If she showed me a kitten video, I’d suffocate her with a pillow. “What?”
“Holy shit,” she repeated.
The second holy shit had my curiosity soaring. Katy didn’t say holy shit twice in a row without reason. Normally.
“What?”
She hit me on the arm twice and then once again harder. “Holy cow crap.”
“Katy!” I yelled in her face, trying to get her attention while grabbing for her phone.
She held it out of my reach. “Cassandra is back in Pelican Bay.”
“What?” She’d only talk to me about one Cassandra, and that didn’t make any sense. But it didn’t stop my heart from skipping a beat. If Katy was fucking with me, I really would stuff a pillow in her face.
She helped pick them out, so it was only fitting she die by them. “How do you know?”
Her finger ran the length of her phone. “Facebook group. She’s been spotted downtown. Pearl said they’re going in for pictures.”
Pearl had a Facebook account? “Let me see.”
I successfully ripped the phone from her hands. Katy tackled me on the couch, but not before I glimpsed a photo right as it posted. Cassandra’s long red hair hung past her shoulders, and even though I couldn’t see them in the shot, I had to believe the line of freckles still dotted her nose.
Then the name of the group where Katy learned this information caught my attention right before she wrestled the phone away from me by placing her knee precariously close to my junk. “Watch it. I might need those one day.”
“Ewww,” she said, crawling back to her side of the couch.
“Is that a Facebook group for gossip?” Only in Pelican Bay did they chat about residents online with live updates and photos.
“Pretend you didn’t see that.”
Easier said than done. The women of this town keeping tabs on us and posting it online—with pictures—would haunt my nightmares for years.
But I had bigger problems. Like why was Cassandra Cable back in town now? Her brother and his long-term girlfriend just eloped, so she wasn’t here to see him. Her parents always visited her in Tennessee. Why return after all these years?
“We should go find her,” Katy said, slipping her phone underneath her leg. Her eyes were as wide as dinner plates. The kind for full meals, not a salad or dessert. It meant trouble.
I crossed my arms. “No.”
Cassandra was the only girl who had ever successfully broken my heart, and I wasn’t ready to run out and see her again. What would we even talk about? How she left me at the bus station after promising to run away from town with me? Or how my Aunt Mary told her she looked like a whore in her prom dress our senior year?
The history between us wasn’t what you’d call great.
At eighteen, I wanted to give up everything for a chance to start a life with Cassandra, but she just wanted to start a new life.
Without me.
She’d gotten on a bus alright but not with me.
Why come back now after she’d avoided the place for so long?
“Why do you think she’s back?” Katy mimicked my question and grabbed her phone again, scrolling for updates.
I itched to pluck the device from her fingers again and see if there were any new pictures, but Katy would read those moves in an instant. “Who cares?” She could come and go, and it didn’t bother me one bit.
Not one bit.
Damn it.
