Page 68 of Star-Crossed
“Lyra!” Cady greeted her from behind the counter, a burst of blonde sunshine on an otherwise turbulent day. “How are you doing?”
On the customer side of the counter, Cady’s husband loomed in his usual PNW uniform of dark jeans, boots, and a Henley stretched over don’t-fuck-with-me shoulders. “You feeling any better?” he inquired lightly, confirming a suspicion that’d been forming for a couple of days now.
Rather than answering, Lyra held up a finger to the couple, then marched over to the door between Star-Crossed and Bazaar Girls. Yanking it open, she seized her sister by the wrist and dragged her back toward Cady and Fawkes, before bringing herself to speak.
“What the hell are people saying about me?” she asked, cutting straight to the chase. “And don’t pretend it’s nothing, Gemma, because you are the lynchpin of the Townsend Harbor rumor mill, and the past couple of days people keep treating me like I’m dying or something.”
Gemma blinked, taken aback. “Rumors?”
“And then Cy’s employee said he’d heard I’m in the market for some stray dick and offered to take me out,” Lyra finished, her voice tight.
“Who, Jack?” Cady’s mouth dropped open as she peeked through one of the alley windows visible between stanchions of new-age and international music albums. “Um… I mean, he’s cute. You could do worse.”
Fawkes snorted and leaned on his elbow. “Nah. He seems like a man who would wear a necklace on a date.”
Lyra blinked up at him, distracted by the relevance of his statement. “Is that a euphemism for something?”
Cady smacked him on the arm. “No, Fawkes is just really against the idea of male accessories.”
“Jack’s…nice.” Gemma wrinkled her nose at the prospect. “ButIheard he makes his own beer in his bathtub.” She and Lyra shared identical shudders of disgust. “Like, who wants a lager filtered through your drain hair? No thanks.”
Cady nodded, her eyes going wide behind her cat-eye glasses as she tapped a memory out of the air. “He’s probably a serial killer, come to think of it. One time, I watched him buy Cap’n Crunch.”
“And?” Lyra scowled.
Cady gestured expansively as if telling a ghost story beside a campfire. “No berries. No chocolate. No peanut butter.Justthe crunch…”
Gemma gasped. “What kind ofmonster—?”
“Whoa, hold up.” Lyra held up her hands to ward off one of Gemma’s tangents. “This doesn’t address the problem. Something is being circulated about me out there, and I have to know what it is.”
All eyes turned to Gemma, whose color was deepening in real time to match her tomato-red knitted cap. “I haven’t been saying anything about your love life, Lyra, I promise. But…I might have mentioned something at the Bare-Naked Book Club to keep the town busybodies off your back.”
“Such as?” Lyra demanded, crossing her arms.
“Nothing crazy,” Gemma admitted sheepishly. “Just that you were undergoing some, like…medical tests and diagnostics.”
Lyra scoffed, dropping her forehead in her hand. Now it was all making sense… “Gemma, you realize that now the town has turned it into something chronic or terminal and has been treating me like a leper or someone who needs to be in hospice?”
“Oh, shit, Lyra. I’m so sorry!” Gemma insisted, her eyes wide with sincerity. “You’d been going to all these appointments lately. And I thought I was doing you a favor by letting everyone know they should give you some space to sort things out.”
Lyra sighed, deflating slightly. She couldn’t stay mad at her sister for trying to protect her. “I get it,” she said, rubbing her temples. It’d taken several visits to her GP and a few specialists to arrive at her diagnosis, and she’d been especially wary of bothering her sister or family about it. She needed to talk to her sister, especially, about the information she’d received, but at the moment she was chewing on a gristly bite of truth she couldn’t seem to swallow or spit out.
“Jack said it was Cy that prompted him into hitting on me,” Lyra informed them sourly.
“Wait, he didwhat?” Gemma’s jaw dropped. “After you guys—” She glanced up at Fawkes. “After the other night?”
Offering a grunt of masculine effrontery, Fawkes pushed off the counter. “I’m going to pretend I don’t know what you’re talking about over there.” He pointed in a random direction but headed straight for the door after planting a kiss on his wife.
Cady dropped her chin into her hand, committed to the conversation. “So, he proceeds to rearrange your insides with multiple orgasms, cooks you breakfast, gives you space for a week or two, then tells his employee to go ahead and get in your pants? Has Cy gone and lost his damn mind?”
Gemma gave Lyra a conciliatory glance, but Lyra had made peace with the fact that anything her sister learned, her best friend would find out in short order.
And probably everyone else, eventually.
“It’s easier to read the future than whatever’s going on in that man’s mind.” Lyra rolled her eyes and scowled into her reflection in the mirror behind the register. “I have half a mind to go rearrange his stupid face for pulling some bullshit like this.”
“Maybe you should,” Gemma offered, to everyone’s surprise. “Tell you what. How about you go to Townsend Manse to yell at Cy while Cady watches the shop? And I’ll activate the Townsend Harbor text tree to make sure everyone knows that any rumors about your health are just that—rumors.”
