Page 83 of The Snowball Effect

Yes.

Weirdwas the appropriate word for the evening, indeed.

thirteen

Regan didn’t considerherself the type to suffer in silence.

Regan also didn’t know if she was suffering.

Because, frankly, Regan had no fucking clue what the hell was going on in her own mind. In her ownbody, which was a first for her.

All she knew for certain was that last night, she’d been acting super, duper normally – as a friend! – and complimenting Emma’s body. That was the kind of thing Regan did for her friends all the time!

She couldn’t even count the number of occurrences over the years in which Sutton had been fretting over something in the mirror, and she’d swooped in to dissuade any and all self-conscious notions from her best friend’s mind. She’d done the same for other friends over the years; just the other day, Beth had been lamenting about how she’d spotted a gray hair, and Regan had hyped her up: tons of women wore their naturally gray hair and were totally fucking gorgeous! Aging was normal! Why was it sexy when men started to gray at their temples, but not women?!

Hell, Regan did that for customers. For the random woman she shared an elevator with at the gynecologist –hey, your legs look great in that dress!

Regan merely viewed that as her job as a woman. Who else would be there to hype one another up, sincerely and genuinely, without expecting anything in return, if not for other women?!

She’d believed she’d been doing that with Emma at the bookstore.

Yeah, she understood that Emma was implying that she wasn’t as attractive as someone who waswaif-like. But she honestly hadn’t understood why Emma would think that.

Fine, Emma wasn’t, like, super thin – big deal.

Regan had never been captivated by another woman’s physique the way she was by Emma’s. She was voluptuous and curvy, and her clothing clung to her in a ridiculously hot way, and Regan intended to say that.

Hype woman!

Only… she hadn’t been able to get the words out. Not in any normal sort of way.

Because, as she’d stared at Emma’s body, she hadn’t just felt the need to hype Emma up. She’d felt – she’dfelt.

Her heart had skipped a beat, and she felt a heat start to simmer low in her stomach. That tingling awareness had started buzzing through her body, and she hadn’t truly recognized it for what it was until she’d realized shewasfeeling attraction. While staring down Emma’s shirt, like a perv.

And that insistent, heart-pounding feeling hadn’t faded as soon as it arrived.

It had remained throughout their walk back home as they’d gone down the hallway to their respective bedrooms. When Regan realized her eyes had fallen to Emma’s butt as she’d walked in front of her –

How often did that happen?! She didn’t even know! Was it brand new?

– she was grateful, for once, that Emma proclaimed to be too tired to do anything other than fall into bed with one of her new books as soon as they’d returned home.

Regan had her own thoughts to ponder.

Like, how did she know if she was attracted to women?

The thought had kept her up for most of the night. It had her pacing back and forth in her room this morning.

Google was surprisingly unhelpful; Regan had taken all sorts of quizzes before about whether she was a lesbian! Obviously, they hadn’t gotten her anywhere so far.

She clutched her phone tightly, staring down at Sutton’s contact info. She’d very nearly hit that call button, oh, only about a hundred times in the last ten hours.

How was she supposed to get through this situation without Sutton’s input?!

Finally, she hit the call icon.

Doubt seeped in, though, by the very first ring.

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