That was why, when she woke up to no message notification, a knot of dread tied itself around the base of her spine and held fast.
It wasn’t an unusual occasion, necessarily. There were long stretches — weeks, months — where she heard nothing at all. But something aboutthisevening felt off.
It was another bad sign when she stepped into her tiny cubicle of a shower to become the unsuspecting victim of a spray of frigid water. Her yelp was loud enough to draw the attention of her closest neighbor. Though that wasn’t hard, considering their bathroom windows faced one another with only a foot gap between them.
“If you trip and die in the shower, I’ll put panties on you before I call Patrol,” Cecilia informed her, as chipper and helpful as always.
Dahlia danced out of the shower, her teeth clacking, and snatched a towel off the hook. She didn’t care if Cecilia saw her tits — they’d compared sizes when they were thirteen and had synced periods since the damn things started — but she needed the warmth. It didn’t matter how warm the weather got. Their apartment building was always freezing.
Kneeling on the toilet, Dahlia pushed the window open a bit more and stuck her head into the strange, dark gap between their apartments. Her best friend’s perfume drifted in the musty air.
“My hot water is out again,” she groused.
It only took a second for Cecilia’s face to appear in her open window. Holding a curling iron in one hand, she pushed up her window with the other. “You wanna use mine? Should be a little bit of warm water left.” She paused to squint her dark eyes speculatively. “Wait, are you working tonight? I thought you were off.”
“I swapped with Alexa. There’s a VIP thing tonight, so I said yes.”
“Oh, big tips.” Cecilia jammed her thumb over her shoulder. “You don’t have a lot of time before opening, but you wanna use my shower?”
Dahlia shook her head and was immediately annoyed by the situation all over again when she felt how only half her hair was wet. She didn’t want to talk about how she’d spent half her getting ready time staring at her phone, waiting for her boogeyman to make himself known.
“It’s fine. I just wanted to inform you that today is cursed. I can feel it.”
Cecilia nodded solemnly. A little bit of the sincerity of the gesture was ruined when she began curling her hair again, but Dahlia could allow it. “That sucks. I have a date in a couple hours. You think I should cancel?”
“It’s worth considering.”
“Noted. If I get murdered, you get custody of Oyster.”
Dahlia wrinkled her nose as she climbed off the toilet. The salvage operation on her hair and makeup had to start soon or she’d really be up Shit Creek. “I so don’t want your dead cat, Cece.”
“It’s not about what you want,” she called back. “It’s about familial responsibility, Dahlia! You have to take care of Oyster, discreetly dispose of my sex toys, and for the love of the gods, pick a cute picture of me for them to put on the news feeds. None of that senior photo or embarrassing selfie crap.”
Yelling over the roar of her hair dryer, Dahlia complained, “I thought we both agreed I’d die first!”
“That was before you stopped going on dates. I’m on dating apps. My risk of being murdered is much higher than yours now.”
“That’s dark. Real, but dark.” Dahlia tipped her head over and violently blew hot air through her short blonde hair. Scrubbing her fingers through it in a vain attempt to give it a little volume, she argued, “Cece, it’s not like you go on dates with criminals. The last guy you had drinks with was a middle school math teacher. And we both work at a vampire bar. I think that makes our mortality risk about equal.”
“Ugh,Jason.”The sound of hairspray being more than liberally applied came a few seconds before the scent of it drifted across the divide and into Dahlia’s bathroom. “I really thought we had fun. I don’t understand what happened there.”
Personally, Dahlia didn’t understand it either. She didn’t date because she wasn’t willing to risk the life and limb of some poor schmuck who worked in finance, but Cecilia was a different story.
She’d always been the sweet to Dahlia’s tart. The pink to her red. The baby to her brat. They’d been thick as thieves since thefirst day of kindergarten, and despite having seen every single one of Cecilia’s most awkward phases and catastrophic fashion choices over the years, Dahlia still thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world.
Andkind.Fundamentally. Wholly. In all the ways Dahlia had beaten out of her before she ever got a chance to understand what she’d lost.
Cecilia deserved a gorgeous, doting nerd with obscene amounts of money and a high tolerance for pastels, not the milquetoast jerks who kept disappointing her.
Flipping her hair back, Dahlia switched off her blow dryer and scrambled to throw on a halfway decent face of makeup. Patting concealer under her eyes, she said, “I hope Jason gets hit by a bus.”
“Nooo. Didn’t you hear about the substitute teacher shortage in San Francisco’s school district? His untimely death would put a strain on our education system. Let’s hope he gets hit by an electric scooter instead. He can still go to work with a broken leg.”
Dahlia reached for her eyelash curler and bit back the retort that it might be helpful if Jason did have an accident that took him fully out of commission. Her friend had recently finished her teaching certification and was jockeying for one of those open positions.
Meanwhile, Dahlia drowned in coursework as she clawed her way to the finish line of her business degree. If she could’ve gotten to the finish line of a better job with a well-placed shove off a curb, she would’ve done it.
“Face?”
