Page 80 of Turnabout Is Fair Cosplay
“Stay. We are doing a reading.”
I sit there for twenty minutes while my mother tells me that every card in my cross and Six of Cups says I’m going to return tolaw and find a Knight of Wands and settle down, and if he wants to wait to have kids, it isn’t up to him, it’s up to Jupiter and our star charts.
“We done?”
Mom returns her tarot cards to her purse. “You could come with me. I’m getting my palm read and a manicure.”
“I just remembered I have to spritz my cacti.”
I head home and gasp as I pull into the garage. It feels hotter than a new oven. My shorts are sticking to me, and my linen top is anything but breathable. I’d jump into the ocean, but I think I’d burn myself on the sand coming out. A cold ginger ale and an afternoon of reading are what I’m looking forward to.
I frown when I see all the windows of Mike’s beach house open. I startle when I hear the string of obscenities coming from inside.
“Mike?” I call, leaning in past the Dutch door.
More cursing.
I let myself in and head straight for the kitchen. “Mike!” I open the fridge and fan myself with the door.
“What?” he calls from above, in the attic crawl space.
I grab ice cubes from the dispenser drawer in the freezer and roll them over my neck. “I’m not having this conversation with you through walls. Come down. Talk to me!”
I nearly gasp when a sweaty, shirtless Mike appears in the kitchen. “What happened to your hair?”
He’s cut it. All of the bleached blond is gone. But it’s been growing out for so long that instead of looking like a shorn sheep, he looks… His hair looks…amazing.
“It’s an Elizabethan-staged production. Bleached blond wasn’t exactly a style back then.” He goes to run water at his sink, but it sputters. Nothing comes out.
“Come on!” he growls, throwing his shirt into the sink and hitting the faucet, which sputters back to working order.
“Bad day?”
“I was trying to hook up the washer and dryer, but I screwed it up, along with the HVAC system, and now for reasons that I can only presume have to do with the universe hating me, my buddy can’t come out until tomorrow to look at it.”
I grab more ice from the freezer and hold it to Mike’s neck. He hisses but doesn’t swat my hand away.
“You look overheated. How long were you in that attic?”
“I don’t know. Forty-five minutes. An hour.”
In this heat? “That was stupid.”
“Not having working air conditioning despite paying eighteen thousand dollars for a new unit is stupid.”
“So take a cold shower and leave it until tomorrow.”
“I can’t.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“My showerhead broke. The new one is on back order. It’s supposed to be here any day now.”
I’m watching the ice melt on his skin.
“And before you tell me to go cool off in the ocean, I burn, really easily, and in a matter of days, I’m going to be onstage in the biggest role of my life.”
“So crash at my place. Shower and watchStarship Cruiserwith me.” I blush. “I mean, shower independently and then join me for some wholesome entertainment.”
