“What did you say to Will, when you pushed him out of my apartment?” It seems like Neve’s last question for the night, the way her words slur and slide and there’s exhaustion in her tone. But she’s composed in a way, too. Those words might have been slurred, but they held conviction. A trump card.
Sylvan doesn’t smirk, which surprises me. He just holds Neve’s gaze and says, “I told him if he bothered you again, he’d be gone.”
Neve cuts her eyes to me.
But I don’t have anything to say.
TWENTY-ONE
NEVE
“How’s that hangover?” Cynthia asks as I come padding into the open area of our apartment.
My pulse is thrashing around inside my temples, I can barely open my eyes, and I have a black velvet blanket wrapped around me like a cloak, with red knee-high socks for extra warmth.
I squint at Cynthia as she scrambles eggs on the stovetop, the first time I remember either of us cooking in weeks.
The scent of something sweet is in the air too and I glance at the countertop beside her—where Sylvan smashed Will’s nose—and see a stack of pancakes, maple syrup in a glass bottle, and butter on a platter.
I stop, frozen, as Cyn turns to look at me over her shoulder. She’s in a black pajama set, her curly hair up in a thick bun on her head, and her eyes look a hell of a lot less tired than mine, despite the fact we stayed out the same amount of time, both taking an Uber back when I was done speaking to the boys. Although it felt more like a battle than a conversation.
She didn’t ask questions last night, gushing to me instead about wanting to fuck the guy she met—a football player—butshe was too drunk to trust herself, so she didn’t go home with him.
Tasia was nowhere to be found. She vanished alongside Clay and Ace, but Karter was still there. She took her own Uber, though.
Now, I think Cynthia is going to ask those questions she was too tipsy to verbalize last night.
I’m not looking forward to it. At all. Not because I don’t want to talk to her, but because I’m having trouble making sense of it in my own mind. I need a little more time to psychoanalyze, but it looks like the therapy session is going to come before I figure it all out.
“Who is the feast for?” I glance down the hallway to our locked front door and panic for a second, thinking maybe she’s invited someone over. Okay, so, yeah, maybe Idoneed to talk about it.
“Us,” Cynthia says, and her tone is bleary but upbeat.
Okay. Maybe she doesn’t want to talk about last night? Maybe she’s just feeling hungover, too.
I’m too tired to puzzle it out so I pad over to the breakfast nook, a miniature kitchen island, and sit at one of the barstools, my socked feet tapping along the bottom rung, the blanket still a shroud around me.
Cynthia turns off the stovetop, divvies up the eggs into two separate plates, then starts forking two pancakes onto each.
“We,” she says, gathering up both plates and turning, setting one down in front of me, and another at the place beside me. “Need to talk.”
Fuck.
She’s not done, though.
She heads to the cabinets, snatches out two glasses, thunks them both on the counter, then pulls the apple juice from thefridge. With a knowing glance at me, she opens the freezers and tosses some ice cubes into mine.
It’s my favorite way to drink anything.
With ice.
I mean, I did grow up in the South.
When she’s brandished the glasses toward me, and I’ve gotten up and retrieved forks, the syrup, and the butter, and we’re both sitting next to each other, I freeze, staring down at my plate.
Pancakes are one of my favorite foods on earth, probably right up there with cannolis. But I avoid both, as often as possible. And I don’t eat before eleven, and it’s only just about to turn ten, according to the clock on the oven.
I pick up my fork, because Cyn went to all the trouble, and she has hers in her hand already. But when I glance over at her, feeling oddly like I’m in trouble, she’s already looking at me.
