Hasty by Julia Kent

Author:Julia Kent [Kent, Julia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Julia Kent

12

Perky has been holding out on me.

Not that we’re friends or anything, so there’s no reason why I should know about this amazing hot spring that exists in the subterranean wonderland beneath her parents’ estate. All I know is, I’m soaking in the water, wearing a bikini, holding a perfect sangria, and wondering if my sister’s hair can curl any tighter in this humidity.

“Chris wants me to work with him at the gym part time,” Fiona says, making her way through her second large glass of alcohol. She’s got sangria in one hand and a huge plastic glass of water in the other as she leans against the jagged rock wall. Steam rises in irregular patterns, blocking faces. I close my eyes and just listen, the lapping of the water against the rock lulling me.

“Do it,” Mallory says to Fiona. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t have time,” Fiona says, as if the question irritates her, like someone’s asked it multiple times and she’s sick of hearing it.

“You teach four-year-olds during the day. You have your evenings free,” Perky says.

I open my eyes, knowing full well I’m going to see Fiona glaring at her friend. The dynamics between the three of them completely escape me. They have been buddies since before they were all in A-cup bras, and the only reason I know that is because I was in a C-cup and they kept stealing mine and stuffing them with balled-up rainbow toe socks whenever there was a sleepover.

Perky ruined my jellies back in the nineties, and even though I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing anything like that now, it meant something back then.

It meant she was an annoying little brat.

Still is, even on the cusp of thirty.

“Some of us don’t work part time, remember?” Fiona says to Perky. I can hear her teeth grit from across the hot spring.

“Just because I only work twenty hours a week at Beanerino doesn’t mean I’m not putting in hours elsewhere,” she says in a snappy tone. “I’m plenty busy with Parker and with coffee initiatives, and with fair trade and—”

Fiona cuts her off. Her hand moves like a puppet talking. That just makes Perky’s face get redder. Either that, or the sangria is hitting her.

“Ooh, it’s getting hot in here,” I murmur.

I grab the giant glass of water that Fiona carefully set next to me, and I drink half of it.

As the three of them banter back and forth, the words nothing but a salad of nonsense that flows through my brain, I smile. I never had friends the way that my sister has. Not that I’m jealous. It’s more anthropological.

Watching the way they interact makes me see that I don’t know their language. I can observe it. I’ve tried to imitate it, but Mallory’s explained that I just come across as bitchy, which I know is wrong.

I’m just in command.

But as I listen to them, something digs at me, a sense of unease. They can talk to each other this way because they’ve spent almost two decades hanging out together.

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