I order a cup of coffee, black, no frap, no frills, just as the two of them walk in like a ball of sunshine, laughing and strapping me with arms as we exchange a quick embrace. The girls pick up their drinks and follow me to the back where we take a seat among the throngs glued to their laptops. Hallowed Grounds is one of Hollow Brook’s premiere coffeehouses. It holds a soft spot in the hearts of most people who live here because all of the local universities happened to have one planted on campus.
“What’s up?” I ask, landing Poppy on her very own seat. Poppy is the moniker I gifted my Louis Vuitton Neverfull after I purchased it. The name comes from its bright red lining I selected. I’ve worked hard for everything I have and I aptly take care of and personify all my prized possessions, such as Frank, my Range Rover, who kindly transported me to this sunny little meet and greet this morning. Who I’m only slightly ticked off at for eviscerating my bank account. It’s not his fault I upgraded to the butter leather alpaca-colored seats and twin sunroofs.
They whisper amongst themselves before breaking out into cheery cackles. Sunday is blonder than her brothers, Rush or Nolan, and gorgeous as any supermodel. Serena is my doppelganger with the same crimson hair and deep green eyes. She’s a knock-out, which is why I’m beyond relieved that she’s currently enrolled in her first year at Barnes University, an all-girls’ school right here in Hollow Brook just down the road from the far more hormonally infused Whitney Briggs where poor Sunday has opted to spend the next four years of her life fighting the frat boys off with a stick. Which reminds me, I need to arm her with a can of Mace and a set of nunchakus, too.
“I got a job at the Black Bear!” Serena bounces in her seat with enthusiasm.
“What?” I squawk so loud half the establishment turns my way. “You’re kidding, right?” I clutch at my chest with relief before she lets me off the hook. There’s no way in H-E-double hockey sticks my baby sis would ever entertain getting a paycheck from that romp and stomp university bar. The Black Bear Saloon is nothing but a notorious hookup spot that acts as a sex ring for the surrounding universities. It’s clear Serena is just trying to soften the blow for something far less offensive in her life that she’s afraid to unload on me. It’s a game we’ve played since our mother ran off to the other side of the country to shack up with some loser ex she claimed still held her black frozen heart. I took on the mama bear role in Serena’s life ever since, and, if you ask me, we’re both better for it. My mother, Wendy, always said she would take off for Neverland one day, and sure enough, she made good on that morbid promise. She lacked the maternal instinct from the get-go.
“I’m not kidding.” She smacks Sunday on the arm for laughing as if this were the funniest thing in the world. “The gig at the bookstore didn’t work out.” She shoots Sunday another side-glance, and she quickly clams up as if the two of them were hiding far more than some summer job gone awry. “In fact”—Serena bites down hard on her lower lip, a maneuver she’s invoked a thousand times while holding back either laughter or tears, and right now I’m hoping for the latter—“the university didn’t quite work out like I planned.”
“What?” My voice cuts through the air like a machete, and the two of them straighten.
“Kidding!” Serene throws her arms up and breaks out into a wailing laugh.
“Oh, thank God.” My phone buzzes, and it’s a text from Low.
See you in two hours and don’t be late! I’ve got news that will knock your designer socks off!
I glare at the screen as if it were Low herself. I’d like to knock her socks off. And I will tonight when I bring this ridiculous friendship to a grinding halt.
Sunday proceeds to tell the two of us all about her adventures at Whitney Briggs, and I can’t help but note the sullen, I’m missing out look on my sister’s face.
“My new roommate, Trixie, is certifiable in a good way.” Sunday salutes me with her drink as if subtly commenting on my own mental health. I’ve been known to have the reputation of an ice queen, but at the end of the day the ice queen is who I chose to be in order to survive the arctic waters my mother tossed me in all those years ago upon her departure. “She’s a total blast because she’s basically fearless. Her brother, Knox, and Rush are best friends, too, so that’s kind of cool.”
Serena scoffs at the thought. “I’d poke my eyes out with a fork if Marlin were running around on campus.” She plucks her straw from her drink and proceeds to mimic the action. “Especially if he were befriending my roommate’s cute brother.”
“He is cute.” Sunday butts her shoulder to Serena’s, and they share another earth-shattering laugh.
“So what’s the big news?” I lean back, studying my sister with renewed interest. “Surely you didn’t haul yourselves out here to tell me about your nonexistent position at the Black Bear?” The two of them exchange a nervous glance. I don’t know what’s going on, but I don’t like it. “Come on, spill. Nothing can be as bad as working at the Black Bear. What’s really going on? Let me guess.” I pull my sister’s hand toward mine in an effort to comfort her. “You’re too afraid to tell me that you’re not taking a full course load?”
No sooner does Serena open her mouth than a tall, dark, pain in the behind walks in strutting his stuff in a suit on a Saturday of all days.
“Mother F,” I bleat under my breath, and both Serena and Sunday turn to look at what’s hijacked my attention.
“Hello, handsome,” Sunday whispers.
“Come to Mama,” Serena hums before straightening in her seat. “Hey, isn’t that—”
My heart starts to palpitate, my blood pressure spikes to unsafe levels. Axel gives a quick look around before locking eyes with mine and I’m paralyzed, unable to breathe or think or feel. He breaks out into his signature killer grin and heads in this direction as if he has the right.
“Look, why don’t you girls finish up your drinks. I gotta run.” I fling Poppy over my shoulder and snap my coffee off the table. “We’ll catch up soon. Serena, don’t mess with my head like that anymore. I’m in a fragile state as of late and I really can’t take it.” I blink a brief smile at Sunday. “Watch over this one, would you? And stay away from your roommate’s cute brother.” I try to zip past Axel and he steps in my path.
“Lexy.” He leans in with those pleading eyes, that sad, tired smile expanding my way, and my entire body flares with heat. It feels as if all of gravity is buried in his chest, and my body can’t help but demand to yield in his direction. Then I remember who he is and who he’ll never be to me again, and I make a run for the door.
WHERE ARE YOU? I NEED TO SEE YOUR MEAN FACE RIGHT NOW!
I scoff at the text Low just sent. I’d text her back if I wasn’t already standing in the entry of The Sloppy Pelican, a bar-slash-eatery that Axel and two of his cohorts thought it a good idea to plant in the middle of Hollow Brook. If anyone had asked me, I could have told them that this side of town is a graveyard for businesses and restaurants alike. The fact that old mining restaurant they bought out had quickly turned into the ghost town it was destined to be should have given them a clue. But then, Axel was never good with those, was he?
I glare at the elbow-to-elbow crowd as the sound of the house band sends pulsating thumps through me with every beat of the drum. The customer base is primarily made up of sorority girls of years gone by. If the Black Bear is the official frat brat hangout, then The Sloppy Pelican is the rapidly aging alumni section. Let’s just say copious amounts of alcohol and carbohydrates do not a pretty complexion make. The place is teeming with various versions of Barbiturate Barbie. Not that the male offerings are any better—men with beer paunches so pronounced you could play a board game with all that shelf space. And what’s with the Neanderthal-inspired follicles? Please tell me this trend is region specific to the west end of Hollow Brook and that the rest of male civilization still worships regularly at the altar of a razor wielding barber. A brief visual of me wielding a razor to Axel’s neck comes to mind, and before I can
properly decapitate him I’m jumped by an over enthusiastic jumble of dirty blonde hair.
“I knew you’d show!” Low squeals in my ear so loud I can now hear orcas all across the planet howling out their long distance conversations.
“Geez.” I unleash myself from my one and only soon-to-be ex-friend. “Ease up on the caffeine, would you? One day someone’s going to sue you for assault.”
A dark-haired girl frowns at me from over Low’s shoulder. It’s her “bestie,” Raven, the one that technically started the entire fiasco the night I kissed Levi, Low’s boyfriend—it’s a long story, and I’m not dragging my short-term memory into this. I guess you could say Raven is equally responsible for the fact I got canned, so technically, I’ll be disenfranchising two people from my life tonight. Fine by me. Let the friendless good times roll.
“I’m so glad you’re here.” Low shakes me by the shoulders as if we were long- lost sorority sisters. I happen to know that Low and Raven actually are sorority sisters, or were. They attended Whitney Briggs University together once upon a sexed-up time and blah, blah, blah. The whole how-I-met-my-bestie story bores me to tears.
Low sticks a diamond-clad finger in my face, and her entire face lights up like a firefly. Low sort of has a pixie appeal to her with her delicate features and slightly turned up nose. She’s undeniably pretty. They both are obviously beautiful, but I don’t hold their well-polished genes against them. Just simply everything else.
“Does this ring make me look engaged?”
I scowl at the sparkling treasure as if it personally offended me. It’s big—too big if you ask me. “It makes you look like you stuck a quarter in a gumball machine at the grocery store.” I twist my lips at Low, and something about the vulnerable way her eyes get squirrely right after I gift her the zinger endears me to her as if she were Serena. “And it’s nice. Yes, you look engaged. Did you dump Levi and meet a Rockefeller?” The truth is, as soon as Levi gifted that boulder to her, she texted me and I sent her a very cordial congratulations. That was exactly T minus five seconds from the moment I was evicted from gainful employment. It seems the better things go for Low, the worse they get for me. Either the universe has a twisted sense of humor or it’s experiencing a bout of temporary cosmic insanity. Judging by the state of the world, I’d bet the latter.
She wrinkles her nose at me. “Very funny. I’m thrilled you’re here, and I want you to know that”—her eyes moisten with tears, and her lips quiver the way Serena’s do when we’re having a heart-to-heart and the urge to coo at her as if she just morphed into a kitten overwhelms me—“I’d be honored to have you as one of my bridesmaids.”
“A what?” both Raven and I cry out at once.
Raven steps between us with her signature long raven-colored hair, dimples that look as if someone chiseled them out with an ice pick, and that same perplexed look on her face that I’m currently wearing. “You can’t—there’s no way I’ll let you—what in the hell, girl?”
I grunt at the expletive. Sure, I’ve been known to let an off-colored word fly now and again, but that’s only on occasion—say after a truck tire ran over my left foot, or the time I walked through a glass door and ended up with one hundred twenty stitches because the thing looked so damn clean. See? There it goes again. I know when and where to let them rip, and I refuse to be populating the world with them right along with the masses. They’re cheap, offensive, and make the user look aggressively stupid. And perhaps the fact my mother cursed like a sailor has a tiny bit to do with it. Wendy, in search of her Neverland, loved to lace even the most mundane thoughts with a curse word or twelve.
“I’m dead serious. I am formally asking Lex to be a bridesmaid.” Low bites the air between her and Raven before reverting to me. “I want to. I want you. Both my sister Lisa and Raven are my maids of honor, but I’d be so happy if you’d stand up for me right along with my other two sisters. I realize we’ve only known one another for a few months, but you were there for me during one of the toughest times in my life, and we were sort of ride or die the night we took off out of this place after that whole making out with Levi debacle.” She takes a moment to glower at me. “Which I’ve totally forgiven you for. So what do you say? You, me, the entire wedding party, right here in a few short weeks?”
“What?” both Raven and I squawk in unison again. My God, we have to stop doing that.
“That’s right.” Low wags that star sparkling on her finger in the air once again. “Levi and I have decided to get hitched right here in the bar. What better place to commemorate the night we first laid eyes on each other?”
“Didn’t you land behind bars that first night?” I’m quick to point out. “Perhaps your nuptials are better suited to be held at the Hollow Brook Police Department.” A part of me demands to stick a pin in that ginormous helium balloon Low has inflated with lust, or infatuation. The good Lord knows, she hasn’t known Levi all that long either.
“Details.” She rolls her eyes, and much to my relief my phone buzzes deep in my purse. I fish it out of Poppy. It’s a text from Serena.
Is this really you? What the hell are you thinking?! I cannot be your sister if you’ve devolved to this level. The poor woman was deaf for God’s sake!
“What?” I hiss, trying my best to click on the link she’s sent. Both Raven and Low gather to my side, but I couldn’t care less about their impromptu snooping. Serena sounds distressed, and what is she talking about—deaf?
A video pops up on my screen of me wagging my face and my finger at that mustache lady yesterday morning, and I gasp.
“Oh no!” My fingers fly to my lips because God knows I’m begging to let a few expletives fly myself.
“What’s this?” Low takes the phone from me and scrolls down a notch. “Who’s ChiwawaMama91, and why is she saying you’re this crazy woman with a green face and rollers?”
“What?” I snatch the phone back, and sure enough, the caption under the vile video reads my nasty neighbor Alexa Maxfield, food critic at Food Crack Nation, disparaging a disabled person in an explosive psychotic rant. Mrs. Gale is a vet who served this country as a photographer and lost her hearing in a roadside explosion while covering our troops. #fireElphaba “Judas Priest.” I bury the phone in my chest and give a caustic look around as if Stumpy might actually appear and I can promptly beat the shit out of her. That word! Gah!,
“Is that really you?” Raven takes the phone from me and the video plays again on a loop. “Yup, I can see fifty shades of wicked under that green flesh. How long does it take to apply your foundation in the morning, anyway?”
“Would you stop!” Low snatches the phone from her and shakes her head at the screen. “Oh no. It gets worse! Food Crack Nation was one of the first to respond.”
I snatch the phone back and read it. “Not to worry, we fired the wicked witch weeks ago for equally disparaging behavior.” I growl at the phone because I happen to know that Dan Rodgers is at the social media helm at my old place of employment. The next time I see that half car he folds himself into parked around town, I’m going to spit on his windshield.
Low pulls me back by the elbow as if we were about to brawl. “Is this true?”
Both she and Raven wear matching looks of horror.
“Yes, it’s true.” I give a quick glance into the crowd just as Levi comes over and burrows his face into Low’s neck.
Raven audibly gags. “Get a room.” She takes off for the bar proper and leaves me amidst the dry humping and the giggling.
“Come on.” Levi hitches his head toward the band. “I want to dance. I can feel a slow song coming on—one that might just be dedicated to you.” He glances up. “Oh, hey, Lex. Good to see you.” He waggles his brows. “Ax has been asking about you all night.”
“Stop being so terrible!” Low giggles as he steals her away. She does her best to look back. “Don’t you dare leave! I’m tackling you again in about five minutes!”
The music shifts to something softer and slower
, a cover of “Key Largo” by Bertie Higgins. I know the song well because for the brief time Low was living with me she played it on an endless mind-numbing loop. Apparently, it’s her song, her father’s song, and now it’s their song. I groan at the idea of a couple’s song in general. It’s all so codependent I can vomit.
Shockingly, my high heels scuttle me deeper into the restaurant and not toward the exit like I demanded. Ax and his buddies decided to keep the old miner décor when they took it over, and I will admit I love the old world feel, the rustic cracked plank floors, the distressed picnic tables, and reclaimed wood lining the walls. The Mason jars they serve their drinks in and the cutlery that looks as if it’s hand-hewn from silver tree branches add to the charm. It’s cozy and the food is terrific, or at least it is now that Low revamped the menu. Honestly, after hearing the horror stories of the previous menu, they’re pretty lucky I never gave them that first critique a few months back. That’s the night I walked into this place and right back out once I saw Axel standing smug at the helm of the bar. He took my breath away in that business attire he’s known to sport at all hours of the day. Axel in a well-tailored Italian suit has always been my weakness. That’s pretty much when everything went to hell in a Low-shaped handbasket. I take a few steps deeper into the lively establishment, trying my best to shake Axel Collins right out of my head and bump into a body—Axel Collins himself.
“Lexy,” he says it so soft, his brows dipped into a hard V with a level of concern on his face that I’ve never seen before, and just like that my next breath is knocked right out of me. It’s almost unfair the way my body demands to react to his. My blood pressure spikes, my cheeks slap with heat, and my thighs—they are the biggest traitors of them all the way they quiver for him. It all amounts to an unspoken invitation that my body gifts his without my permission. “Raven just told me about the video.”
Dirty Disaster (Low Down & Dirty Book 2) Page 3