Chapter 2
AMARA
“What does it say?” Briar asks, her elbows perched on her knees as she leans over the coffee table to take a peek.
I cringe, holding the flimsy card between my fingers. Zara giggles next to me, handing me my wine.
I take a big gulp. “How did you lose your virginity?” I look up at Briar, watching as her whole face goes red. She fidgets uncomfortably, tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder.
“Do I really have to say?”
I nod as Isla says, “Duh. Confess. Let it out. Tell the world!” She spreads her arms out wide, throwing herself back into the couch cushions.
The room smells like the most expensive amaretto and vanilla candle known to man that sits in the corner of the room; the scent, along with the company, immediately relaxing our tired muscles from a long week of working on our feet—or in Isla’s case, crouching like a shrimp on the floor as she paints.
“Okay,” Briar groans, defeated. “Tony—” the sound of retching fills Briar’s family room as we all react to her asshole ex-husband’s name being spoken out loud for once. Her big brown eyes send us a scolding glare before melting, a hint of a smirk playing at her lips. “Are you guys done?”
“Fuck that guy,” Heidi murmurs from the other side of me.
Zara leans back to look around me. “He was the fucking worst.”
“There’s a lot of cursing tonight,” Briar smiles, giving up playing with her hair and tucking it behind her ear. “Well,” she pauses, wincing. “Wait, are we talking about like, broken hymen? Because simple. Tampon.” She shrugs and throws the card down.
“You know that’s-s not what we’re talking about,” Isla slurs, sucking down the rest of her Moscato.
“Fine. Tony wanted to go get pizza one day. Borrowed his dad’s truck. It was absolutely filthy. Had sex in the back seat in the parking lot of a Park and Ride.”
Zara groans. “It was disgusting. He’s all tongue, and not in a good way. Trust me. I had to deal with the two of them for far too long.”
Briar flinches and nods, shooting back her drink in what I can only assume is an attempt to forget the memory for good.
“Okay, your turn.” She gestures to the card I’m still holding, and I drop it into the middle.
“Do I have to?”
Heidi slams her drink down on the table. “Can we stop asking that after every card, guys?”
The game is Confess, and if I must confess something, it’s that I hate it. Well, I hate it when I’m sober—which isn’t a problem at the moment.
“I lost my virginity behind the bleachers,” I tell her with a sigh. “They were cold. My leg got scratched. It lasted literally about thirty seconds.”
Zara and Briar stare at me, but the others have heard this story before. They were there for it.
Mila finally speaks, prying her eyes away from her phone.
She has a pink flush over her nose and cheeks from her vodka soda, and if I didn’t know any better, I would think she was maybe, just maybe, talking to a man.
“I lost it behind that trampoline park,” she shrugs in an attempt to make us feel a little less bad.
I’ve always pretended not to know why the story bothered me so much.
But I do know. I spent my whole life until that moment thinking it would be another way, with another man. And even then, if I was being honest with myself, I pictured him.
“The one I’ve been taking Elara and Juniper to?
” Briar gasps, her pink lips forming a perfect O.
I’m actually pretty sure that’s where the two girls are right now.
Briar had Emmett—the hot single dad Heidi hooked up with last year and decided to keep around, and Leo’s teammate—take them for the night so that we could have a girls' night without little ears around.
“Yeah.”
Zara cocks her head. “Out in the open?”
Mila shakes her head. “Nope. In the trunk.”
Briar’s jaw drops open as Heidi and I giggle. Isla hides behind her third glass of wine, a shit-eating grin stretching across her face.
“Mila, this was…” Zara looks at me from the corner of her eye, her brows creased in concern.
“It was consensual!” Mila throws her arms up. “Unfortunately! We tried it in the back of the car and he couldn’t—” she trails off again, taking a sip of her vodka soda as her left eye flickers like a doll at the memory.
“He couldn’t what?” Isla chortles.
Mila frowns. “He couldn’t find the hole, okay? Couldn’t do it. Made me get out and stick my head in the trunk.”
“Did he find it that time?” Zara probes.
“He found it for about two seconds. Jackhammered in, immediately pulled out too much, and spent the rest of the ten seconds going to town on my thigh.”
Isla laughs so hard that water flows from her eyes, her wine nearly spilling onto the couch multiple times. Briar keeps her eyes on it as she holds back a laugh in an attempt to be far more considerate to our friend than we have ever been since getting the call the night it happened.
Mila was the last to lose her virginity in our group.
It all happened fairly fast. First, it was Isla, then Heidi, me, and finally Mila.
She had been dating the guy for a little over two months, and although we all told her she deserved someone a little better, she didn’t want to wait any longer before losing it.
“Virginity is a construct, anyway.” It’s the same thing I tell myself every time I think about it for too long.
“It is, but it didn’t feel like it back then.”
Two things can be true at once.
“Who's going next?” I ask, pushing the deck of cards together.
Mila rolls her eyes, leaning forward to grab a random card from the pile, and I silently pray it’s an easy card so I can get it over with.
The way the game works doesn’t quite make sense, and I don’t think it really has to. It’s meant for drunk women to play together over wine or tequila, depending on how spicy we want it to get. It’s probably best that there are no real set rules.
“Okay. Easy one. One person you hate.”
Cooper Henry, I think to myself.
But they don’t actually know that.
“Miles Teller,” I tell her, sitting back against the TV console. Thank god, it’s over.
Zara cranes her neck in my direction. “Are you going to explain that one?”
Shaking my head, I tighten my long ponytail of curls. “No—pe.” I pop the “p.”
Isla eyes me suspiciously. Out of all of them, she’s the only one who has confronted me about my lack of interest in the Baltimore Cobras football team. Or rather, my lack of interest in socializing with the men on the team.
While I love all of their significant others, I won’t lie. I hate going to Lulu’s—the bar down the road around the inner harbor—on Mondays.
I hate seeing his face.
It was easier before he got drafted here. It was easier when I could pretend as if he never existed in my life at all. As if he were a distant memory that I didn’t think about daily. As if I didn’t shed a river of tears over Ben & Jerry’s for a few months after he stopped talking to me.
But admitting it to them would mean telling the whole story, and that’s just simply too painful.
And besides. They technically do know of him, in a way.
They just don’t know it. They know of a boy who hurt me, and they may have even known his name at one point.
But by the time Cooper was drafted to the Baltimore Cobras, telling Isla that her brother’s teammate was the piece of shit who broke my heart a million years ago would only cause stress.
Mila holds the card to her chest, her eyes tipped up to the ceiling as she thinks. “Mmm, I think I hate Tony.” Her eyes shoot to Briar, her grin growing.
“To hating Tony!” Briar cheers, holding up her glass. It’s been a long time since she’s had to deal with him. Leo made sure of that. But we still take every opportunity to curse his name.
The man deserves the worst in life, that’s for sure.
The game goes for another hour or so before Briar yawns dramatically, signaling she needs us to get the hell out of her house for the night and go home.
I look at Mila. “I’m bringing you home?”
She nods sleepily, pulling herself off the floor as Isla stumbles around the couch.
“I don’t know if I brought my keys with me,” Isla mumbles as she pats the pockets of her jeans.
Briar sighs. “Your spares are in my office. Want me to get them?”
Isla smiles thankfully as Briar heads off. “I thought you requested the keys back?” I ask her.
Her shoulder raises in a half-hearted shrug. “I kept locking myself out, so I entrusted Briar with them.”
She’s had a habit of locking herself out of her apartment next door for as long as she’s lived there. The problem being that her brother has also had a bad habit of barging in unannounced.
I manage to wrangle Mila onto the street, the car horns blaring in the distance, and the water quietly lapping in the harbor oddly peaceful after several hours of questions that are designed to keep you in a constant fight or flight mode.
We amble to my car, and when she settles into the passenger seat, she lets out a dramatic sigh.
“You okay?” I ask, turning the key in the ignition.
“We need to find boyfriends,” she mumbles under her breath.
My lips tighten. “I’m good, but we can find you one.”
“I think you need to open up more. Get on a dating app. Zara could probably get you onto that one for celebrities. Find yourself a cute baseball player,” she rants, continuing to list off all of the people I could hook up with.
I notice she does not bring up the Cobras, and I don’t call her out on it.
“I just think it would be fun for you. Give you something else to do.”
“I don’t need anything else to do,” I assure her as I pull onto the road, heading out of the city to where her apartment is.
She and Heidi used to live together in the cutest little place, and when the lease was up, Mila decided it was time for her to take a step and live completely on her own. “And I love my job. You know that.”
My catering company has grown over the last year, and we’ve gone from one event every few weeks to multiple a week. In fact, some summers we have one every day.
It’s grown so much, in fact, that I have a manager. And an assistant. Although I make the final call on all business decisions, I’m not as hands-on anymore, which is both wonderful and annoying.
I do miss the act of building the business, but not enough to build another one at the moment. I think I’d actually rather go back to Bartending for a while, actually.
A lot of blood, sweat, and tears went into Baltimore Bites, and I’ll baby it until I can’t anymore.
But the best way to make sure that I can’t do that is to get distracted by some man.
“I just think it would be cool. All of us together with our families. All running around, barefoot in, well, definitely Briar’s kitchen.”
While everyone, including Heidi, believes Briar will be the mother of the friend group forever, I do think Heidi has a firm chance of becoming Martha Stewart overnight and taking over the role.
“One day,” is what I tell her. But in my head, watching the stoplight shift, I’m not sure that’s true.
“You know, there’s that show coming o—”
I cut her off with a shake of the head, my ponytail suddenly super uncomfortable pressed against the seat. “That’s not happening.”
“But don’t you think that could be so romantic?”
“Having to give up an entire week? Or is it two? To do challenges to get paired up with a stranger? No thank you.”
“Well, you’re not just paired up. You get married. And then live life together.” She crosses her arms over her chest with a little huff. “I think it’s really cute. A perfect show, actually. And it’s a few months, not just a week.” She says it like that small fact makes it better.
“Then why don’t you go on?”
She purses her lips. “I would, but I think I’m nervous I wouldn’t be paired up with anyone.”
The Final Pick is a reality TV show that’s been up my ass with ads for the second season casting. The first season did great, but it was low-budget, as any first season is, and the show took off. They’ve been all gas and no breaks ever since.
“I think you would be.”
“Amara, you need to get all of those questions right to get matched. If you don’t match with someone perfectly, they don’t match you. Then it’s a whole week in the gutter for no reason. You don’t even meet a man.”
I think about it, turning onto her street. “Then why are you asking me to sign up?” I try not to feel insulted.
“Because you just like messing with people. And you’re really good at reading others.
I think you’d have a really good time on the show.
Maybe even match with someone. It would be just your luck, right?
You want to stay grumpy and closed off, but randomly get paired with someone on a reality TV show. ” She laughs. “I would pay to see it.”
“I’m sure you would,” I mumble.
“Anyway,” she climbs out of my car the second I pull into her driveway. “I have work tomorrow, but call me, okay? Let’s grab lunch. I have some man drama going on, and I need help with it.”
I gasp. “And you didn’t tell me that first?”
She doesn’t give me a moment to question her further. “Nope. Night.” She waves goodbye as she runs up the front steps of her house, and I stay parked in her driveway until she’s safely inside.
By the time I’m back in Fells Point, I’m just ready for bed. It’s been a long day of meetings, followed by our girls' night. I’m just ready for my head to hit the pillow.
Getting to the gate outside my brick building, I insert the key and swing it open with a creak. I make a mental note to ask the landlord if he can oil it so I don’t feel as though I’m waking up my neighbors every time I get home.
Walking through the little alleyway between the townhome apartments, I finally get to my door. Kicking off my shoes, I head to the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face before climbing into bed.
But sleep doesn’t come.
A lot has changed in the last decade and a half. A lot. I find myself staring at the ceiling, thinking about where life has taken me more often than I’d like to ever admit, even to myself.
Things are good now. No matter how tough things may get in life, it’s had a way of working out for me one way or another.
And right now, things are good.
And I really hope they stay that way.
But right as I’m about to fall asleep, sheep dancing above my head, my phone buzzes.
MilaBug:
Don’t be pissed! If it’s not meant to be, you won’t hear anything. I love you!
Attached to the text is a screenshot of a submission.
A submission to a dating show.
I’m going to kill you.
I end it with a heart.