Page 3 of Scarlet Secrets

Her eyes flash as she grins. “You go, girl!” Then her smile fades. “You know I want to say I’m sorry my brother did that to you. I mean, I’d picked out my bridesmaid dress. I hate her. And I’m so mad at him.”

“It’s not her fault. He was the one in a relationship finding fresh pussy. I don’t even know if she knew about me. He made it sound like she didn’t. The?—”

I stop. It’s her brother. And a fancy bar.

“We’ll go out?—”

“I’ve got that meeting, remember?”

Kara sips her drink. “I just don’t want you to be lonely. I want you to have fun, Erin. I want us to have our own advertising company. Modern.”

“Everton and Banks?”

“And I hate that he might have ruined that.” Her eyes narrow. “Call me shallow.”

“You?” I say. “Never. And I’m totally fine, totally over him. I can’t remember his name.”

“You should. He’s a terrible excuse for a human.” She squeezes my hand. “And that’s why we should go out. Findyou a hot man and practice your filthy low-down rebound sex on.”

I laugh and hug her, right as the bartender puts her next drink down. Then he’s off. It’s busy now, so he can’t interrupt. “I’m not doing that. You should get his number.”

“The imaginary rebound man?”

“No, the bartender.”

“Go find a hot man to fuck and make Toby shrivel up inside. I’ll get T-shirts printed of you and Hottie McHotFace.”

A groan slips free. “Toby’s your brother; you don’t have to hate him for me. I appreciate you more than you could know.”

But she straightens, finishes her first drink and puts it down, then eats the curl of lemon rind. “Candied,” she says. Then she looks me up and down. “What he did to you was low, Erin. Not worthy of the name Everton, and not worthy of you. I’m going to make sure he never forgets it.”

“I love you, Kara.”

“I love you.” She grins. “Let’s go out.”

“Dinner? We can have some here.”

Kara sighs, saying, “I guess I could eat.”

The food’s excellent,and we have wine with it.

After dinner, we continue our fun conversation—I’ve missed that spark she brings to the gossip and mundane tales since we don’t work in the same department. She’s into computers and loves packaging pitches, but they have her stuck doing admin work at Clearwaters. The company is on the edge of hip—just old-school enough to be cool—but she hates handling admin accounts if she doesn’t get to be creative.Which they don’t allow.

Even me, who’s clawed her way up from my first intern job there as a freshman in college, had to pay dues photocopying, doing the duller parts of copywriting, of graphics before they cottoned on to my skills and then just took my input and turned it into their successes. Luckily, the CEO took a chance on me this time. And I’m determined to make it happen.

And then when we put in enough time, by age twenty-eight, three years from now, I hope we can walk to start our own agency.

But there’s a lot of sweat and finger-bleeding thankless times between now and the future. Things are changing for me. I can feel it. So I can’t fuck this up.

When Kara starts in again, this time about some cool place in Brooklyn, just over the Williamsburg Bridge, I concede to another drink at the bar.

“Fine, but you’re missing out,” she says.

I laugh. “I don’t need that kind of hangover. Tomorrow’s big. Especially if you want to grab our dream.”

“I said fine.”

We head back to the bar and stick to wine, and I don’t say anything as Kara orders another bottle for us on my tab. She doesn’t know the tab’s my personal card, but I can afford it. I’ve got a trust fund. The upside of dead parents, I guess.

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