“Oh no! Because of his...” I cringe and point at my groin.
“No.” Lex narrows her eyes. “For work.”
“Phew, I was worried. Wait, is he a doctor or something?”
Lex’s head tilts. “Yeah, he is. You didn’t know that before you agreed to a date with him?”
“It was less of a date and more of a hookup,” I say dryly.
“Ew.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Notewas in casual sex is gross, butewas in I don’t want to hear about my brother doing it,” Lex clarifies.
“If it makes you feel any better, I have nothing to report on that front. I’d only just met him.”
“Isn’t ‘what do you do for a living’ one of the first questions you ask a person after you learn their name and whether they’re single?” She doesn’t sound judgmental, just curious.
“For most people, yes,” I say. “But not for me.”
A group of people walk past, boisterous and happy on their Friday night. The suspense of my comment draws Lex in, and she takes a step closer.
“For me,” I continue, “there’s no point in getting to know someone. Because of the curse.”
I watch in real time as Lex’s eyes glaze over. She takes one step back, and then another. “Right. The ‘curse.’” She raises her fingers in mock quotations.
“You saw what happened back there,” I say, gesturing over my shoulder with my thumb toward the restaurant. “That was the curse, in action, right before your eyes.”
“That’s not what I saw.” My mouth pops open, but before I can retort Lex interrupts. “I saw a water glass get knocked over—”
“Club soda.”
“Club soda, fine. It happens all the time and could have happened to anyone.”
I pull the sleeves of her jacket aside and flash her my purple panties through my translucent white pants. “Thishappens all the time, and to anyone?”
Lex reaches forward and pulls my hands back together, glancing right and left to make sure nobody saw.
“Trust me,” I say, “thishappens to me all the time. And usually it’s worse—hospitalization worse, which you also witnessed.”
“Bad luck,” is all she says.
“Bad luck? Bad luck! Bad luck is missing your bus because you couldn’t find your shoes. Bad luck is your favourite deli place running out of turkey and you have to eat ham even though youhateham. Bad luck is the Canucks losing a game because Quinn Hughes ate some bad sushi and spent the game hugging the toilet. What I have is a curse.”
“Sorry, but science is on my side with this one.” Lex crosses her arms. “And no matter how much you want to blame your circumstances on some sort of external force rather than taking responsibility for your own actions, that doesn’t make it true.”
My mouth drops open, but I have no words. Her verbal slap in the face stings worse than if she’d physically struck me.
A white sedan parks beside me and the window rolls down. “Uber for Aubrey?”
“You know what?” I say, fumbling blindly for the handle while trying to maintain eye contact with Lex. “It doesn’t matter what you think. You can choose to deny what you see happening right in front of your face all you want. I’m the one who has to live with the damn thing, not you.” I climb into the car and shut the door harder than necessary. “Just go,” I tell the driver. I can’t get away from that offensively skeptical woman and her piercing blue eyes fast enough.
As bad as the curse is, at least I’ll never have to see her again.
chapter five
Descending Into Awkward Chaos
