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The car was warm, and as usual, Wade had old rock and roll on, softly playing in the background. Billy Joel was crooning about something I couldn’t quite make out as he drove me to the pub, and when he stopped, I thanked him before getting out. He waved as he drove away, and I waved back, realizing that, somehow, I had unwittingly made a friend. I had a feeling Wade would come get me even if Hunter never said anything about it now. Or even told him expressly not to. Check or not.
It was nearly five-thirty when I opened the door to the pub with my key, swinging the heavy green door open and sliding inside. Locking it behind me, I turned and saw Mom and Lena sitting at one of the tables, each with boxes of Chinese food in front of them.
“You knew,” I said. “Somehow you knew.”
“Lena did,” Mom said, shaking her head and laughing a bit. A bit of beef and broccoli fell off her chopsticks. She was terrible at them, but she tried every single time, for the authenticity apparently. Dad was a wizard with them, but Mom never picked it up. It was always a fun game to wait and see how long it took before she broke down and used a fork.
“Twin power,” Lena said, crunching on an eggroll.
“Twin power,” I repeated, taking my seat and looking around at the buffet of food on the table.
The spread was massive, as it always was when the McGraths got Chinese food. One each of several dishes were open, several boxes of rice were half-empty, a bag of eggrolls were sitting beside the drinks, and empty plates and chopsticks were waiting on me. Each one of us would pick various bits of each dish to eat. Dad used to get the curry chicken, which none of us would order, just so he only ate a little of the other stuff, saving it all for us three. The spicy smell was conspicuously absent tonight.
We dug into our food and chatted for a bit before Mom started in on the job. I was usually able to fend her off, but this time Lena was getting in on the fun, too. She had seen some recent pictures of Hunter in a magazine where he had been working out with The Rock of all people. She hadn’t stopped talking about his muscles every time I mentioned him since.
“I swear, I don’t think I could hang out with him without trying to get him to do some pushups or something for me.” Lena laughed.
“We aren’t hanging out,” I said. “We’re working.”
“You can’t tell me that man doesn’t have some time off while he’s in the office. He probably works out while he’s on conference calls.”
She wasn’t far off. Hunter had, just last week, been on the treadmill in my office while I was out running errands for him, and when I came back, he hopped off. But he had been on a call at the time, and was sweating through the T-shirt that was tucked into the shorts he had put on. When he went back to his office, I had tried not to watch as he changed back into slacks, but I failed.
“I’d be trying to seduce him,” Mom said, and then when we sisters began looking at her with stunned and disgusted expressions, she said, “What? He’s a man.”
“Well, that doesn’t matter,” Lena said, shaking off the image that was now seared into both our brains. “Jules isn’t the seducing type.”
“Sort of,” I mumbled.
Then I froze.
“I’ve said too much,” I mumbled again.
Why were the words not staying in my head?
“Jules,” my sister said in something that seemed like patience. “If you have something to tell the group, I would like to know what that is, please.”
“Nothing,” I muttered, shoving an eggroll into my mouth.
“Don’t make me fish that out of your mouth, sis,” Lena said. “I’ll do it, too. Remember the sandwich from eighth grade?”
“How could I forget?” I said over the chewing.
Lena had never let me forget that. No matter how much I tried. She hadn’t taken no for an answer then, and was threatening not to now either. And this was about something much more important than where her One Direction poster was.
I sighed. “Okay, but this has to stay here.”
Both of them leaned in so comically and in sync with each other that I almost laughed. But their faces said they weren’t ready for jokes. They were ready forgossip.
“Please, please, on all that is holy and good, tell me you’ve slept with this man,” Lena said. “Please tell me that. I need to live vicariously through you banging billionaires.”
“Lena!” Mom said.
“Hush, Mom!” Lena said. “You were saying?”
“We… might… have…”
It was like a bomb went off.
