Page 55 of A Quick Stop in Paradise

“If you hadn’t been gone for random work so long, you’d have seen,” she said, elbowing me. I worked on keeping a straight face,notthinking about what we’d been doing for that time. “Jacob was here. I got to say hello, chat a little bit. I would have introduced you.”

“Ooh. You got to flirt with your hunky dreamboat man? You didn’t want to run away with him?”

“I feltmarginallybad ditching Allison in the water and running. Maybe I could have if you two had been back! What work were you even doing that you had to interrupt a beach trip for it?”

Fingering Brooklyn in the backseat of her car. Which I was not going to say. “I’d been waiting to hear back from a potential contributor to go ahead with something urgent, and it had finally come through. So? Did you and Jacob schedule a date or anything?”

She scowled. “He didn’t ask, and I didn’t want to have to be the one to ask. Like, it feels weird being the one to ask, I’m a girl and he’s a guy.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “Okay, cool to know you and Grandma are on the same page.”

“Don’t say that,” she laughed. “You don’t think so? Like, you’d be comfortable asking a guy out?”

“I have before. It had never even crossed my mind once that it could be weird.”

“Pfft. Well, okay. Not all of us are as good feminists as you are. It just feels weird to me asking a guy! All my friends had their boyfriends ask them out, so it feels like I’m cheating the system or something if I ask first.”

“Didn’t realize you were looking for Jacob to be your boyfriend…”

“It’s the principle of the thing. Ugh, forget it.” She settled back into a seat, taking a long sip of her drink and making a satisfied sound putting it down. “Allison’s a little cagey.”

“Around girls, yeah, absolutely.”

“But…” She folded her hands in her lap, turning to me with a slight smile. “We got her talking to someone.”

I turned to her, eyebrows high. “Seriously? And she didn’t put her foot in her mouth?”

“I thought you and this girl were friends.”

“Ah, it’s fine. She’s mean to me. It’s all mutual. We love each other. Who was she talking to?”

“This really pretty blonde girl was out here swimming with her friends, except that she got left behind a little bit when they went to go surfing and she didn’t seem keen on joining. I pushed Allison to go swim with her a little bit, and they got really into talking before the girl’s friends came around and picked her back up. Seemed like they were getting onreallywell.”

“Are we sure the girl is, you know… into women?”

Stella shrugged. “I don’t know. She seemed into it. What was I supposed to do, walk up to her and ask if she was gay?”

I cleared my throat. “No, probably something… subtler. So, Allison denied that there was any connection, said the girl was absolutely not interested…”

She laughed, knocking back more of her drink. “It’s like you read her mind.” She crossed her legs, sitting back on her hands. “You know, I’m glad we did this. I feel like we never get, you know, girl time.”

I gestured to where Brooklyn was kicking back on the water, floating while Allison ducked her head under the waves and splashed back up some distance away. “Well, plenty of girls now.”

“Yeah, that’s just it. You’re always around guys, you know? Like some kind of pick-me. With Oscar and Shane and then all your work friends are men…”

I looked back out to the sunset, rattling my ice cubes in my drink. “I’m being charged with not being a girl’s girl, then.”

“Sometimes I feel like the only daughter.”

“This is because I’m called Ryan, isn’t it?”

She laughed. “I’m just saying, it was a choice that Mom decided to just keep the names she had when she thought you two were both going to be boys.”

“So, what?” I laughed. “You’re glad Shane and I are over so now we can have girl time?”

She kicked my foot. “We couldreallyhave girl time if you were willing to just play along alittlebit with the boys.”

“Oh, now who’s defining femininity by proximity to men?”

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