“Oh, hi, Sam,” she said, leaving the door way. I turned to see her attending to that darn lid.
“What’s up, Sam?”
“Oh, nothing,” she lied. “I just needed to talk to Cherry about tonight is all.”
I narrowed my eyes at her and clenched my teeth but opened the door anyway. It wasn’t my home to kick her out of and she was in the band with Cherry. I walked to the coffee table and picked up the bag. I watched Harper through the corner of my eye as Sam came in and closed the door behind her. Sam swung her arms as she sauntered toward the sofa and plopped down on top.
“It’s so freaking hot outside,” she said, removing her short jacket, revealing only a tank top underneath.
I rolled my eyes but Harper didn’t catch it. She was too busy watching Sam. Before long, Harper’s gaze flitted back to me, then back to Sam one more time. I sat in Cherry’s arm chair, hoping Harper would make eye contact so I could tell her to squeeze in next to me but she wasn’t paying attention and sat on the opposite side of the sofa from Sam. Another awkward silence filled the room. Cherry came out from the bathroom dressed but her hair wrapped in a towel.
“What’s up, Sam?”
“Nothing really. I wanted to go over the set list.”
“Oh, yeah. Cool. Let me grab my bag. I think I left it on the washer,” Cherry said before leaving the room for the small kitchen.
Sam turns toward Harper without missing a beat, revealing the true reason she came. “So, Cherry tells me that you and Callum are getting an apartment together?”
Harper turned the palest shade of white and gulped audibly. She looked at me, tears welling in her eyes.
“Yes, we are,” I told Sam but looking intently at Harper. “We had a slight hiccup. It’s not a big deal but we will eventually get an apartment together.”
“Isn’t that a little weird? I mean you guys barely know one another. Are you, like, that kind of girl?” Sam asked Harper with more acid than I felt necessary.
She wasn’t even pretending to be nice and she was implying that Harper was not classy or something. I couldn’t stand for that.
“No, Sam!” I said. “We’ll have two separate rooms. We’ll be proper roommates.” I sat back in my chair, feeling satisfied that I defended Harper’s honor.
Harper
Any doubt I had that Callum may have liked me, completely vanished the instant he insisted to Sam that we were strictly roommates. I felt like such a complete fool. He liked Sam. And who wouldn’t? Sam was gorgeous.
She was tall, well taller than me, with bright beautiful blonde straight hair that tapered down her back. She had light blue eyes and a body that could rival Brooklyn Decker’s. Who, by the way, I finally realized she looked exactly like. I believe I was close to the exact opposite of Sam. Bigger hips, bigger eyes, bigger lips, bigger hair. Everything about me was bigger than her except for my height, of course. I had coppery hair and gold eyes which I’d always thought were sort of my best features until, that is, I met Sam, now I wasn’t so sure.
Yeah, she was prettier than I was, maybe, but that didn’t bother me. It never really bothered me to meet girls prettier than I was. I was jealous of Sam for a completely different reason. She had Callum’s attention. I thought, at first, that he was getting annoyed at her but then I realized that he was probably annoyed with her. She belonged to Charlie and she was untouchable. That would be enough to drive anyone insane.
“Harper?” I heard but Cherry said it in such a way that it made me think she’d been trying to get my attention for awhile.
“What? I’m sorry. Did you need me?”
“I was asking if you wanted to borrow any clothes for the concert tonight.”
“That’s really nice of you to offer but you’re like six foot tall, Cherry. I doubt anything would fit.”
At that, Cherry only laughed. “Come on, girl. Just check out my closet. I think I may have a few mini’s in there that would fit you. Any of them would look chic with a pair of combats,” Cherry said, winking at me.
She picked me up by my arm and dragged me to a closet set deep within the wall. She opened the doors and an unbelievably amount of clothing practically burst out.
“Oh. My. Gosh.” I said, in shock. “How do you even close the doors?”
Cherry laughed out loud just as Sam came to stand beside her.
“It is ridiculous, Cherry,” Sam laughed.
“You say ridiculous, I say magnificent,” she chimed in. “Alright, so let’s see.”
She dug around in her closet and pulled out ten or fifteen different miniskirts that looked more like tube tops to me and threw them at my feet. I bent to pick them up, examining each one as I checked them over. I held up a dark silver sequin one and thought it was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.