And a few in particular looked somewhat familiar. From that clubhouse birthday party.
“Oh, there she is. She’s right here,” the pretty, very classy-looking woman wearing a lot of white—like she’d been the night of the party—called.
“Can I help you guys?” I asked, suddenly feeling very on display as all their gazes slid to me in unison as a pretty brunette came back from, it seemed, snooping in my windows.
“We’re here to take you to brunch,” Vi, the woman whose birthday it had been, informed me.
“What are…” I started, looking at the two women who both had expensive, professional-looking cameras out.
“Don’t mind them. They do this all the time,” Vi said, rolling her eyes.
“We’re just getting some b-roll,” the light purple-haired one said.
“Don’t worry, we aren’t filming either of the houses. We just want some of the landscape shots. It’s really pretty here,” the other woman told me.
“That’s Ria and Kit,” Vi said. “They vlog for a living. And, that’s Willa,” she said, pointing to the woman in white. “Then over there is Layna. And Gracie, of course. And Luna is going to meet us at the restaurant since she ‘only had a hundred pages left’ in her book,” Vi told me, shaking her head.
“I, ah, I’m confused. Did Dezi tell you to take me to brunch?”
“Please, if Dezi heard the word brunch, he would have insisted on tagging along,” Layna said. “And as much as we love his ass, we wanted to get a chance to know you in private.”
“It’s obnoxious, right?” Vi asked, smirking. “This is a thing they do. Dropping in and surprising the new girls.”
“You say that as though you’re not here with us,” Gracie said.
“In my defense, I am only here because I don’t have a skip to chase… and Willa is paying,” Vi said.
“It’s okay if you have plans,” Willa said, seemingly the most rational of the bunch. “We can schedule a brunch.”
“She’s just annoyed that she’s not chained to her desk right now,” Layna said.
“I, ah, I could go for brunch,” I said.
Not because I particularly wanted to, but because these were Dezi’s people. And if it got back to Dezi that I turned them down, I didn’t want to know what he would think of that.
Besides, they seemed nice enough. And there being so many of them meant that I wouldn’t be so much in the spotlight.
“Should I change?” I asked, looking at Willa and then Kit and Ria—the vlog girls—all of whom were dressed really nicely, albeit in very different styles.
Kit had the same sort of low-key classy goth look again that I remembered from the party. Ria was a little more understated in high-waisted brown slacks and a tucked-in black long-sleeve shirt.
Vi and Layna were both casual, though, in blue and black jeans and tees under their lightweight jackets—brown bomber for Layna, and a black biker for Vi.
“No, you’re fine. We are going to a casual place. Willa’s snooty places refuse to carry the fake maple syrup,” Vi said. “And I hate that real shit. Give me sugar and additives over shit tapped from a tree any day.”
With that, everyone shuffled back into the car, leaving the front seat open for me.
And we were off.
“So do you guys do this often?” I asked a little while later as we sat at a table in a diner that, apparently, was owned by two of the guys in the club.
“Go to brunch?” Gracie clarified. “Not really, no. What with Willa and Hope being workaholics, and Layna and Vi being out of town a lot, we don’t get together as much as we used to.”
“And this isn’t even all of us,” Vi said. “But the others have been popping out babies like crazy and have fuller schedules than they used to. So it’s just us single girls. I mean… and you,” she clarified.
“Vi,” Gracie hissed, giving her big warning eyes, like they’d discussed this topic and not bringing it up before they’d come to scoop me up.
“So, you and Dezi, huh?” Layna asked, making Gracie literally throw up her hands and grumble about the diner not having a liquor license because she needed a mimosa to deal with the rest of them.
“I, ah, I guess so, yeah.”
“He’s not fucking anyone else,” Kit said, making me jolt and look over. So far, she and Ria had been mostly quietly, kind of talking a bit between themselves more so than to the group at large. I guess because they were newly back in town, and maybe didn’t feel like a full member of the group yet.
“What?” I asked, voice tight.
“Sorry, is that too much?” she asked, looking around the table. “I was just talking to my brother…”
“Seth,” Gracie said. “Who is a part of the club.”
“Right. And he said that Dezi hasn’t fucked anyone in weeks. Except, it seems, you.”