“Only if you want to be a party pooper. ”
If those nine words don’t sum up my relationship with Tori, than I don’t know what does. She’s six months older than I, and ever since we were put together as roommates our freshman year at UCSD, she’s pretty much considered it her job in life to corrupt me—a position she has only grown more firm on since she turned twenty-one a few months ago.
For the sake of our friendship, some days I even let her think it’s working.
Curious about this strange and unexpected package, I head down the hall toward my bedroom. Having finally finished her last toe, Tori gets up to follow me. But since she’s worried about smudging the polish, she kind of waddles on her heels, toes in the air. With her hair dyed race-car yellow and cut short and spiky, she looks a little like a top-heavy duck. One that stuck its wing in an electric socket.
She’s actually a really pretty girl, with beautifully delicate features and the most haunting green eyes I’ve ever seen. But she’s got major issues with her looks, so she messes with herself all the time, changing her hair, her makeup, her clothes. She has multiple piercings, a few tattoos, has even experimented with scarification and branding on occasion. She says she’s just being young, trying to figure out who she really is. But I’m pretty sure it’s the opposite. For as long as I’ve known her, she’s been trying to forget who she is. To bury deep the sad little rich girl she still sees every time she looks in a mirror.
I’ve tried to talk to her about it on a few occasions—that’s what best friends are for—but every time I broach the subject, she shuts me down, hard. Maybe I should push it, but she’s fragile—a lot more
fragile than she’d ever admit—and I’m terrified of breaking her with a careless word or too-vehement protest. So most days I just keep my mouth shut. That doesn’t mean I don’t worry, though.
“Well, open it,” she orders from my bedroom doorway, when I just stand there looking at what is, indeed, a very large box. It covers about a quarter of my double bed, and when I go to pick it up, I find that Tori didn’t exaggerate. It really is heavy. It’s also marked FRAGILE, with arrows pointing to the words THIS END UP.
Now I’m as curious as she is. Reaching into my nightstand, I pull out a pair of manicure scissors and start hacking at the tape on the box. It takes a couple minutes more than if I’d gone and gotten a knife from the kitchen, but eventually I get the box open. Once I do, though, I’m as confused as I was before I opened it. Because there are no HR manuals in the box. No new employee information. Just a four-hundred-dollar gourmet blender and a dozen pints of strawberries.
Immediately I think of him. Juice Guy. I know he’s the one who sent this to me—it’s the only thing that makes sense. But how did he get my address? And how does a guy who works in a juice bar afford to throw around this kind of cash? And even if he could afford it, why would he throw it toward me?
My heart is beating a little too fast, and while I try to convince myself it’s because I’m creeped out—it smacks of online stalkerdom that he managed to get my address so quickly—I know that it’s more than that.
He’s flitted through my mind all day, along with my very odd reaction to him. No matter how he did it, it’s nice to think that he’s been thinking of me, too. Provided, of course, he’s not a serial killer who wants to put my head in a box. Because I totally wouldn’t be okay with that. Strawberries and a blender I’m strangely fine with, despite their cost. My head in a box, not so much.
When I don’t do anything but stand there, peering at his gifts and contemplating what all this means, Tori creeps up behind me. Stares over my shoulder. “Strawberries? Who would send you strawberries?”
I don’t know where to begin, so in the end I don’t say anything. Just keep staring at the perfect red berries. The pint baskets they come in are stamped with the name of an organic strawberry farm about twenty miles up the freeway, which means he went to a lot of trouble to get this gift here so quickly.
The only question is why.
Tori takes my silence as ignorance and starts poking around in the box. “Is there a card?”
“I don’t see one. ”
But when I reach in and pick up one of the baskets of strawberries, I notice the ivory business card that had slipped between the pints. It’s embossed, with Frost Industries name and logo on the front. But the name listed directly below the logo is all wrong. Not that I know Juice Guy’s name, but I’m pretty damn sure that the surf bum I met today isn’t Ethan Frost. Except when I turn the card over, there’s a phone number scrawled on the back in bold black writing.
“Ethan fucking Frost is sending you strawberries?” Tori demands incredulously. “How is that possible? He’s a legend. Not to mention the most eligible bachelor under thirty on the entire West Coast. ”
“He’s not. Of course he’s not. They’re from…”
“Who?” She eyes me suspiciously.
“Some guy I met today. Not Ethan Frost. ”
“You certain about that?” She grabs the basket out of my hands and whirls away. “Because it sure looks to me like he’s the one who sent these babies. ”
“Hey!” Still confused, I follow her. “Where are you going with those?”
“Haven’t you ever seen Pretty Woman? Strawberries go awesome with champagne. ”
“We can’t eat them!”
She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Why not?”
“Because we don’t know where they came from!”
Tori snatches the card out of my hand, waves it in my face. “They came from Ethan fucking Frost. That’s good enough for me. ”
“Well, it’s not good enough for me. If these even came from him—”