“Dealing with people is better than brooding on your own,” Flick suggested softly.
“I know, and if you could guarantee—” Tally shook her head. “Ignore me, anything would be great.”
Ignore her? She didn’t think so. “What were you going to say, Tally? What do you want to be guaranteed?”
“Not guaranteed, just...I’m being silly.”
Flick would’ve taken her sentence at face value and brushed it off except that she saw panic flash in Tally’s bright blue eyes, along with a little fear. She reached across the table and tapped her finger on Tally’s knuckles. “Spill.”
“I’m just not...shit...comfortable around men.”
Tally wore exactly the same don’t-even-ask-why look that Flick had seen on Kai’s face. So she wouldn’t. Not yet anyway.
“Okay. A job where you don’t have to deal with guys. Let me think about it, put out some feelers,” Flick noticed the relief on Tally’s face when she didn’t ask any probing questions. Rape? Molestation? Domestic abuse? She really wanted to know so that she could track down the bastard and kick the crap out of him.
Or send Kai to beat him up. Or that karma acted quickly and made sure that he got hit by a bus.
Flick heard the back door to the building slam shut. She heard Pippa’s and Tiffany’s voices and her stomach clenched into a tight knot. Yeah, being at work was going to be not so fun if her heart ached and her intestines remained in a tangle.
Pippa walked into the room and sent her a dirty look. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”
Well, good morning to you too, sunshine. “No. Are you going to apologize for being a first-class bitch?”
“No.” The word was like a gunshot and Flick was certain that she could hear Tally’s eyeballs snapping from her to Pippa and back again.
Pippa sent her another “drop dead” look before stomping over to the stairs that would take her up to her office. The office that was now, Flick presumed, strictly off limits.
“Tense,” Tally stated, breaking the loaded silence.
“You have no freaking idea.”
It was the end of another crappy day in a series of crappy days when Flick pulled up into her driveway. She draped her wrists over the steering wheel and stared at the window to her bedroom, the curtain fluttering in the cool evening breeze. Since her fight with Pippa more than ten days ago, she spent as little time as possible downstairs. She fed the animals and did laundry, but she didn’t linger if Pippa was there. They basically each pretended the other didn’t exist.
It was a special type of hell.
Flick’s house had become her prison, her best friend a stranger. Her world had been turned upside down and inside out and she hadn’t felt this lost since she was twelve. She wasn’t sleeping and she wasn’t eating. She knew that she couldn’t go on like this for much longer—something had to break. And soon.
She couldn’t let this terrible tension linger. Every day that passed added a layer of resentment to the situation and dropped them further into the abyss of non-communication. She didn’t like conflict—who did?—but she was adult enough to know that avoiding the situation wasn’t helping. They had to talk this out, but Gina’s insistence on keeping her secret was problematic. How was she supposed to find a solution to Gina’s problem, and how was she supposed to mend fences with Pippa, if her hands were tired?
Gina, I love you like crazy but I don’t trust myself with a pillow around you right now.Flick felt Rufus’s hot breath on her neck and turned in her seat to bury her face in his neck. He needed a bath and his teeth brushed but he was solid and real and he loved her. Totally, irrevocably, and absolutely. He was the only creature on the planet that she felt was totally on her side.
My best friend is now a slobbery dog.Her life was definitely in the toilet.
Rufus barked and Flick jumped, slapping her hand against her ear. “Aaargh! Dammit, Ru!”
Ru’s bark bounced off the windscreen and he did an ungainly twirl on the backseat, placing his big paw on the half-open window. Because he wasn’t the brightest dog in the world, he tried to shove his upper body through the half-open window.
Flick grabbed his leash as she opened her door and Rufus squeezed between the front seats and stepped on her thighs. He sprang from the car and Flick had no choice but to let go of the leash. Flick bounded across the grass and hurtled up the steps to the porch and onto the knees of a man sitting on Gran’s swing bench.
Kai.
Flick didn’t blame Rufus for his little man crush. It was weird, sure, but she could easily see herself slobbering all over Kai as well.
Flick pulled her bag over her shoulder, slammed her door shut, and walked up to her house. Kai, dressed in a pair of running shorts, running shoes, and a sleeveless athletic shirt, looked like he’d been running and had made a quick detour to see if she was home.
Maybe she could persuade him that there were better, more fun, ways of burning off some excess energy. Sigh. She was such a tart.
“Hey,” Kai pushed Rufus off his lap and onto the floor and Flick saw the tiny head of one of her kittens poking out from behind his back. Protective to the nth degree, he’d obviously shoved the kitten behind him when he realized he was about to be attacked by a monstrous dog/horse. Awww. Flick had no defenses against kindness, especially kindness to animals.