Her cat gives me the hairy eyeball ofI’m mentally clawing your fingers off and feeding them to my pet piranhas.
I don’t know if her cat has pet piranhas, but he has this look about him that suggests he’d love them if Waverly would get them for him.
“If you quit making noise, I’m getting your people,” I tell Waverly.
Not even kidding. If she needs to go to the hospital and I’m the reason she doesn’t get there, I will never forgive myself.
And that’d be true whether she was Waverly Sweet or some random person who started getting sick on the street next to me.
But I can’t take her myself because she doesn’t want to be seen with me.
For good reason.
“They’ll tell,” she says.
“They’d tellthe fucking gossips?”
“No. They’d tell Aunt Zinnia. Just—five—”
I curse to myself while she quits talking.
To me, at least.
She’s talking plenty to the toilet.
I head toward the door that I’m pretty sure leads to the other part of her suite, where her entourage is most likely hanging out, but before I get three steps, her cat leaps in my way and hisses again.
“You too?” I say to him.
He bares his teeth.
I mutter another word that I learned from my grandpa, then set a timer on my watch.
But I don’t give it the full five minutes, and I don’t care what she’s afraid of or what her cat’s opinion of me is.
Not when her voice gets fainter after another thirty seconds.
She needs help.
And I can’t be the one to do it.
Fuck.
10
Waverly
Cooper didn’t leave.
If I were him, I would’ve snuck right back out the way I came in if I’d walked into what he walked into, but not Cooper Rock.
When I’m finally done with what the shrimp decided to do to my insides, Hiramys and Kiva hover until they’re sure I won’t do the same with the Pedialyte they’re making me sip.
Yeah.
Pedialyte.
How’s that for a badass pop princess?
