oaklee. I don’t owe her anything. Whether she knows it or not, she got her boyfriend experience. I don’t owe Law, either. Though I do still need him. If I want to get what I want, that is. I need him, but I don’t owe him. So that’s not why.
So why? Why do I do this? Is it some deep craving for forgiveness?
Probably. But that’s not enough. Not for the kind of shit I pull off.
So why? What is the payoff?
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. A lot.
And there’s really only one answer.
I like it.
I smile just thinking that truth.
I like it.
I hired Darrel to work with me for a reason. And Finn, too. They are both decent enough on the outside. But inside… inside Darrel and Finn are just like me. Two morally bankrupt motherfuckers looking to make a new fortune.
I wield a powerful hammer having Darrel and Finn on my side. Some might say it’s not fair, but he who writes the rules of the game wins, right?
Except… I’m cashing out.
All the way out.
Because there’s only one thing left for me to want.
That fucking building.
I pick up my phone and call Lawton, ready to make my move. I’ve liquidated everything I have—except the house, because, well, I haven’t quite given up on that. I have one more game to play and it involves this house.
Lawton answers, “Yeah,” and for a second I forget I called him and hesitate. “Jordan?” he asks.
“So hey,” I say. “I’m ready to make an offer on Turning Point. Did you find out who the owner is?”
“Uh, yeah,” he says, hesitating.
“So how much do they want?”
“They’re not selling. And man, I tried my hardest too. I pulled out all the stops for you, brother. But these people are holding tight.”
“Dude, I pulled together fifteen million dollars cash. Did you tell them all-cash offer?”
“Yeah, they don’t care. I’m telling you, they’re not selling.”
“Who the fuck are these people?” I ask.
“Well, see, that’s the interesting part. They know you.”
“What?”
“Yeah, some woman named Augustine and her husband Alexander.”
“Augustine and Alexander bought my building?”
“It’s their building, dude. They’re not selling. I’m sorry, I know that club meant a lot to you, but I’m sorry. I tried my best and…”
I end the call. Stare out my window. Sip my drink.
And rage inside at the audacity of those two showing up from my fucking past, in my fucking town, buying my fucking building, and then letting it sit there for almost two fucking years as they wait for me to realize…
I just lost my own game.
Fuck that.
It’s time to play dirty.
Get the next book, PLAY DIRTY, HERE
END OF BOOK SHIT
Welcome to the End of Book Shit! This is the part of the book where I get to say anything I want about the book and you can read it or not. :) They are never edited and always written last minute right before I upload the files to the distributors so there will be typos and you should ignore them!
One of the best thin
gs about writing (for me, anyway) is thinking a story will go one way and have it go somewhere else unexpectedly.
Vivi Vaughn didn’t really exist before this book, but then… of course she did. Sick Girlz was inevitable, it’s only logical that Veronica Vaughn’s brother, Viv Vaughn, would have Bombshell daughters too. Her name always began with a V because for some reason that whole clam is fixated on that. And she was born to be a tattoo artist because Sick Boyz was her inherited empire, just like Bronco Brews was Oaklee’s.
I’m not going to lie, I had A LOT of fun writing this book. Like almost too much fun. I got to re-imagine Spencer and friends way into the future, I got to put a Shrike Bikes showroom in the old Chaput photography building next to Coor’s Field, which means I got to go back to the Five Points neighborhood AND I got to stick Oliver in here as well. So even though this book isn’t about the Rook & Ronin people I got to kinda pretend it was.
I also got to talk about leather jackets, and motorcycles, and tattoos again. It made me realize how much I missed that world.
Which brings me to a bit of good news I just got a couple days ago. Some of you may already know, but for the benefit of those who don’t follow my personal Facebook profile and didn’t see the post…
I have signed a TV series option deal for the books Slack, Guns, and The Company (which used to be called Come, Come Back, and Coming For You) with MGM Television. They optioned those five books and have first right of refusal locked in for the entire Rook & Ronin/Company series. And this was ALL due to the hard work my partner, Johnathan McClain, did when he pitched the books, the world, and the TV series project to MGM last fall.
So… this world was one of the first I ever built but it’s still going. It’s got a lot of life left in it.
The Boyfriend Experience is also the very first “official” tie-in between the Turning Series, Jordan’s Game, Rook & Ronin, and The Company. And there’s even a mention of Anarchy Series in here too. So FIVE Huss worlds in one book.
I’m laughing out loud right now. Because I know you’re not supposed to do this. I know this. Readers are picky and lots of them like to start with book one and read everything in order and HATE finding out later there’s so much more that came before.
But I can’t help it and I didn’t plan it. It just rolled out this way.
OK, so how about the new world. Jordan’s world is just getting bigger and bigger and I have a feeling that Law and Oaklee are gonna be one of the favorites.
I’m not really a drinker so this whole craft beer set up kinda took me by surprise when I came up with it. But the more I thought about it the more I liked it. I love creating new “brands” in books. Like Shrike Bikes. Which has stood the test of time. And I started doing this immediately in my very first series I Am Just Junco. In Junco’s world there’s a movie star called Jax Justice (It’s Science Fiction, BTW) who even crosses over into the Anarchy series at one point. And there’s a rock star called Cora and I have Junco drinking craft beer in book two (it’s called Little Sister) and there’s a whole bunch of culture in there. Because that’s how you build a world in science fiction. So when I started writing romance that’s all I knew. I just figured that’s how it’s done. And I like reading books like that, so I figured hey, why not make up brands in this romance stuff too? Why not build a “culture” and not just a world? And that’s who we got Shrike Bikes and that’s how we got Cookie’s Diner (which made an appearance in Pleasure of Panic) and that’s how we got Sick Boyz tattoo shop.
So building Oaklee’s world of Bronco Brews was almost inevitable. But in addition to all that, I actually have a real-world experience with this beer brewing stuff. When I was up at Colorado State University doing my undergrad in equine science I had to take a microbiology class to graduate. And microbiology was already my thing, I loved it. But my professor was this kick-ass little lady who worked with mosquito-borne diseases over at the CDC on campus. And when SHE was doing her college she actually took microbiology with one of the brewmasters for New Belgium Brewing (which is one of the first craft breweries to make it “Big”) and they happened to be based in Fort Collins, so she invited him over to our class to give a lecture on how he uses yeast to flavor beer.
So Bronco Brews is like a little Easter egg in my life. It’s almost like… no matter how hard I try everything leads back to Fort Collins for me.
The other Easter egg is the Funsville Arcade. When I lived back in Ohio growing up this is where we hung out as teenagers. It really was called Funsville. I was addicted to pinball back then and funny enough, one of the pinball machines I used to play as a teenager shows up in a major way in the Junco series.
Another funny little fact in this book was the whole “hipster” scene in the Opera House Tavern up in Golden. BTW – there is a bar in an opera house in Golden, it’s just called something else. I am not a hipster and I only have a cursory knowledge of the “hipster” culture so I had to look most of it up online. (Don’t take any of it too seriously if you’re a hipster! Lol) But the funny part is that I have this too-school-for-cool (who somehow manages to be super cool anyway) twenty-one-year-old son. My ONLY knowledge of hipster culture is hearing my son proclaim (long and loud) about how he isn’t one, OK? Like... that’s it. That’s all I knew.
HE IS NOT A HIPSTER!
But I know my son. Right? So I started looking up different things… like what do hipsters listen to? And what to hipsters wear? And what do hipsters care about?
And I found Modest Mouse. Who I can’t stand, BUT have listened to A LOT because it’s my son’s FAVORITE BAND and h would play them in the car.
I was like… huh. That’s weird.
So I’m feeling pretty good about Modest Mouse because I know them, so they make it into the story.
Then I look up what they wear and I see… Hawaiian shirts and old-school Adidas.
And I’m like… what? Because my SON, who ISN’T a hipster, also had a weird fixation with Hawaiian shirts and old-school Adidas.
And then I get to the names… and I’m like… HOLY SHIT! My son is a hipster! Because his name is Odin. lol
So this story isn’t over yet. Because two weeks ago he and his girlfriend take me out to dinner for Mother’s Day. And we’re sitting in Bourbon Brothers in Colorado Springs and I’m telling him this same story above. Pointing out how he is 100% hipster in every way imaginable.
He couldn’t even deny it. (He did try and deny it. He blushed and laughed and said no! But his girlfriend was like, “I told you! I told you!”)
So that was pretty funny. And he would be mortified if he knew I was talking about him in the EOBS (even though he doesn’t even know what an EOBS is) ;)
So I just had too much fun with this story. Too much fun. And I hope that’s what you take away from it. It’s not some super serious mind-bending twisted mystery or anything. It’s not some work of literature. It’s just FUN.
Jordan is up next. It IS a standalone book. And it IS a MFM love story. And it IS a little bit darker. And it IS just ONE POINT OF VIEW. Just Jordan. He deserves an entire book so that’s what he gets. It’s called Play Dirty and you can get it at the link below.
Thank you for reading, thank you for reviewing, and I’ll see you in the next book!
JA Huss
May 25, 2018
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About the Author
JA Huss is the New York Times Bestselling author of 321 and has been on the USA Today Bestseller's list 21 times in the past four years. She writes characters with heart, plots with twists, and perfect endings.
Her books have sold millions of copies all over the world, the audio version of her semi-autobiographical book, Eighteen, was nominated for a Voice Arts Award and an Aud
ie Award in 2016 and 2017 respectively, her audiobook, Mr. Perfect, was nominated for a Voice Arts Award in 2017, and her audiobook, Taking Turns, was nominated for an Audie Award in 2018.
She lives on a ranch in Central Colorado with her family.
If you’d like to learn more about JA Huss or get a look at her schedule of upcoming appearances, visit her website or www.HussMcClain.com to keep updated on her projects with Johnathan. You can also join her fan group, Shrike Bikes, on Facebook, and follow her Twitter handle, @jahuss.
SEE ALL HER BOOKS HERE