Tomboy

BringHomeTheCup: +1

Mr. Knight: Maybe if “Lady Luck” acted more like a lady, people would treat her like one.

The Biscuit Mistress: Okay people, I just sprayed an extra heavy dose of troll be gone. Mr. Knight has been banned.

BringHomeTheCup: Can you work that magic on the populace in general?

The Biscuit Mistress: I wish.

Chapter Ten

Paint and Sip night was more crowded than usual when Fallon arrived for her weekly girls’ night. People looked at her a little longer than normal, and she swore she caught someone doing a pseudo-selfie with their camera angled to catch Fallon in the shot. Okay, maybe she was being paranoid. She probably was being paranoid.

Still, after everything that had happened since her photo

with Zach at his house had gotten out and the Ice Knights game against the Thunder, it seemed like people looked at her differently—and it was weird.

At least she had her girls here. That helped. It was just her, Gina, and Tess painting under the watchful glare of class leader Larry, who never had a twisted thought he didn’t want to memorialize on canvas. As she sat down in the empty seat between her girls, she glanced over at the example Larry had put up at the front of the room to showcase what they’d be painting. The choice tonight? Zombies breaking through a melting glacier as a skinny polar bear slept nearby.

“Wow,” she said. “That’s bleak even for Larry.”

Gina handed her a plastic cup of cheap white wine. “I made the mistake of getting here a little too early, and he told me all about the climate change documentary that inspired it.”

Fallon loved her friends, but she’d never been more happy to see them than today after the hospital’s Human Resources department head had pulled her over for a little chat when her shift ended. If she’d left when she’d meant to, she would have been the one stuck depression-chatting with Larry, the tortured artist who’d obviously done something bad in a former life to have to teach Paint and Sip classes in Waterbury. All was fair in love and avoiding one-on-one time with Larry.

“So where did the zombies come from?” Tess asked, cocking her head to the side in true Tess fashion.

Gina grinned. “He fell asleep watching The Walking Dead.”

“Yeah,” Fallon said. “That’ll do it.”

That had all three of them giggling loud enough to get the stink eye from Larry, who shushed them from the front of the room as he started the class. Properly silenced, they made it all the way to the point where Larry was showing them how to paint a zombie’s exposed elbow bone before Gina spoke up.

“So how did it go with Human Resources today?” she asked.

Fallon sipped—okay, guzzled—the rest of her wine. Oh yeah. That had been a ton of fun. There was nothing as good as being called onto the carpet at work for something that had absolutely nothing to do with her job performance.

She let out a sigh. “I’m still gainfully employed, but I have been warned that my off-duty behavior does reflect back on the hospital, so I better watch it.”

Gina gasped. “Did they even care that the jerk put his hand on you and went into Creepy Dude Zone on Tess?”

Fallon shrugged. “Not so much.”

“I hope they get eaten by defrosted zombies,” Tess said as she added some green to her zombie’s bald head. “How did anyone even find out it was you?”

Now wasn’t that the sixty-million-dollar question. “My guess is someone at the hospital saw it on social media and ratted me out.”

The security guards at the arena had been nice once they reviewed the closed-circuit video feed, but by the time she’d gotten out of there, the whole thing was all over social media—not that that was the post-punch part of the night that had danced around suggestively in her subconscious as she slept. Oh no, that number one spot had been taken by one Zach Blackburn of the amazing chest and blinding biceps.

“Well,” Tess said. “At least you got a new sweatshirt out of it.”

Fire. Fallon’s cheeks were on fire. She clamped her mouth shut before she could add the fact that she’d slept in it last night—only because it was super warm and soft on the inside. Obviously.

Gina twisted in her seat and leaned over so that she was practically in front of Fallon’s painting. “Fill me in.”

Copying the other woman’s move, Tess scooted so that she was blocking the other half of Fallon’s painting. That meant all she could do was hold her hand under her brush covered in blue paint so it wouldn’t drip all over her jeans as her friends discussed her in low tones as if she wasn’t even there.

“I walked into the office to find our Fallon wearing a certain tattooed hockey player’s sweatshirt while he stood very close to her wearing only a pair of sweatpants that did pretty much nothing to disguise that he was thinking very hard about her.”