She looked up.
“Hi, Glory. Your boss said I could find you here.”
It was Bethany.
Glory stared up at her, examining her for any evidence of having been kissed senseless or otherwise sexually satisfied last night.
Bethany gave her head a little self-conscious toss and her hair spilled over her shoulder like a butterscotch and saffron tassel.
“Hi. Bethany, right?” Glory scrunched her brow a little.
That was indeed bitchy and very unlike her. She was sorry and not sorry.
“Yeah. Bethany. I think Glory is such a cool name. It’s like you were born to be a rock star.”
“Yep.”
She was aware she was being obnoxious, and she didn’t much like herself for it, but if there was one advantage to being a rock star it was that no one would be surprised if you showed a little attitude.
Bethany was working up to something, she was pretty sure.
“Your gig wasamazing. I’ve never seen a woman jam on a harmonica like that. I guess I always thought of it as a sort of a guy’s instrument.”
“Yeah, the mouth organ is a masculine instrument, all right.”
She watched unblinkingly and guiltless as perfectly nice Bethany slowly turned scarlet.
“Ha ha,” Bethany said uncertainly.
Glory was beginning to enjoy herself in an entirely unworthy way.
She wrapped her hands around her knees and stared up into Bethany’s brown doe eyes and waited for the next thing Bethany intended to say. Like a chess prodigy deciding upon which strategy she intended to use to decimate her opponent.
“You and Eli grew up together, didn’t you? You’re kind of like a sister to him? You guys seem to know quite a bit about each other.”
This was either a fishing expedition, a very subtle declaration of war, or actual innocence on Bethany’s part.
Whatever it was, the “sister” thing was pretty unpleasant to hear.
“Is that what he told you?”
She didn’t think he’d say that. Eli wasn’t one to tell a lie. Not even a placating white lie to the woman he’d just started to date.
And the undertone of the relationship between her and Eli was so deafening to Glory that it seemed inconceivable that Bethany couldn’t hear it. It was, in fact, kind of like that low D tuning. It thrummed through every word they said to each other; it thrummed in the silences, too.
“It’s just you guys seem to have grown up together and you seem comfortable with each other. What with all the, um, teasing, and so forth.”
Maybe Bethany was just quite nice and not terribly complicated because life never hacked chunks out of her and so she thinks, poor fool, that what she sees is what she gets.
“Yeah. I’ve known Eli my whole life,” she admitted finally.
She wasn’t going to cop to “comfortable.” Comfortable was the last thing they were these days.
“ANYways...” Bethany bravely continued. “You probably know his birthday is coming up,” she said brightly. “Of course he’s a Scorpio. No surprises there, am I right?”
Glory greeted this sentence with a pitying, incredulous stare designed to make Bethany feel like a whimsical fool.
She privately thought the same thing. Boy, if there ever was a Scorpio, he was it. Still waters run deep, the stare, the sizzling, the whole nine yards.
