When there’s a hammering at the door, Jackal and Shade transform as they draw their weapons. Without a word, they separate, Jackal approaching the front door, Shade, the rear.
It takes a moment, but then, I hear laughter.
“Who was it?” I ask Jackal as he walks back into the kitchen.
“Brace yourself, kiddo,” he says. “The reinforcements have arrived.”
“Hey, Wren,” Quinn says as she bounds into the kitchen after him, swiftly followed by more women. Raven’s thick black hair is swooped up into a carefree bun, and a thick cream sweater hugs her baby bump. Greer is holding a casserole dish and three bags of chips. Ember is carrying two bottles of wine that I notice are alcohol-free. Lucy holds two more that aren’t.
Plates and bottles and dishes and bags of chips are placed on the counter.
“What are you all doing here?” I ask.
Greer places her hand on my shoulder. “Support.”
“Book club,” Raven says, waving a book that looks like it’s some Persephone retelling, given the sexy couple and pomegranates on the cover.
“And the alternate book club,” Lucy says, holding a copy of Charles Dickens’sA Tale of Two Cities.
“You really don’t read the same books?”
All the women shake their head and say some version of the word no while laughing.
Jackal backs away to the door. “I’m gonna leave you all to it.”
“Coward,” I say.
He winks. “I’ll be doing a lap of the property. I got some prospects to yell at for letting them get up here without thinking to call us and let us know.”
Shade huffs. “Don’t leave me in here with all”—he circles his finger at the women—“this.”
“You snooze, you lose. I’ll be back soon.”
“Fuck my life,” Shade mutters. “I’ll be in the hallway.”
Twenty minutes later, after wine has been poured and food plated, Greer sits primly with her copy of Dickens’sA Tale of Two Citiesopen, and a pencil tucked behind her ear. Across from her, Raven’s romance paperback is perched over her knee while she grabs a handful of chips.
“That’s the difference, though,” Ember says. “Sydney Carton makes this huge dramatic sacrifice, dying in place of Charles Darnay, the man Lucie Manette loves. So, he doesn’t even get the girl. That’s not love. Well, I mean, it is. But she never even knows.”
Greer’s lip twitches. “Yes. But we do. We feel the agony that life is rarely tied up in a bow. We feel the weight of his sacrifice.”
Quinn runs her finger over the rim of her wineglass. “I think dying for someone who will never know how much you loved them until you are dead is a waste of a perfectly good life.”
Lucy rolls her eyes. “But it’s about redemption. In finding purpose in a life half-lived. He believes his life now has meaning because he can use it to make her happy. That’s selflessness, not waste.”
“Selflessness is overrated,” Raven chimes in from the other end of the table. “If I’m in love, I want the guy who chooses to live for me, not die dramatically for me.” She taps her paperback. “Think about it. Ethan thought Evangeline would be better off without him, but he stayed close anyway—so when she figured it out, he was still there for her.”
“Strategic patience,” Quinn says. “And all those pages of him yearning for her, so when they finally got together, it happened with a big bang.”
“And, boy, did they bang,” Raven says, causing everyone to laugh.
So far, I’ve been sitting quietly, listening to the conversation, trying to decide if I even want to be here. I feel like, while theindividuals are not inherently into labels, their worlds fall that way. The men out doing the dangerous thing, the women home reading books.
Something about it makes me itch.
Yet, if I ask myself a simple question, am I having a good time, the easy answer is that I am.
“I have a thought,” I say. “I mean, admittedly, I haven’t read either book, but I’ve got the general idea from what you’ve been saying. They’re both versions of the same idea.”
