12. Kiera
Kiera
I t was Friday night and Kiera was sitting in her car behind the Kappa house. She’d been there for ten minutes already and she was having a hard time convincing herself to go inside.
Hunter was at the house with Nana and they’d been texting back and forth all week. This afternoon, Kiera had playfully asked, Wanna do me a favor? and when Hunter replied that she did, she’d texted, Go to my sorority chapter meeting for me. I’ll get you a disguise.
She’d had to explain the situation to Hunter after that, or at least gloss over the finer points.
She told Hunter that the girl she’d mentioned – the one who was beginning to look a lot more like an infatuation than a soul mate – was a Kappa and that Kiera’s feelings had not been reciprocated when she confessed them.
That was all she’d said, and then Hunter had spent the rest of the afternoon trying to build her confidence to walk through those doors.
And it almost worked, but now that Kiera was here, the final steps up to the Kappa house were the hardest. She texted Hunter again, hedging.
Maybe I should just come home. What are you and Nana up to?
While she waited for the reply, Kiera flipped down her visor. It was mostly because there were other Kappas – the freshman girls who didn’t live in the house yet – arriving and she’d rather not let them see her sitting in her car, too embarrassed to go inside.
It was pathetic, but Kiera knew what was waiting for her in there.
They would all know by now because the first thing Lauren had done after Kiera kissed her was tell the biggest gossip in the sorority about it.
She was sure they were all talking about her, and that was why she’d skipped almost a month of weekly meetings in an effort to avoid this very moment.
Kiera’s phone buzzed and she reached for it, eager for the distraction. Hunter had sent a photo of herself sitting on the arm of Nana’s recliner, pretending to sleep while Nana dozed off beside her.
We’re having way too much fun, but chances are we’ll be having the same amount of fun when you get home. Go to your meeting and show those girls who’s the boss.
Kiera snorted.
Lauren was the boss. She was the sorority president and everyone’s favorite sister.
It was why Kiera fell for her, and it was why she found it so difficult to go inside and face her.
Lauren would be utterly unavoidable and all sympathies would go to her.
Kiera sent one last text to Hunter - a thumbs-up that pretended far more confidence than she actually possessed – then slipped the phone into her purse and pulled off her red velvet cap.
She used the visor mirror to smooth down her hair and then checked the time on her dashboard.
Six o’clock on the dot.
Time was up.
Kiera got out of the car before she had another chance to talk herself out of it.
All she had to do was go inside, take her seat at the front of the room with all the other committee chairs (and Lauren) and make her weekly report on the sorority’s philanthropy efforts.
Then it would all be over and she could retreat back to the safety of Nana’s house.
Kiera had spent the drive over thinking that it might be easier now that she and Hunter were…
well, she wasn’t quite sure what they were doing.
Stealing kisses as they crossed paths. Driving each other a little bit crazy.
Flirting, definitely, but mostly in a covert way.
Hunter had certainly been effective in getting Kiera’s mind off Lauren during the week and even erasing the pain of the heartbreak.
Kiera had no idea why she felt the way she did about Hunter, or what it meant for her previous feelings for Lauren.
Could she really be so easily swayed, or were her feelings for Lauren all just a result of proximity?
They’d been best friends and roommates for so long, maybe Kiera had just gotten her wires crossed. Lauren wasn’t even Kiera’s usual type. Hunter, on the other hand… she definitely was.
The possibility that everything Kiera had felt for Lauren was merely circumstantial was unsettling. It meant that Kiera had upset her whole life over something that wasn’t even real to begin with. She would have sworn that she knew better, that she could tell what was real from what wasn’t.
Despite conventional wisdom, Kiera was realizing, maybe the heart really didn’t know what it wanted.
Kiera went through the back door of the Kappa house, which led onto a large, empty kitchen.
There were bottles of sparkling water and after-meeting snacks lined up on the counter and Kiera could hear her sisters’ voices coming from the living room at the front of the house.
All the girls would be gathered there in chairs taken from every room in the house and arranged in a big circle all the way around the spacious room.
As Kiera walked up the hall, she stepped lightly so she could listen to their conversations, keeping her ears pricked for the sound of her own name.
She wanted to know if any of them were talking about her – or if all of them were.
No one was expecting her tonight after a month-long absence, but she didn’t hear her name.
The best Kiera could hope for was that she’d become old news by now.
She took a deep breath and rounded the corner, and Lauren’s eyes were the first to meet hers.
Of course.
She was sitting in the place of honor, a chair situated in front of the large stone fireplace at the center of the room.
Her straight, platinum blonde hair was perfectly styled and her Barbie pink matte lipstick was flawless as always.
She wore an A-line skirt that rode up her thigh where she crossed her legs and her posture was perfect.
She looked every bit the queen that Kiera had built her up to be, sitting on her throne and gazing curiously at Kiera.
Waiting for her to speak first, probably.
Kiera just stood frozen in the doorway and it didn’t take long before the conversations around the room started to die down. Then all eyes turned to her. They were waiting for a show, exactly as Kiera had feared.
Shannon was the first to speak. She was sitting in the chair to Lauren’s right and she exclaimed, far more loudly than necessary in the silent room, “Look what the cat dragged in!”
Kiera flicked her eyes over to Shannon, trying not to show her contempt.
They’d been friends once upon a time, before Shannon turned her gossip machine on Kiera.
This wasn’t really Shannon’s mess – she didn’t kiss a sister – but it was easy to pin the situation on her for blabbing about it.
Kiera pasted on a smile and asked, “Did you miss me?”
“Of course!” Shannon said. “Where ya been, girl?”
You know damn well where I’ve been, Kiera thought, but she settled on, “I’ve been staying off-campus.”
That was all they needed to know. She could have added something about caring for her grandmother, on the off chance that some of these girls didn’t know the whole ugly story.
But then they’d just want details, and maybe to praise her for what a noble thing she was doing, and Kiera couldn’t stomach that.
“It’s good to have you back,” Lauren said, her smile more genuine than Kiera expected. Then she turned to the group and said, “I think we’re all here now. Shall we start with roll call?”
Kiera let out a long, silent exhale, grateful to Lauren for knowing when to step in and cut the tension out of that moment.
That was why she was the sorority president.
Kiera made her way through the center of the circle, angling away from her customary chair beside Lauren to find a spot three places further away.
She held her head high and settled into her seat, and the girl next to her – Becca, the social chair – nudged her and whispered, “Missed you.”
“You too,” Kiera said with a smile, the weight lifting from her chest. She could get through this meeting – it wouldn’t be as bad as she’d feared because from here on out, it was all business.
Shannon began calling names and Kiera glanced over at Lauren.
She was impossible to read, especially when she was acting in her official capacity as the sorority president and everything she did took on an air of formality.
Was she still upset about the kiss? Repulsed by it?
Had Kiera ruined their friendship in a drunken moment of impulsivity that even she had begun to question?
Kiera had no answers, so she just focused on the business at hand. The meeting seemed to drag on forever, through a long and tedious roll call and then to status updates, in which each chair took the floor to talk about what they’d been working on.
This was the first meeting that Kiera had ever been to in which she didn’t sit next to Lauren.
Usually when someone was being long-winded and she got bored, she’d steal glances at Lauren, daydreaming about the way her skirts always seemed to be sliding up her thighs, or else whispering snarky things back and forth to each other and trying to make each other laugh.
These meetings were so formulaic, after three years Kiera knew exactly when to tune in and when she could space out.
It was different today, though – not only because she was in a different seat. When Kiera looked at Lauren, she realized that something had definitely changed. Instead of seeing a beautiful girl she desperately wanted to belong to, there was… nothing.
None of those old feelings.
It used to be so hard to sit so close to Lauren and know that she was beyond reach. It used to tear Kiera apart with longing. But it was all gone now and Kiera knew for sure that there was nothing romantic left in her heart for Lauren.