Page 30 of Butterfly Sisters
“How do you even know? You don’t have a clue what life I lead.”
“I can take one look at you in that fancy outfit and guess,” he said, getting back up off the hammock.
She squared her shoulders and looked up at him. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean that you’re so buttoned up, it’s pretty obvious that you need to live a little.”
She ran her hands down her linen trousers. “Just because I care about my appearance doesn’t mean that I don’t…live. I had to work today!” she said, her voice rising, aggravated. She looked around to be sure no one else had heard that and, to her relief, everyone was still chatting away happily.
“I need another beer.” Colton marched down to the ice bin by the water, Elvis following, and grabbed a sweating bottle, using the keychain in his pocket to pop the top. He tipped it back, draining a third of it, and then walked down the pier, looking out at the water as it ebbed and flowed.
Meredith waved to him from her float before spinning in the water, the tide pulling her toward shore. Leigh followed him down. She didn’t know what she wanted to say to him, but she wasn’t going to let him off easy.
“Get in!” Meredith called to Colton, paddling back out with her hands. “Really, because I want your beer,” she teased, wriggling her empty bottle in the air. “None left! And the water is glorious tonight!”
“You’ll have to come out and get it,” he called back. “I’m in my jeans.”
“Come on,” Meredith whined. “Who cares?”
“Yeah,live a little,” Leigh chided.
Slowly, Colton set his beer down by his feet on the dock and turned to Leigh, defiant. “You’re one to talk,” he said.
She peered up the hill at the other partygoers but no one seemed to notice them down there. “What’s wrong? Scared?” she pressed, enjoying this new leverage she’d found.
“Definitely not.” He crossed his arms.
Meredith had gone quiet, staring at the two of them, but Leigh ignored the audience of one. She was too busy making a point.
“Then what’s stopping you?”
He looked out over the water again, nodding as if he’d decided something. Then, he turned to her. “Nothing,” he said, suddenly scooping her up.
The next thing she knew, they’d left the dock and she was sailing toward the lake in her cardigan and linen trousers, her two-hundred-dollar wedge slides already off her feet, dropping into the lake underneath her. With a splash, she and Colton plunged beneath the frigid surface, taking her breath away, the gasps and buzz of the crowd from above muffled under the water.
Elvis barked from the dock.
“What in the world, Colton?” she sputtered through trembling lips upon emerging, pushing her soaking hair off her face as her sister laughed so hard she almost lost balance and fell off her float. Leigh paddled over to her shoes, lifting them from the water—ruined—while Elvis continued to bark.
“It was your idea,” he said, swimming over to her with a mischievous grin on his face. “You suggested we live a little.”
“Not at the expense of my Stuart Weitzmans!” She tossed the shoes back into the water right in front of him, splashing him in the face, making him laugh when she’d been trying to get him back.
“They’re just shoes,” he said.
“They’re really expensive shoes.” She pouted, stripping off her water-heavy cardigan and swimming until her feet touched the soft floor of the lake.
“That’s why you don’t buy expensive shoes,” Meredith chimed in, giggling.
“Her priorities are a little bit different from ours,” Colton said to Meredith, setting Leigh’s waterlogged wedges onto the dock.
They were just teasing her the way they always had, but right now, while she swam in the lake in her ruined linen suit with the entire party looking on, she felt the swell of frustration in her throat and the prick of tears in her eyes. Leaving the two of them, she swam in until she reached the shore, lumping her soaking cardigan in a chair, and walked up through the gawking partygoers to the porch, finally letting herself inside where she stood, dripping, as she broke down into tears.
Pulling a towel from the hall closet, she went into the bathroom and stripped off her wet clothes, turning on the hot shower, her skin like ice, wondering why she’d let them affect her like they had. When she was younger, she’d have dunked him and let him chase her around the lake, but now, it wasn’t funny. Not at all. She stepped into the stream of water and let the warmth soak down to her bones, the tears falling silently as she washed herself clean.
There was a knock at the door and then Mama’s voice. “Honey, are you okay?”
“Yes,” she answered, a catch of sadness in her voice.
