Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Andi
I blink down at my phone. Scrub my eyes. Reread the text.
Okay, princess. Tonight you eat what I put out.
It’s clearly a string of terrible typos. A laugh bubbles up from my diaphragm. Within seconds, I’m bent double, my abs aching as I hang on to the edge of my kitchen counter trying to recover my breath. I can’t stop imagining Cat sitting up in bed, pure horror overtaking her features as she discovers what she’s butt-sent me. She’s cute in my mind’s eye: her ponytail a mess and her hoodie from last night tangled around her form. I didn’t feel comfortable helping her change, so I put her to bed in the same clothes she’d gone out in.
Stop it. I blink again, harder this time. I can’t think of Cat as cute. She’s annoying, for starters, and also very much not single.
Under her latest sending, a line of bubbles appear. There’s something magical about witnessing dialogue in action, about being connected to someone miles away. I hold my breath, waiting for what she’ll say.
Behind me, the microwave dings. I jump and flip my phone over. Straightening from my hunched position—I’m becoming maudlin in my middle age—I pull back the lid on my Shin Ramyun. Breakfast.
In the end, she sends nothing. I drown any sense of disappointment I definitely don’t feel in spicy broth and MSG.
“You’re a sweetheart, you know that?” Val takes the bag of biscuit sandwiches and vase of pink peonies I’ve brought over to her place and sets them on her kitchen table. “You act like a droid, but then you do shit like show up with lunch and flowers. Makes me wonder what you’d do for your actual partner, if you ever got one.”
“Probably less,” I quip. “I’m only doing this because I feel bad about ditching you last night. And because I know you won’t take it the wrong way.”
“You mean I won’t take it in any serious way.”
“Exactly.”
Val smirks. “Whatever helps you sleep at night, darling. Stay for a game?”
I catch the PlayStation controller she lobs at me. Work is beckoning, but I have all day to catch up with Dane and the million other things on my to-do list. “Why not?”
“Sweet,” Val says, vaulting herself over the back of her couch. “You’re going down.”
We play a few rounds of Fortnite before Val calls for a break to chomp into her sandwich. As she eats, I drag free my laptop to fit in a few lines of dialogue between Dane and Sentinel. Cat’s help yesterday was instrumental in unsticking me from the thicket I’d gotten myself tangled up in. Since leaving Revivify, I haven’t been able to stop plot points and cutscenes from popping up in my head.
Like she’s read my mind, Val interrupts my train of thought. “So. How was your ride home last night?”
I don’t break from typing. “Fine.”
“That’s all you’ve got? I saw the way you were looking at that girl.”
My fingers spasm and stop, frozen over the keyboard. Rolling my shoulders back, I force a chuckle. “What’re you talking about, Val?”
“Cat. Your ‘coworker,’ ” Val says.
I don’t appreciate her air quotes. “She is my coworker,” I insist. “ Just my coworker.”
“Uh-huh. And I’m your barista.” When I start to protest, Val lifts one index finger. “ Just your barista. Definitely not your friend with benefits, who, by the way, is about to cut off said benefits unless you admit to yourself what’s going on.”
“What’s going on?” I demand. I snap my laptop shut and give Val my full attention. “Tell me, Val, because I’m dying to know.”
“You like her! You know you went completely deer-in-the-headlights when we saw her at the table in the VIP section?”
“The lights were hurting my eyes,” I say.
“And earlier in the day, when she wandered off to take her phone call, you kept turning around to check her out. You didn’t even realize you were doing it, but I work in a caf é , Andi. I’m a professional people watcher.”
My ears go hot. “We still had work left to do. I was making sure she hadn’t run off.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Val says, clapping her hands in front of my face. Her half-eaten lunch topples off her lap and onto the floor, but she doesn’t move to retrieve it. “What are you gonna do about it?”
I bend to clean up her mess before it ruins her carpet (and before Val catches the color crawling up my cheeks). “Do about what? I don’t like her.” I will die on this hill if I need to. “Even if I did—which I don’t —she’s seeing someone else.”
“Hmph,” Val grumbles. “I guess that’s true.”
Victorious at last, I return the deconstructed sandwich to the coffee table with a smile poised on my lips.
“Don’t think they’ll last, though.”
The smile vanishes. “What? Why do you say that?”
Val taps her chin. “I don’t know. Just a feeling. Cat was asking about us, you know. Last night, while you and your ex were catching up.”
I know. I drift my eyes up toward the pause screen on the TV. I have no reason to hide what Cat and I talked about in the quiet minutes before I drove her home, but all the same, my throat closes up around the memory of us standing in the velvety dark, the smell of crushed leaves and cigarette smoke and cheap beer in the air. The stroke of her hair, like so many strands of silk, between my fingers as I worked her helmet on for her. The curve of her arm against my hand as I helped her onto my bike. The warm thrum of her pulse in her too-cold wrists—
Stop. It. Brain. Val is wrong. I just need to get laid or work out or take a cold shower, or maybe all three. There’s no way I’m interested in Cat or Dog or anyone else. And there’s definitely no way I’m involving myself in anything emotionally messy, not when both Compass Hollow and my post- Aftermath reputation are on the line.
“Don’t you wanna know what she asked?” Val prompts.
“Nope.” I extricate myself from the past with a shrug. “Kind of nosy of her.”
Val tilts her head but takes the hint. Reaching for a napkin, she wipes off her hands, and we get back to the serious task of killing each other.