I shrug him off. “I need Dad back. And none of this will bullshit.” I wheel around to glare it into him. “Think you can do that for me, twinsy?”
He just stands there, eyeing me like he’s the one who asked the question.
Someone further down the street yells: a party-goer, a hobo, I’ll probably never know.
The point is, the night is young, and I’m not old, not yet. I’m still young enough to enjoy tonight, to make something out of it other than a piss-poor disappointment.
“See ya,” I say, and close the door.
I sit there, enjoying the ass-warming leather seats I had to have reupholstered after Jax’s crazy goth girlfriend stabbed a knife into it to make a point.
Something’s nagging at me and it takes me a few seconds to realize what.
It’s the girl.
The one back in the restaurant with the hello body, brown-red hair and blue eyes. The one I later bumped into on my way out. The one who, if it were any other night, I would’ve chatted up the rest of the night. The one I could still go back to, talk to, take home with me. The one who could maybe save tonight from being a stinking pile of utter shit.
I pause, gazing out the car window. The night is young and full of possibility, but is she the one I want to choose?
One flash of the memory of her in my head and I get out of my seat, heading back to the restaurant. Inside, it’s emptier than I remember. Behind the bar, Rodney gives me a nod that means one of those whiskeys he’s pouring has my name on it.
But I didn’t come here to drink my sorrows away, no. Right now, I plan to drown my sorrows a better way…
A way that’s looking increasingly like a long shot. My glare traces the club once, then twice. I see a tableful of glum blonde 40-somethings, another table of obnoxiously happy looking friends, then a recently-vacated spot, but no her.
Fuck it.
No, whatever I hoped, there will be no saving tonight.
Back in my car, cruising home and blasting Metallica, at a stop light, it hits me.
I don’t have to take this sitting down. Just because of what some sheet of paper says? Some sheet of paper I didn’t even see myself? Not that my brothers would lie about something like that, but still.
I have one of NYC’s top lawyers at my disposal, who’s paid to find loopholes in legal documents that for any regular old loser would be the kiss of death. That’s something.
I drive the rest of the way to my place with less speeding and swerving and passing.
The lobby is empty, Bob the doorman nods officiously, and next thing I know, I’m up in the elevator. Two seconds inside my place, though, and Jax is loping over, a dangerously eager smile on his long-toothed face. “You know what today needs?”
Chapter 4
Sierra
“Ughhhh…” I groan blearily against the blinding shaft piercing my eyeballs. “Light.”
“Shut up,” Josie moans from beside me. “Just… no talking.”
Wynona, apparently, is beyond speaking, only has enough stamina to make a low liquidy moan.
“I knew we never should’ve listened to you and gone to that other club,” I grumble at her, staggering for the kitchen. Right now, the only thing that makes any sort of sense is Doritos. As soon as my fingers find purchase on the crackling familiar red bag, I hurtle back to my room and heave onto my bed.
One bite, two… mmmmm… thank the Lord…
“Hallelujah,” Josie breathes after the first bite.
“There is a God,” I agree quietly, lost in mmm heaven.
We crunch away at the cheesy yumminess for a while more.
“Sierra?” Josie says.
I peer at her, then crack up.
“What?” she says indignantly.
“Look in the mirror,” is all I can say between giggles.
Grabbing the chip bag, Josie flounces over to the mirror, then groans. “When did we let Wynona do my makeup?”
I can’t stop laughing. Whether Wynona did it from drunkenness or revenge, the result is the same: Josie’s eyes are smeared pandas, her lips lined with dark red so crooked and uneven that it looks like a joke.
“When we got back here after you stole my date,” Wynona states morosely, reaching between us to grab a chip from the bag.
“You mean the guy who was all over me?” Josie replies smoothly, deftly grabbing the chip out of her fingers.
Wynona grabs it back. “The one who asked for my number, you mean.”
I grab the chip and pop it into my mouth. “Guys. We are not going there. Have you forgotten Killian the Almost Irish so soon?”
Scowling, Josie manages to grab a chip, pop it in her mouth and sigh, all at the same time. “Ah, Killian. The Almost Irish.”
“Don’t remind me,” grumbles Wynona, grabbing a handful of chips.
Killian was the Irish dreamboat at our high school with curly red hair, unfairly beautiful cyan blue eyes and a killer sense of humor, who, in Grade 12, almost created an unbridgeable rift between the twins due to his (allegedly innocent) courting of the two. Him mixing up one for the other (and neither correcting him) went on for a good two months until they figured out his game and summarily dumped him. Although he always remained convinced that it was ‘the other twin’ that dumped him, he—and fighting over a guy—is a mistake the twins have yet to repeat. I’m not about to let them start now.