Page 1 of Twins For My Bestie's Brother

Chapter 1

Lily

The store is quiet. My father is shuffling around in the back, filling prescriptions, pills softly scraping into bottles. And I’m running the register, just as I did when I was a teenager.

I didn’t expect to be back here behind the register ten years later, but life doesn’t ever go to plan, does it? I know mine hasn’t.

I don’t mind the quiet at all though. This is funny considering I left Cider Bay when I was eighteen because it wastooquiet. Now I thank my lucky stars every day I’ve left misty, fishy Seattle behind.

Of course, there’s a price for familiarity. Back in Seattle, I had a regular spot at Glow Tattoo Studios and a significant client base. Here, I’m working at Bolton’s, my family’s nearly century-old drugstore. It’s a trade-off. But one I’m okay with. For now.

While I might not be tattooing anymore, the store is slow enough that I have time to draw, oftentimes uninterrupted, which is great because there are few things I like less than a break in my flow.

I’m close to finishing a nontraditional design of an apple blossom, the Michigan state flower. I’m shading a couple of bright pink buds framing the central flower. A design someone could walk into my shop and ask for right off the wall. If I had a shop.

Maybe someday.

I lean closer to the paper, and work on deepening the pink away from the light source, tucking my tongue into the corner of my mouth.

That’s, of course, when the door chimes open.

I drop my pencil in frustration, knowing who it is before I even look up. “Dammit, Kayla.”

“Sorry, did I interrupt your drawing?”

I look at my best friend. Her expression is so innocent I know I can’t be mad for too long. “What does it look like?”

Her lips purse and then tip up into a conciliatory smile. “I brought lunch,” she says, holding up a white paper bag.

I can smell the grease and salt. I’m salivating. “From Babe’s?”

Kayla flushes. “I’ve been trying to cut back on the fast food, but—”

“Babe’s isn’t fast food; it’s local cuisine,” I correct with a finger in the air.

She drops the bag on the counter. It lands with a thud. “Precisely. Plus, it’s hump day. We all deserve a treat on hump day.”

Kayla comes over every day at lunchtime so we can eat and gossip. If there’s anything in our sleepy town to gossip about, that is.

I open the bag and pull out a foil-wrapped burger that weighs as much as a puppy. “Yes. I needed this.”

Kayla pulls my sketchbook across the counter toward her and glances down at it through her wireframed glasses. “Ooo . . . I like this one!”

“I can tattoo it on you if you want,” I say, peeling the wrapper off my burger.

Her eyebrows jump. “You know I’m afraid of needles.”

I snicker. “I’m just teasing you, Kay.”

“I don’t know how you have so many,” she says, retrieving her own burger from the bag.

I glance down at the bare space on my right arm at my incomplete sleeve of tattoos. I’ve managed to take a bunch of designs from tattooists I’ve worked with that somehow looks cohesive while drawing from all different styles of tattooing. An American traditional pinup, a Japanese koi fish, a crown of New School sunflowers, etcetera. There are some gaps for other images. I don’t know when those will get filled. To get to the nearest tattoo shop that isn’t the old musty place off the highway takes about an hour, and even then, I’m not thrilled with their designs. Plus, the whole point is that each of these tattoos holds a memory of a person. Not just a tattoo for a tattoo’s sake. “Don’t feel it anymore,” I say, then take a big bite out of my burger.

Kayla shakes her head in disbelief. “How are we friends again?”

I chuckle. It’s a good question. Kayla runs the bookstore here in Cider Bay. She’s polite and serious, blonde and blue-eyed. Meanwhile, here I am, brash and bawdy, with a head of curly dark hair and a pierced nose.

Something to say for opposites attracting, I suppose. But there’s also something to be said for time and history. We’ve known each other since we were babies. Sometimes that’s all the closeness you need.

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