Hush

She found it hard to eat her lasagna. She wished the news would move on already. Stop replaying the scenes over and over and over again, just to build their own narrative. She took a chug of her wine, trying to erase the thought of the TV before she left the house, the news she couldn’t turn off.

“Soooo . . . Eric?” Technically, Orion should’ve cut ties with April the second her knife had plunged into the doctor’s flesh, but she wasn’t perfect. It turned out she needed her friend.

“What about Eric?” April repeated, swallowing her wine with a struggle.

Orion sipped her own. It helped with her anxiety. It wasn’t totally gone, of course. She would never rid herself of the panic that settled in her bones whenever she went anywhere public, especially since she was still recognizable. Luckily, Shelby was getting more and more comfortable being the poster child for all this shit.

“Nothing’s going on with Eric,” April lied.

Orion raised a brow.

Maria approached the table. “More wine, belle ragazze?”

Orion glanced up at the woman. She was smiling, always smiling. It didn’t seem to bother her that Orion never smiled back. “Definitely more wine,” she said. They’d already finished one bottle.

Maria grinned in approval. “Va bene.” She reached to grab the empty plates. “And some tiramisu, no? You’re both too skinny.”

Of course she didn’t wait for either of them to answer.

“More wine?” April said. “Who’s going to drive us home?”

Orion shrugged. “You could call Eric.” She didn’t know where the lightness in her voice had come from. She’d managed to call it up more often, ever since she murdered the doctor. It was as if she’d split herself cleanly in two. The broken, ugly killer who didn’t feel much but the thirst for revenge, and the woman who drank wine and teased her friend about a man as if she had no cares in the world.

April’s cheeks reddened. Orion had not seen her blush in all the time she’d known her, and that included when she was a fourteen-year-old girl.

“I think he’s a hot piece of ass, you know that.” April drained her wine.

“I also know that April Novak does not blush over boys or men. And she always goes after what she wants,” Orion countered. “So, what’s stopping you?”

“You know what’s stopping me, Orion,” April said quietly.

“Oh, puh-lease. You’ve made a career out of pissing off your brother,” Orion said.

April’s eyes narrowed. “Exactly. And what do you think he and Eric would think if I ever tried anything? That it was just another move by the predictable April.”

This surprised Orion because she had half-thought that this was April being predictable, doing things to piss off Maddox. But she saw it now. She was in love with this guy, but didn’t trust herself enough.

“Okay, so instead you’re just going to make yourself miserable pining over him and sleeping with assholes?” Orion asked.

April’s eyes flared. “You’d know a thing or two about making yourself miserable, wouldn’t you?”

Orion saw the regret as soon as the words came out of April’s mouth. It didn’t hit her at all. If anything, it impressed her. She wanted people to insult her, because then they wouldn’t be acting so fucking scared to break her.

Maria interrupted what would’ve been April’s apology.

Neither of them spoke as she set down the food.

“I didn’t mean it,” April said quietly once the woman left.

“Yes, you did,” Orion replied through a mouthful of her tiramisu. Her table manners left a lot to be desired. The trailer park would always show through.

April opened her mouth to protest and then shut it again. Orion watched her think. “Okay, I did,” she relented.

Orion almost smiled at her.

“I was being a bitch.”

“Yes, you were,” Orion agreed. “But so was I.”

“We’re just a couple of bitches then,” April said, lifting her glass.

“I’ll toast to that.”

April called Eric about halfway through the second bottle of wine. She wasn’t drunk. Teenage binge drinking and young adult casual drinking gave her a tolerance that most forty-year-old soldiers didn’t have.

She wasn’t drunk, but definitely had loosened inhibitions. Loose enough to call the man she was not so secretly in love with to give them a ride home. Of course he answered, and of course he turned up at the restaurant with an easy smile and a kick-ass leather jacket.

“You came to Maria’s without me, called me here to pick you up, and the kitchen is closed? You couldn’t have called me thirty minutes earlier?” he asked with faux anger.

April smiled. No, she beamed at the man. “Oh, as if you’d let carbs and fats inside that body, that temple of yours.”

He smiled—no, he beamed back. “Normally, that is true. But not with Maria.”

April rolled her eyes and then handed over a wrapped package she’d been hiding behind her back. “I’m not that selfish.”