Chapter Nine
Chapter
Nine
Sasha must have slipped twice the amount of alcohol into April’s drink.
Either that, or she’d hit her head and just didn’t remember.
Maybe the lake was poisoned, and jumping into the water after Daphne last night had caused toxins to soak into her pores.
Some bodily malady was the only explanation for agreeing to help Daphne wild up her life.
Daphne, who was not only Daphne Love, but was now April’s competition for the Devon exhibition.
Still, as soon as April’s acquiescence flowed out of her mouth, Daphne’s face had illuminated like the Bristol Family Farm’s holiday light display, and there was no way to take it all back. Not with Daphne looking like April had just saved her puppy from becoming roadkill.
The tequila certainly hadn’t helped matters, that was for sure, not that tequila ever did.
And now, as April pulled a chair from their small breakfast table into the bathroom and set it up in front of the sink, her last bottle of lavender hair dye ready and waiting, she couldn’t help but feel a little nervous.
“Okay, I’m ready,” Daphne said, appearing in the bathroom doorway.
April glanced up, her nerves cresting even more, because Daphne didn’t have on a shirt.
Granted, she had on a very staid sports bra—a sweat-wicking material in a cerulean blue—but still.
There was suddenly a lot of skin in April’s vision, and it didn’t really matter that the skin belonged to Daphne Love.
It was still skin, and it was very smooth and soft-looking, and it swelled over small boobs, dipping into a subtle cleavage and—
April shook her head, squeezing her eyes closed. Damn tequila. Never led to anything good.
“I need some water,” she said, sliding past Daphne and into the main room, grabbing her water bottle and tossing half its contents down her throat.
She was suddenly very aware that the entire process of dyeing someone’s hair was pretty intimate, someone else’s armpit or boobs or face was usually very close…
“April?” Daphne called from the bathroom.
“Yeah,” April said, swallowing a few more gulps. “All good.” She capped the bottle, then walked back to the bathroom. Daphne was already sitting in the chair, her hair loose and a bit frizzy around her bare shoulders.
A client, April thought as she walked to the sink and snapped on a pair of the black latex gloves she used at her shop. Daphne is just like a client.
“You ready?” she asked.
Daphne nodded, her cheeks still a bit pink from the alcohol. April wrapped a towel around Daphne’s shoulders and secured it with a hair clip at the base of her throat. She picked up the jar of coconut oil she used when dyeing her own hair, started applying it around Daphne’s hairline.
Daphne’s eyes fluttered closed.
April tried to breathe normally.
Her stomach was a riot of nerves, which was simply ridiculous. She thought of her cats, of tattoo ink, the Providence River Pedestrian Bridge near RISD. Anything but the relaxed sighs coming out of Daphne’s mouth.
April squirted the dye into the large mixing bowl she’d also stashed in her car, then started working it through Daphne’s dry hair with a dye brush.
“You have a nice touch,” Daphne said. Her voice was muzzy, sleepy, and April knew it was the alcohol, but the entire vibe here was making her hands shake.
She needed a distraction.
“What kind of tattoo do you want?” April asked.
Daphne opened her eyes, and she seemed momentarily startled by how close April was. Her gaze flicked down to April’s chest—which, yes, it was impossible for April to not press her boobs against Daphne’s shoulder.
April cleared her throat, focused on Daphne’s hair.
“I want you to design one for me,” Daphne finally said. “I told you that.”
An image blew into April’s mind, like the wind pushing a storm over the lake—wildflowers and light, the hues almost like watercolors over Daphne’s pale skin.
“Tattoos are personal things,” April said, shaking her head. “I can’t choose one for you.”
“What do yours mean, then?”
April laughed lightly. “Which one?”
“All of them.”
April was quiet for a second. She had over twenty tattoos right now, spiraling down both arms, over her chest, a few on her thighs, one right between her breasts.
“What’s this one mean?” Daphne asked when April remained silent. She reached out, her fingertips lightly grazing the flowering tree on April’s right upper arm, which curled over her shoulder and down toward her collarbone. She had a mirror image on her left arm, but of a barren tree in winter.
April shivered, and Daphne pulled away.
“It means change,” April said, and the word felt heavy on her tongue. “Seasons, life, death.”
“ ‘A time to be born, and a time to die,’ ” Daphne said.
April paused in her work. “Did you just quote the Bible at me?”
Daphne winced, then tapped her temple. “Some parts are stuck in there like a bad song.”
“I don’t know,” April said. “I’ve always liked that bit—a time for everything.”
“It’s from Ecclesiastes, which is a wisdom book,” Daphne said. “ ‘A time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance.’ ”
April nodded, smoothing a thick swirl of lavender through the blond. “Basically what these tattoos mean.”
“What else do you have?” Daphne asked.
“I have a few astrology tattoos. Three, actually.” She held up her arm, showing off one of them on her left forearm, a simple gray-and-black sketch of a woman with short dark hair and a scorpion’s tail, kneeling in the grass and holding a blazing sun between her hands.
“She looks like you,” Daphne said, and April smiled.
“I guess that was the point,” April said. “She was my first tattoo. Got her the second I turned eighteen.”
“Did you always want to be a tattoo artist?”
April frowned, watching Daphne’s hair grow more and more lavender.
She loved tattooing—loved designing them, placing art on people’s bodies in a way that became part of them forever.
But looking back on her childhood, high school, college, she wasn’t sure she’d ever wanted to be one thing or another.
She’d just wanted to create, and as the only child of two parents who didn’t really understand the inclination, she wasn’t sure she’d ever felt the safety to explore. Then in college, she had a curriculum, a path she had to follow.
“I don’t really know,” she said, suddenly wanting to tell Daphne the truth.
“After RISD, I moved back home because I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do exactly.
I started working at a tattoo shop in Concord to pay my bills, but then I liked it.
I started apprenticing with the owner and eventually got my license.
Opening my own shop just felt like the natural next step.
Ramona helped me set up Wonderlust and now here I am. ”
“Ramona’s your best friend?”
April nodded. “Ramona Riley.”
“Wait…” Daphne said. “Ramona Riley? Why is that name familiar?”
April laughed. “Probably because she’s dating Dylan Monroe. Quite famously dating her, in fact.”
“Oh my god, that’s right.”
“Yep. That rom-com Dylan was in last year was filmed here in Clover Lake.”
“Now that, I have seen,” Daphne said. “It’s so good. And Ramona grew up here too?”
April nodded. “Her mom left when she was young. She pretty much raised her younger sister, and I…” April trailed off, remembering how after graduation, a few of her RISD friends were going on a road trip across the country, and something about the idea made her feel as though she was made of light.
Not just a road trip, but the possibility of it all—being twenty-two, the whole world laid out before her.
But she came home to Clover Lake instead.
She thought about that first year back at home, Ramona working at Clover Moon, nine-year-old Olive playing softball and learning long division, and April was involved in all of it.
She’d been by Ramona’s side the whole way, through all of Olive’s growth spurts and teenage twists and turns.
April had felt needed, felt at home with the Rileys.
Always had. But looking back on the last ten years, it suddenly felt as though April mostly gave advice Ramona rarely followed, received with a laugh and an eye roll, a joke about April becoming a childless cat lady, or how she needed to try and date someone seriously again.
It’s been a year, Apes.
It’s been two years, Apes.
It’s been three years, Apes.
April always waved Ramona’s concern away, and Ramona never pressed it too hard. Not like April, who knew she pressed too hard on everything. The funny best friend in a rom-com with all the right quips and quirks.
And then Dylan showed up, Ramona fell in love and met Noelle Yang, and there was no one left in Clover Lake to push April to date or get another cat or give her any kind of comfort after closing her business.
No one but Penny fucking Hampton.
“April?” Daphne said softly. “You okay?”
April shook her head, unsure of how long she’d been frozen, her gloved hands stained purple and tangled in Daphne’s hair.
“Sorry,” she said quietly. She blinked, felt her breath go shallow in her chest. Everything felt tight. Fuck, she was about to have a panic attack right there, her hands covered in hair dye like she was a teenager again and wanted to freak out her parents.
So she focused on that.
Breathed in and out and started talking.
“The first time I dyed my hair,” she said slowly, letting the oxygen back into her lungs, “I was sixteen and shoplifted a bottle of blue hair dye from Gallagher’s Grocery.”
Her hands started working again, thumbs massaging the color through Daphne’s tresses.
“Were you a little rebel growing up?” Daphne said.
April laughed. “I went and confessed a week later, gave the cashier a twenty-dollar bill. So, a wannabe rebel, maybe. Soft-core. I thought bright blue hair would get a reaction out of my parents.”
“Did it?”
April went quiet. She’d started the story for something to focus on, forgetting the ending. “Barely a blink,” she said.
She raked the lavender down to the ends of Daphne’s hair, then used a brush to comb everything through evenly.
Daphne was quiet for a second, but she didn’t frown in confusion.
She didn’t ask for more details or anything else about April’s parents.
She just nodded, her eyes soft and knowing; April had to look away.
“Sit up,” April said, and Daphne did. April twisted her hair into a knot, then clipped it on top of her head before pulling a plastic cap over the swirls of purple. “Thirty minutes.”
Daphne nodded, standing and moving away from the sink so April could clean up. “Thank you,” she said.
“No problem,” April said, but Daphne didn’t move, didn’t head into the living room, didn’t leave April with her whirling thoughts.
“I think you’re really brave,” Daphne finally said.
April glanced up, catching Daphne’s gaze in the mirror. “Brave.”
The word sounded like gobbledygook. If April was anything—moving back to her hometown after college, opening a business mostly on her parents’ financial support, which she was sure stemmed mostly from their desire to get her out of their hair—it wasn’t brave.
It was the opposite.
But Daphne nodded, and despite the cap on her head making her look like a purple mushroom, her expression was lovely and genuine.
A knot tangled in April’s throat as she stripped off her gloves, threw them in the trash. “I guess I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Daphne tilted her head. “What, you don’t trust me?”
“I don’t know yet,” April said, turning on the water and scrubbing dots of purple from her wrists. Because despite Daphne’s innocence regarding Elena’s betrayal, trust no longer came easily for April Evans.
“What are you going to do for the Devon?” Daphne asked.
April laughed, a quick, somewhat panicked burst from her mouth. “God, I have no idea. Are you going to use your new painting?”
“I think so,” Daphne said quietly. “I think you’re right. I should do more with it. More paintings. I can do more.”
“You should. It’s incredible.” She pressed her palms to the cool porcelain of the sink, eyeing Daphne in the mirror. “I guess we’re really doing this.”
Daphne tilted her head. “The Devon?”
April could only laugh mirthlessly. “The Devon.”
They both went quiet for a beat. April stared at the purple streaks in the sink.
“I really want it,” Daphne finally said.
“Me too,” April said, her voice almost a whisper.
She didn’t say that she needed it. She didn’t say that she had to show in the Devon, because what else did she have in her life if she didn’t?
She didn’t say she was scared and exhilarated at the same time, that she’d felt more alive in the last few days than she had in months.
Years, even.
She didn’t say any of that, because she knew that Daphne felt the same.
“By the way,” April said, wiping down the sink and glancing at Daphne in the mirror. “You’re a July Leo.”
Daphne’s mouth dropped open, and April laughed.
“July twenty-ninth,” Daphne said. “How did you figure that out so fast?”
April shrugged. “I thought you were a water sign at first, like your moon, but then…I don’t know.
What you’ve been through, leaving home.” She focused on getting all the purple out of the sink, her throat suddenly a little thick, thinking of Daphne Love running away from the only family she’d ever known.
Running away, but toward herself.
“And all these wild things you want to do now,” April said. “As a late July baby, you’re also pretty close to the border between a Cancer and Leo sun. A watery Leo if ever I’ve seen one.”
Daphne smiled and shook her head, her cheeks reddening. “And my rising?”
“Oh, I’ll get it,” April said, meeting her eyes in the mirror again and winking. “Don’t you worry.”