“Mama!” Rachel starts, completely indignant. “What are you yelling at me for? I didn’t—”
“Oh, shut up, Rachel, youliterallyhave egg on your face.” Molly glares at Rachel, then Laine, then Chance, standing slack-jawed to the side, smeared with his sisters’ war crimes. “We are having dinner as agoddamnfamily this Sunday, and we are going to work this out, once and for all.” Mrs. Woods points at me. “And your ass better be at that table, too, Zoe Brennan!”
My eyes widen. “Yes,ma’am.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Just as the evening’s twilight settles into a deep, husky violet among the vines, a knock sounds on my cottage door. Jitters wriggle through my insides.
This is not a date.This is not a date!This is, in fact, a wretched family dinner caused by egg-fueled warfare that I am attending with myemployee. Who, despite our rocky start, might be my friend now. I can’t mess that up with misplaced horny vibes. I check myself in the mirror and frown.
Is this dresswretched-family-dinnerappropriate? It’s black and patterned with tiny white daisies and hangs just past my knees. The neckline approaches my throat, but it’s sleeveless, showing off the subtle definition rolling wine barrels around will give your arms. Let Rachel see that I can throw a punch if need be. I grab a pale denim jacket for the walk over and zip up my stacked combat boots. Now that I’m thirty, I refuse to fuck with laces.
The knock comes again right as I reach for the doorknob. I school my face into something casual and unassuming—something that doesn’t say I’ve been getting ready for the last hour—and open the door.
Sweet Jesus on a biscuit withallthe fixins.
It’s a cool evening, and Laine’s leaning into professorial mode hard. She’s wearing a dusky blue wool blazer, its thin lapel one of those that perpetually stands up to kiss the base of her smooth neck. A dove-gray shirt underneath, buttoned to the collar, is tucked into a pair of navy-blue pants, the cuffs rolled high to show off her thick-soled boots. Her flop ofgolden-brown hair is wavy from the shower, and her thick-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses are back.
God, she looks cool. The town’s star athlete turned studious. Is there anything sexier than a jock with an intellectual bent?
Laine must sense my inner turmoil because a blush blooms high on her cheekbones. She looks at her feet, her hand going to her hair to riffle through it as always, then stops, as though she doesn’t want to mess it up.
“I wasn’t sure what to wear to a painful family experience,” she says, her voice bashful.Bashful!Can you believe it? How am I supposed to refrain from clutching her collar and smothering her with kisses?How?
I clear my throat, then quickly turn to lock the door. “I know, right? I tried to go for Sunday school meets contrition. Ready to walk over?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” Laine’s sheepish in the way only women in their thirties who are still terrified of their mother’s wrath can be. It’d be adorable, but I, too, am on the bad side of Molly Woods right now.
Laine laughs and runs her palms down her face. “Ughhh, I wish we were going literally anywhere else right now.”
I bump her shoulder gently with my own because people who aren’t on dates do that all the time. “Well, at least your mom can’t ground you anymore.”
“You sure about that?” Laine arches an eyebrow at me, and we both smile and drop our gazes.
“Do you think this is going to work? Forcing us all to gather to share a meal? Hash out our differences?”
Laine sighs miserably. “It never has before. Rachel’s hated me for years. I don’t even know why.”
I snort. “Really?”
“You do?”
“Varsity tryouts your senior year!” I laugh somewhat incredulously. Does Laine really not know this? “You kicked her off the field.”
“No, I didn’t!” She looks at me bewildered. “IbeggedCoach to let her finish the tryout, but after she crushed Ava Sanchez’s nose—”
“Sadie Jenkins’s nose, you mean,” I correct gently. “Ava Sanchez was your girlfriend.”
Laine’s face splits into a bemused smile. “You remember my girlfriends, boss?”
“Well, kind of hard to forget after I caught you in the kitchen with Ava’s boob in your mouth,Beave.”
Laine blinks, another piece of our shared history slotting into place for her. “That was you …”
“Yes, but I never—I didn’t tell anyone what I saw.” It feels important to clarify since a few weeks later, rumors hit the high school. Some dumbasses were snickering about Charlaine as she walked by one day, and she stopped, looked them dead in the eye, and said: “Yeah, I’m a lesbian. Now get over it.”
The craziest part is, they did. Charlaine approached being outed like she did everything back then—she owned it. The snickering stopped. People got on with their lives. Charlaine got on with being gay, this time out and proud. Fucking legend.
