Chapter 9
KIERA
“It’ll be kind of like a slumber party!” Elli exclaimed.
I glanced over the back of the couch and toward the kitchen where Elli was happily buzzing. She’d already pulled out an electric popcorn popper. Now, she was nabbing popcorn from the pantry and butter from the fridge.
“A slumber party?”
Growing up, I hadn’t been one for that kind of thing. When your family was as humiliating as mine, you only made the mistake of inviting a friend over once.
And…because I’d learned to avoid the type of connection that encouraged people to even want to visit, I wasn’t invited to other people’s houses either.
The closest I’d ever come to a slumber party was about two months ago in this very room with Elli, Amy, Parvati, and Jen. But we’d all crashed on the couches because of too much wine and/or tequila—not because any of us had planned to spend the night.
Elli dropped into a squat, disappearing behind the kitchen island. There was some clanking and scraping, then she declared something to be “Perfect!”
She popped up like a cork—victorious—with two large bowls in her hands.
“And, yeah,” she said, in response to my question. “A slumber party. You’ve already picked out the movies—”
I’d chosen two classics—Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Devil Wears Prada.
“—and I’ve got the popcorn.” She picked up the plastic jug of kernels and shook it like a maraca. “I thought, while we’re watching movies, we could do facials or paint our nails. Or, I don’t know, maybe both!”
“Are you all right?” I asked. Elli’s voice had gone up an octave with all her excitement.
She stopped twisting the cap off the popcorn jug and bit down on her bottom lip. “Am I being weird?”
“No.” I shook my head, still grinning at her. “Not weird. And I’m totally down. It’s just that I never thought of you as a facials, nails, and sleepover kind of girl.”
She sighed. “I’m at the rink all the time, and when I’m not, some of the team likes to hang out over here. I spend way too much time with male berserkers and fae. I’m excited for a little human girl time, and since they usually go out for drinks after their meetings…”
“Like I said, ‘I’m totally down,’ but you and I did have lunch with Amy just the other day. You don’t consider that girl time?”
Elli rolled her eyes dramatically. “You don’t understand.”
“I guess not!” I was laughing now, mostly because of the desperate look on her face.
“We’d have to do one hundred lunches to counteract one hour with those guys,” she said. “Especially when a bunch of them are here together. The testosterone is through the roof.”
“Is that a bad thing?”
She smiled down at the kitchen counter. “Not always, though it’s better when there’s just one of them.”
It was clear which one she meant.
I faced forward again and picked up the copy of Creature Confidential that was lying on the coffee table.
“By the way…” I said, flipping through the magazine’s photos of professional athletes. Some were posed, others were action shots taken on their respective fields, rinks, and pitches. “Have you wrapped up all your feature posts on Tate Brass?”
“Just did the final one last night,” she said. “Overall, it wasn’t quite as popular as my series on Rafe, but it still got nearly seven thousand likes and fifty-some comments.”
“Nice,” I said, and I meant it.
I’d gained over two hundred thousand followers since I started working on my media presence full time, but the engagement on my channel—though excellent—wasn’t nearly as impressive.
I was still building my brand. Elli’s product, the Minnesota Spriggans, had already been well established when she took over its social platforms two months ago.
“So, who are you featuring next?” I asked.
When she didn’t answer right away, I stopped flipping through the magazine and glanced back over the couch at her.
She was staring at me with a somewhat cautious, somewhat expectant expression—expectant of what, I didn’t know.
“What?” I asked.
“The next feature is on Murph.”
“Oh?” I hoped my face didn’t give anything away. Like how much I would love to learn more about him, especially if I could do it alone and from the safety of my own home.
“Does that bother you?” she asked.
“Why would it bother me?”
“I’ll be spending one-on-one time with him.”
“So?”
She shrugged, then chopped off a hunk of butter into a little dish. She turned her back to me and put the butter in the microwave.
“Did it bother Lukas when you spent one-on-one time with Rafe or Tate Brass?” I asked.
“No,” she said, then turned to face me again.
“Well, there you go,” I said. “You’re just doing your job. And besides, it’s not like Sean and I are together, so why would I care?”
“You tell me.” Elli poured the kernels into the popcorn popper and flipped on the machine. It made a tremendous roar, so there was no more talking for now. Maybe that was a good thing.
I went back to the magazine. It was sixty percent ads for sports equipment, over-the-counter pain medications, and athleisure brands. The latter used pro athletes as models, but I didn’t recognize any of their faces.
That is, until I got to an underwear ad, and there were those familiar moss-green eyes, staring out at me from an otherwise black and white photo: Sean Murphy, in his skivvies, leaning on the end of a hockey stick.
Fuck me.
There was that long, luxurious brown hair breaking over his tanned shoulders…
I’d always thought of Sean as a cross between a hockey player and a lumberjack. Now, I was going to have to throw Greek god into the mix.
And those washboard abs… Women from the olden days would have killed to scrub their laundry on those abs.
I tentatively allowed my gaze to descend the rest of his body.
So as not to be too obscene, the photo editor had blurred out the outline of what was hidden behind the tight boxer briefs Sean was advertising, but it would have been impossible to hide him completely.
I swallowed hard, closed the magazine, and tossed it onto the coffee table.
The popcorn stopped popping, and Elli came back to the couch with the bowls and paper napkins. The smell of melted butter bloomed in the air.
I took one of the bowls.
Elli turned sideways on the couch with her legs folded under her. “Let’s talk about it.”
“Talk about what?” I tossed a few fluffy kernels into my mouth.
“Murph. Duh.”
I gave her the side-eye, then ate a few more. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“I don’t think that’s true, but let’s start with why there should be nothing to talk about when he’s so obviously interested in you.”
“El… We already did this at the bakery.”
“Not really. We got interrupted.” She hadn’t eaten any popcorn yet. She was gripping the edges of her bowl tight, as if it were a steering wheel and she meant to drive this conversation straight onto the Let’s-get-to-the-bottom-of-this Expressway.
“Like I mentioned before,” I said wearily. “Sean and I don’t go together. We’re a mismatch. Simple as that.”
“Then why was he the one calling us about your broken water pipes? Why was he the one bringing you over here?”
I cocked my head to the side. “Because he’s a nice guy. But that doesn’t mean we work as a couple. He’s half pro athlete, half rustic live-off-the-land lumberjack. Sweatpants and plaid flannel.”
“So?” She pushed her first bit of popcorn into her mouth and chewed.
“So, I’ve got my eyes on Chanel and Louis Vuittons. And I don’t mean that in a shallow way—more like a symbolic way. I want a different life than the one he’s set up for himself.”
“Opposites attract,” she said, reminding me of an adage that might be true—Sean was definitely attractive—but that didn’t automatically lead to a happily ever after.
While Elli waited for my next excuse, her expression turned unflappable.
I took a deep breath and considered breaking my long-standing rule. Did I keep hiding the truth behind a curtain? Or did I tear it down even further?
I’d never wanted Elli to learn about my brother, but she had, and she hadn’t bailed on me. Neither had she talked behind my back. I knew this because none of the other girls seemed to have a clue.
Elli had told me her secrets, too, like how Lukas had said he was done with her and tried to convince her he was hooking up with a pooka instead. Elli had told me about it when she hadn’t told the other girls.
It made me wonder if Elli would get off my back about Sean if I told her the full story.
“El, I just… I can’t go back to that.”
Her eyebrows scrunched together. “Back to what? Pro athletes? Or rustic live-off-the-land lumberjacks?”
I took another deep breath. “Give me your tablet.”
“What? Why?” she asked over another handful of popcorn.
“Just do it.”
She twisted over her shoulder and grabbed her tablet off the end table. She handed it to me, and I opened the maps app. With a few quick taps, I pulled up the address, switched to 3D, and zoomed in.
I handed the tablet back to her.
“Uh-huh,” she said slowly. “What exactly am I looking at?”
It was a good question. What showed on the screen was a deteriorating mobile home with broken lattice that failed to hide the fact the trailer was still on its wheels. The postage stamp of a front porch was rotted, and the roof was patched with corrugated metal and a plastic tarp.
The whole thing sat in the middle of an equally miserable trailer park surrounded by corn fields. What you couldn’t see from the photo were the train tracks that ran behind the park or the train that blasted its horn on every pass—even in the middle of the night—and shook the windows.
“That,” I said, “is home sweet home.”
Elli glanced at me, then back to the image. “I don’t understand.”
“That’s where I grew up. Cool, right? That’s me.” Then I added a bitter, “Like and subscribe.”
“Oh,” she said, because what else could she say?
What I really wanted to know was what she was thinking. “Crappy, right?”
“It looks pretty rough,” she said. “How long has it been empty?”
“What?”