Grumbling, she stepped deeper inside her friend’s domain.
It always surprised her how sparse this place was.
The walls were lined with counters all covered in stainless steel, save for one which housed a huge mixer, the ovens, and the proving closets.In the middle there was an island with marble covering it, and that was where Persia made her pie crusts, because to her stainless steel wasn’t as cold as marble.
El wasn’t sure if that was bullshit or not.It sounded like it, but Persia was entitled to her quirks as much as El, and she loved Persia for them anyway.
The back office was partitioned off with a sectional wall that housed a window.Seeing Persia, dusted in flour, as she attacked her computer with one-fingered pecking at the keyboard had her smirking.
In the doorway, she rested her arm against the jamb, and murmured, “Hey there, Sweetcheeks.”
Persia froze, peered over at the door, then squeaked.“Oh my God!You came!Does this mean Ryan’s here too?”
El grinned as she was dusted in flour too by the exuberance of Persia’s hug.She squeezed her back, and for once, felt like someone really cared.
Before Ryan, Marc, and Trip had entered her life, she’d felt like the only person who gave a shit about her was Shawn.Persia had been a friend, but El didn’t particularly trust friends.They usually wanted something from her.
But, with their recent conversations, El was realizing she’d underestimated how deeply Persia cared for her.A fact which made her feel guilty as hell.
She gave her an extra squeeze by way of apology, then murmured, “It’s great to see you, Persia, and yes, Ryan is here.”
Persia pulled back, squinted at her a second, then hesitated.“I want to pull you into the café so badly to see this hunk you’ve been hiding from me for months, but…” She heaved out a breath.“You’ve been to see your parents.”
El reared back.“How the hell did you know that?”
Persia wafted a hand.“You always get this look on your face when you’ve been to see them.It’s like a puppy dog who’s been kicked.”
El grimaced—she often felt that way after a visit from her parents.
She knew parenting wasn’t easy.She also knew that it was easy to blame them for every little thing that went wrong, but El really tried not to do that.
Every visit she tried to start afresh, but they never really let her.
Annabel—El loved that she could call her that and didn’t have to say ‘mother’ anymore—criticized her so badly, El wasn’t surprised she looked like a puppy that had been kicked.
Now she understood why, well, it didn’t take the pain away, but at least she understood that Annabel’s bitchiness had been out of…
What?
Jealousy?Bitterness?
El didn’t know what made Annabel tick.She really hoped she never found out either, because if she did, then hell, that would mean the bitch made sense.
“I just spoke with my dad,” she admitted to her friend and slipped into one of the two creaky blue and black plastic office chairs Persia had in her office.
Persia’s chair creaked as she took a seat too.“What did he have to say?”
Hell, how did El go about summarizing that conversation?More than that, how did she go about whitewashing it to make it as palatable as could be?
Deciding she couldn’t, that the conversation was so way beyond anything she could handle never mind Persia, she just wafted a hand.“It doesn’t matter.He was trying to be nice for once.”
“And failed?”
Yeah, epic failure.
She’d learned about a mother she’d never known she had.Had learned her father was still head over heels in love with her biological mother, and that that same woman was also either dead or had been running since El’s birth.
Yeah, it was a bit too much to take in.
