She’s so full of energy, and probably more than just one glass of whiskey, that I’m wondering what havoc is going to befall Cedar Rapids tonight by the time we’re done here.
She watches me, waiting for me to take a drink of the golden liquor. When I do, I close my eyes and savor the light burn as it slides down my throat.
“Feel better?”
I nod, but take another sip. One isn’t enough to prepare me for what she’s about to unleash on me.
“Good.” She nods. “You need it.”
Smiling, I nod. “You know me too well.”
Shaking her head she drags her finger around the rim of her glass. “Apparently not well enough. You wanna talk about the Milkshake Man?” She was with me and Oli that night I dumped a perfectly good chocolate milkshake on Tate’s head. She could also probably tell that I was aching to lick it all off him, too.
“Nope.” I raise my glass. “Maybe after a few more of these.”
She eyes me with her perfectly manicured brow arched high on her face. “I’ll hold you to that.” She clinks her glass against mine and takes a sip. She’s halfway to putting her glass back on the bar when her face falls. “Don’t panic.”
Fuck sake. “In all the history of the fucking world, has that ever worked? When someone tells someone else not to panic, do they ever not panic?” I twitch, my neck prepped to turn to see what she’s looking at.
“Don’t look.” Her voice is hard, but her face remains impassive. She doesn’t want whoever’s behind me to know their presence is impacting her.
“Milkshake Man?” I tip my head to the side in question. Should I be concerned that my neighbor is stalking me? Perhaps. Is there a flicker of hope in my chest that he gets to see me looking this good? Also perhaps.
“Worse.” Karlya shoots back the remainder of her drink.
Who’s worse than the Milkshake Man?
She doesn’t need to say it, I figure it out, but she opens her mouth anyway.
“Your ex.” Her voice is low.
“Penny.”
The single word from behind me makes my blood run cold.Penny. He still says it with a warm familiarity he lost all right to use when I found him in bed with another woman.
Not just any woman. My former best friend.
Why would he come up to me? Why say hi? Why not just leave me the fuck alone? Why the hell is he even here? Of all the places in Cedar Rapids to go, he comes here.
“Dick.” My cousin is savage.
Just like I hate being called Penny, he hates being called Dick. His name is Richard, and I always called him Rich, or Richard, until I found him balls deep in Chloe’s ass in our dorm room in my sophomore year of college.
Then he became Dick.
He groans. I still don’t turn to look at him. And I can tell from the noise he makes that he’s both rolling his eyes and wishing he never opened his mouth in the first place.
“Karlya.”
I don’t know why he bothered saying hello to her. She transferred from Cedar Rapids to Wisconsin at the end of my freshman year so she was here for the entire Dick Chronicles before she left. And she’s even madder at him than I am, which is reflected in the way she narrows her eyes and flips him the bird.
Chloe’s nervous giggle makes me want to throat-punch her. I was with him for six months. And for that entire six months, she was with him, too. They both played me like a fucking fool. She even listened to me crying when I suspected he was seeing someone else.
I was just a fucking idiot and didn’t realize it was her.
Then he had the absolute audacity to suggest we become a thruple. A fucking thruple with the man who cheated on me, and the woman who slept with my boyfriend behind my back for as long as I was with him. Because sure, what could possibly go wrong?
“How are you both?” This fucking asshole still can’t read the room.
