Page 29 of Star-Crossed
“Have a latte, dear—there’s extra foam,” Vee cut in, handing her wife a mug. “These speculative idioms should be redacted in polite company.”
“Your face should be redacted,” Myrtle muttered into her coffee cup.
“Hmmm?” Vee tilted her one good ear.
“Nothing. I love you.” Myrtle’s features brightened at the presentation of a change of subject. “Oh hey! We should set Cy up with someone. Who’s single? Lyra, you could use a man who doesn’t work for some big-city firm of Grabby, Rapey, D-bag, and O’Toolbox. Whatcha looking for in a boyf?” She leaned over to Sheila, who’d scooted her chair around to find more shade conspicuously close to the one Marty vacated. “That’s what boyfriends are called now. Boyfs. But girls are not called girlfs. They’re baes. Which is not the equine allusion I assumed it was initially.”
Kiki’s face relaxed into a genuine laugh, but Lyra had to take a second to focus on not swallowing her own tongue.
They didn’t know she and Cy had…Nah. He wasn’t the sort to kiss and tell.
Was he?
Kiki saved her from having to reply. “Sorry, ladies, but at the end of that road lies disappointment,” she explained with a fond half-smile. “I’ve already lost two friends to the black hole that is Cy’s love life and attention span. So, as much as I think he would benefit from the right partner, I could lose my job if I unleash his form of emotional derptitude on the unsuspecting women of this fair hamlet.”
“Rookie mistake!” Myrtle laughed before slurping at her latte. “What you do with someone like that is set him up with one of those women you want to get back at for being a real catty bitch. You know, one of your disposable friends.”
“My what now?” Kiki’s eyebrows lifted.
“Not that humans are disposable. Like bodies or anything,” Myrtle hurried to explain to the local sheriff. “Just some friends are not always…missed when they storm off, is all.”
Vee all but slapped her hand over Myrtle’s mimosa-lubed mouth. “To clarify, we categorically don’t consider any of our friends disposable.”
“Pffft,” Myrtle snorted, unabashedly showing off her foam mustache dusted with nutmeg. “Not even ‘Windy’ with an ‘I’?” She used the kind of air quotes that gave off the impression she’d like to send Windy through a woodchipper.
Vee gave her wife a look that would have withered half the garden, but Myrtle met it with a very masculine sense of fecklessness. “I told you,darling, Windy is just a friend. She’s going through a heinous divorce. Her fourth, I’m afraid.”
“Aw, man.” Sheila faked a humorous whine. “I’ve never even been divorced one time—have I even lived?” Though attractive, Sheila had the kind of skin and hair that suggested she’d done her fair share of living, and then some.
“Trust me, you’re not missing out,” Kiki said bitterly before she knocked back the rest of her mimosa and reached for the pitcher. “One was enough for me.”
Lyra chuckled, shaking her head. She’d forgotten how much she enjoyed the colorful cast of characters her hometown always offered. In Philadelphia, her social circle had felt polished and predictable in comparison.
Okay. That’d been a nice way to say basic and boring.
“I hope you don’t mind my saying we’re glad you left that dreadful ex of yours as far away as possible,” Vee said, refilling Lyra’s glass. “You’ve learned a powerful lesson about wolves in sheep’s clothing.”
“He was a sheep in Wolf of Wall Street clothing,” Myrtle spat with an overdramatic pantomime of yarking her brunch on the table. “Didn’t like him from the start. Had a real Donny Jr. vibe that made my lady bits shrivel.”
If Lyra minded, it was only because the truth hurt sometimes. “I don’t even know what I was thinking,” she said, almost relieved they’d brought it up so she could set the record straight. “By the time I realized all his genius thoughts were memorized talking points, his self-proclaimed culinary skills meant he could cook seven things really well, and he’d earned almost none of his own money… It was almost like I’d locked it in and didn’t see a way out. I just…truly didn’t think there was anything better out there for me.”
What she was realizing, but couldn’t express in this company, was that she’d not thought enough of herself to consider that a better man would want much to do with her. She’d talked herself into a sort of Bill and Hillary existence, figuring that was how the modern career woman got anywhere these days. By being part of a power couple.
“I guess I was so busy trying to prove to everyone how together my life was, I couldn’t see through his fuckery until it was turned on someone I loved.”
When she thought of the things he’d said to her sister, she wished she could go back in time and steal the punch Gabe got to deliver. She was entitled to it.
“Don’t feel bad.” Kiki put her hand on Lyra’s forearm, and for some reason the absolving gesture misted Lyra’s eyes over a little. “We’ve all been fooled by the wrong man.”
“Some of us so badly, we jumped ship to the other team,” Vee said, her eyes dancing with mischief. Beneath the dance, though, was the echo of a pain Lyra was experiencing in real time.
“Unca Thy!” A high, sweet voice pierced the afternoon. “When you finith pancake? We want to plaaaaaaaay!”
Lyra’s head whipped around so fast, she worried she gave herself whiplash.
Somehow, Cy had pulled up a chair at the adjacent abandoned table behind her, and was digging into a mountain of breakfast while scrolling through his phone.
“I’m working on a sugar coma, Daniel.” He stopped to boop the kid on the nose, which elicited a feral sound. “At my age syrup doesn’t make me hyper anymore, just sleepy.”
