Page 19 of So Thirsty

“You need to think?”

“Yeah, I need time to think. I’m not just going to say yes and then have you out here trying to pull off something you can’t pull off. But I don’t want to say no and deprive you of an opportunity.”

“But your initial reaction is no?”

“I’ll have my answer to you by end of day,” she says. “Which is in, like, an hour. Come on. Up, up, up! I want to take you to brunch. I need coffee. And a cheeseburger. Not necessarily in that order.”

She hops up, taking the covers with her.

I whine.

“Birthday eve!” she says, grooving toward the stairs, my blanket draped over her head like a veil. She turns back toward me, curtsies, leaves the blankets, descends the stairs. “Another beautiful morning to caffeinate! Ah, caffeine. My favorite socially acceptable drug.”

She goes on chattering, but I stop listening. I roll out of bed and hobble over to my suitcase, contemplate what to wear, if it even matters. The days it’s most critical for me to feel good about myself are the days it seems most impossible.

It’s jeans and an unsexy sweater.

As I’m buttoning my fly, my gaze lifts to the window at the front of the cottage. No snow, yet. But there’s something else. A smear on the other side of the glass.

It’s…a handprint. It looks like a handprint.

My nightmare comes slithering back—the figure at my window—and with it an ambiguous whispering. Faraway voices I can but can’t hear. I step closer, closer to the glass. It’s exactly where the silhouette appeared. Residue from a bad dream.

An obliterating headache erupts between my eyes. I pinch the bridge of my nose. I’m hungover.

I dismiss the window smudge. It’s not a handprint, because it can’t be a handprint. It’s just muck.

I look down at my own hand. At the two slim bands on my ring finger.

“Sloane!” Naomi calls out. “I need sustenance!”

I fight the urge to climb back in bed and sleep all day. To sleep forever.

“Coming,” I say.

—

We’re too impatient to wait for the shuttle to take us into town, so we walk to the main mansion from our cottage. We arrive shivering and starving, our hair wind crazed, like a pair of wolves. We’re out of place in the dining room, which is formal, all decorative molding and heavy drapes. There’s a limited menu—a choice of yogurt with whipped honey and berries or eggs Benedict. Naomi throws a small fit at the lack of cheeseburgers on offer but is appeased once she gets her coffee, a butterscotch latte with a perfect heart in the foam.

“Aw,” she says, snapping a picture.

We each order the eggs Benedict, which come with a side of thin, crispy fries. Naomi asks for ketchup and the waiter seems offended, but he brings it. He’s another kid—maybe early twenties? I never noticed or cared how old people were until suddenly everyone was younger than me.

Naomi turns the bottle of ketchup upside down and spanks it with a flat palm, over and over, until a red mass finally bursts free of the bottle’s neck. It oozes onto her plate, saturating everything. Messy. She smiles, satisfied.

I shake my head.

“Gour-met,” she says, licking some ketchup off of her thumb, licking her lips.

I take a sip of my coffee. It isn’t strong enough.

Though we made an unspoken agreement not to revisit last night’s conversation topic, and though I resolved to keep the doorbell camera discovery to myself and try to put Joel and his cheating out of my mind, it’s still there, and it’s taking up space between us. I’m reluctant to admit it, but it’s been taking up space between us for years.

“I made us plans tonight,” she says, piercing a ketchup-coated French fry with her fork.

“Plans?”

“For your birthday. Something special.”