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“That, I do. I spare no expense when it comes to the things that I have to put my head on. No houses to show today?”
“Maybe some tentative appointments later. The office hours are published on the website and attached to the front door of the model. From now on, folks not having an appointment isn’t gonna be my problem. Shora is a new home development with no currently available inventory. Nothing is so urgent that they can’t wait to show up at a sanctioned time.”
“That’s my girl.”
Carine liked the sound of that—my girl.
She knew Heidi was being flippant, but that didn’t make the sound of those words any less compelling.
“Come here.”
Carine narrowed her eyes infinitesimally because that was something shedidn’tknow: if she were being baited for correction.
“Did the kettlebell clinks affect your hearing?” Heidi asked.
“No.”
“So, you heard me, then.”
“Well, yes.”
“Why aren’t you moving, then?”
Conflicting instructions, Heidi. That’s why.
While her body might have been screaming,move, move, move!, the self-preservation part of her mind cautioned wariness. Heidi had told her before to respect her side of the bed.
Carine suddenly understood why computers in cartoons exploded when they were fed bogus programming strings.
“You’re thinking too hard,” Heidi said. “This is very simple.”
“Maybe to you it is. Are you testing me?”
“Is that what you’re worried about?” Heidi chuckled and propped her weight onto her right elbow and her head onto her fist. “I meant what I said. Maybe I should preface things from now on. Otherwise, you might not understand when there aren’t any prior considerations you need to be mindful of.”
“I guess I overthink things sometimes. Occupational hazard when you have a job you always expect things to fall through at.” Carine eased across the cool sheets and situated herself in front of Heidi.
Heidi smoothed Carine’s sleep-tangled hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ear. “You went outside looking like that? Like you’ve been rolling around under the bleachers with some boy after school?”
“The bleachers were too open where I went to school,” Carine said, and ashamedly because there were plenty of other places on the school property where she’d rolled around. “But I suppose I did. Didn’t make sense to look for a brush when I needed to get a point across in a hurry.”
“Did they seem receptive to your point?”
Carine’s memory lurched back a few minutes to the patio and the glazed-over expressions she’d received. “I guess we’ll find out,” she muttered. “To be fair, though, I didn’t really give them much of a chance to talk. My mother has always said that when I’m ornery, dealing with me is like trying to stick a bare hand into a barrel of crabs. I’m good at making impassioned speeches in general, though. I once did a five-minute monologue about school parking lot permits to distract a teacher from noticing my friend hadn’t made it back with the bathroom pass in the prescribed time limit. She needed to take a pregnancy test.”
“I don’t even know how to respond to that. Or if I should.”
Carine shrugged and closed her eyes.
The sensation of the back of Heidi’s hand caressing the shapes of her cheek and jaw made her want to curl into a ball and sleep for an age. But if she slept, she’d miss everything.
She’d miss Heidi’s musing about ridiculous Carine things.
She pulled in a deep breath and let it out. Heidi had said to disregard prior considerations, so Carine was going to obey her chronic talking impulse and shed some words from her system. “Senior year was interesting. Lost thirty pounds. Gained twenty back. Lost my virginity. Gained the smallest bit of perspective about people in general.”
Heidi made the kind of“Lord, help us now”half-groan that non-sighing Southern women of a certain age could all do.
Carine was used to hearing it.
