I grabbed the wine from the fridge and pulled a glass down from the cupboard. Not only could I not be bothered to go upstairs to get the vodka, I wasn’t in the mood to get anything watered down.
This situation would have been fine if I’d had an apartment to go to.
Unfortunately, all I had a was a bedroom and an aunt who wouldn’t stop bugging me if I fucked off upstairs and hid for the rest of the night.
“Mal?” Mom yelled. “Your phone is ringing?”
I almost dropped the bottle of wine onto the counter, only just a breath away from knocking over my wine glass. I took a deep breath and stopped to right them both before running into the living room and diving to the coffee table for my phone.
“Hello?” I breathed into it.
It rang again.
“Shit!” I scrambled to press the green button on the screen and tried again. “Hello?”
“Are the crazies in town yet?” came the familiar tones of my best friend, Jade, into my ear.
“Is it the job?” Mom stage-whispered.
“No, it’s Jade.” I sighed.
“Happy to talk to you, too, asshole,” Jade sniped in my ear.
“Hold on,” I said, standing up straight. “Gimme a minute.”
“If that’s how you answer a phone at work,” Aunt Grace said, “Make sure you don’t have a rip in your pants.”
I flipped her the bird and, after detouring to the kitchen, took the stairs. “What’s up?” I asked Jade.
Laughter tinkled through the line. “Well, I was asking if the crazies are here, but I’d know Grace’s voice miles away.”
I groaned, sitting on my bed and cradling my stemless glass. “She’s been on my back more than a hooker is on her own,” I replied. “She’s trying to be funny, but all she’s doing is bringing out my inner asshole.”
“Your inner asshole? You mean you keep some locked away?”
“Don’t try me, Jade Lincoln. I will kill you in your sleep.”
“No, you won’t. You couldn’t function without me. How’d the interview go?”
Unlike my family, I told her absolutely everything from the moment I walked through the door to the moment I finally escaped my family in the kitchen and got to take off my ripped pants.
“Are we talking Jamie Dornan working out in Fifty Shades hot or Hemsworth brother hot?”
“Both. Combined.” I reached for the glass on the nightstand and sipped. “I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life. Of all my underwear, it had to be the flamingo pair.”
“I’ve warned you about those,” Jade laughed down the line. “I said one day they’d come back to haunt you.”
“But they were so cute!”
“You didn’t pick them up?”
“No!” My voice went so high I was I was only an octave or two from only being audible to dogs. “How could I pick them up? I told him they weren’t mine! I couldn’t admit to dropping my panties in the gutter! That wouldn’t make a good story for the grandkids.”
“For the—Jesus, Mal. You dropped your underwear from your pants leg, in public, right after you’d almost walked in front of an extremely hot guy’s car. The only thing you’re gonna be telling your grandkids is how much of a klutz you were in your twenties.”
“And my teens, and my pre-teens, and—”
“Every day since you learned to walk,” Jade finished. “You should have picked up the panties. You loved those.”
“You literally just reminded me about how you warned me about them.”
“I know, but for my own amusement, you should have picked them up.”
“I wasn’t thinking about your amusement, you bitch. I was thinking that I’d never been so mortified in my entire life.”
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “We can probably come up with a shortlist.”
I groaned again and sank back into my pillow, resting my wine on my stomach. “I quit. I give up. I’m too much of a mess for this world.”
“Oh, quit being so fucking dramatic. You’re just fine. You’re never going to see that guy again, and if you do, he probably won’t even recognize you.”
She might have been going for comforting, but all she was doing was bruising my ego a little bit.
“You’re probably right,” I sighed. “Still, the dream was nice while it lasted. Better than the crap happening downstairs, at least.”
“Grandpa Eddie still angry at the neighbor’s chickens?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe. He thinks they’re out to get him. I think he’s going to do something drastic like, I don’t know, start throwing lit matches or something.”
She laughed. “Well, on the bright side, the matches would probably go out before they even hit the chickens.”
“Do you think they’d go out if I threw some at Grandpa?”
“He drinks so much he’d just go up in flames from being in the same room as the flames. How the hell is he eighty?”
“When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. We could bottle that shit and sell it.”