“You’ve been holding out on me,” Chance said, leaning in with elbows on the table. “I didn’t know you could play.”
Kennedi laid down a card without looking up. “I can do a lot of things.”
“I believe that.” He reached over and helped himself to the chip bowl in front of her like they were already familiar, and she let him because correcting it would require more energy than she had. “How much longer in Silverrun?”
“A few more months.”
“We should do dinner before you leave. Somewhere good. I know all the spots.”
“Mm.” She studied her hand. “I appreciate that.”
He waited like she had more to add. She didn’t.
“All work,” he said finally, shaking his head. “You need some play. I could help with that.”
She glanced up at him then, just briefly, the way you looked at someone when you were being polite about something that wasn't landing. She'd tried once, briefly, to think of a reason she shouldn't entertain him. He was attractive, employed, and clearly interested. On paper, there was no reason not to. She’d reached for one anyway and come up empty.
“I’m good,” she said, and meant it in every direction.
Sametra made a sound across the table that was technically a cough.
Halo did not look up from her cards, but her mouth moved at the corner.
Kennedi opened her mouth when the smell hit her. Someone had set the appetizers out from the kitchen, a whole spread in the middle of the table, and the pimento cheese was right there, close, cutting through everything else in the room and going straight to the back of her throat.
She blinked. Set a card down without thinking about it.
“Does anybody else smell that?”
Sametra looked up. Bri looked around. Chance glanced toward the kitchen like he was trying to be helpful.
Nobody said anything because nobody smelled anything the way she was smelling it.
Her stomach lurched hard. She covered her mouth and pushed back from the table, moving toward the hallway with as much composure as she had left, which wasn't much. She made it to the bathroom off the hallway and got the door closed before her body finished making its point.
When she straightened up and gripped the sink, her own reflection looked back at her, looking exactly how she felt. Exhausted. Wrung out. This had been happening for weeks in exactly this pattern: some days, nothing; other days, she was against the ropes with no warning and no dignity.
A soft knock. “Ken.” Halo’s voice.
She unlocked the door.
Both of them came in, Halo and Sametra, the bathroom suddenly very full. Sametra had a bottle of water and handed it over without a word. Kennedi accepted it, rinsed her mouth, and looked at both of them in the mirror.
“What?”
“Honey,” Sametra said.
“Don’t.”
“I’m just?—”
“Just what?”
Halo had her arms folded, and her eyebrow raised in that way that meant she had already put it together and was waiting for Kennedi to stop pretending. “Bestie. You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I sure am.”
And then it happened. Standing in that bathroom, stomach still rolling like the tide, she had a full That’s So Raven moment. It came in flashes — the hotel room, that night at Velvet, andeverything that came with it, the way it had gone and kept going until sunlight. She had tried very hard to file those nights under a category that would make it manageable. She had not succeeded.
