Subject: Question
Did you have a nightmare?
R
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
Why would you ask me that?
Rachel
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
Because we had sex.
R
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
That doesn’t give you the right to ask me that.
Rachel
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
Doesn’t it?
R
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
Why do you always email me? Why not text?
Rachel
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
Because Maverick can read our texts.
R
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
And he can’t read email? Ha.
I’ll accept that you’re too old school for text.
Did Nyx tell you about Harlow?
Rachel
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
He did. I’m not interested.
R
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
You’re not interested in a potential FBI plant?
Rachel
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
He isn't a plant. He’s a kid who lost his sister in one of the worst ways imaginable. You know as well as I do that even the best of men wither away at that.
Back to your nightmares, did you have one?
R
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
Whether I have nightmares or not isn’t your concern.
Rachel
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
That means you did, and that means you don’t want to talk about it.
R
From: [email protected]
Subject: Re. Question
Take the hint.
Rachel
FOUR
RACHEL
WHY DO YOU ONLY EVER CALL ME WHEN YOU’RE HIGH? - ARCTIC MONKEYS
With distaste, I stared at the bowl of soup in front of me.
I loved cheese and broccoli soup. My grandmother had cooked it for me when I made her proud at school. It was my treat.
Right now, it felt like less of a treat and more of a punishment.
Why, when I should be salivating, was my mouth as dry as if I’d been gulping down ashes?
Swallowing, I picked up the spoon and dipped it beneath the creamy surface. The second I raised it to my nose, the nausea churned once again and that weird ache in my abdomen spiked.
Shoving the bowl away, gasping when it splashed on the table in globules that made my stomach rebel for the tenth time in as many minutes, I pressed my hand to my mouth and quickly sopped up the mess with a handkerchief.
The residue left behind had me grimacing, but as I pushed back from the table, my cell buzzed.
Thinking it was Parker, my executive assistant, I automatically went to answer, but seeing my high school best friend’s name, I heaved a sigh.
I meant to be interested, but all Scott wanted to talk about was their surrogate and her pregnancy—that was always a subject at the bottom of a list of my conversational preferences.
For a second, I hesitated to answer, then, recognizing that that made me a shitty friend, I hit the connect button.
“Rachel!”
Surprise had me almost dropping the bowl the second after I picked it up when he started sobbing down the line. So he didn’t deafen me, I put the call on speaker and placed my cell on the table.
“Scott? What is it?”
Scott was a very emotional guy. I’d known him since high school where the pair of us and his boyfriend, Craig, had been the trio of outsiders in our year.
I was a Sinners’ brat—only, the Sinners’ kids in my year disliked me so that set the tone for the rest of the student body.
After Carly had died, I’d been even more of an introvert, and I’d spent most of my time reading in the library. That meant I got straight As and the teachers actually liked me. Essentially, to my class, I was a weirdo.
Scott and Craig were the gay kids who’d been caught having sex in the locker room. They’d never talked to me before then, but after, they’d hung out in the library too and a friendship had been struck.
All these years later, a nation apart since their relocation to Oregon, I wasn’t altogether sure how we’d remained friends when we were so different, but I loved them both regardless.
I was just grateful we were separated by thousands of miles so that I didn’t have to deal with Scott’s frequent bouts of crying.
“Rachel,” he wept.
Frowning, I placed the bowl on the kitchen counter and demanded, “Scott, stop crying. Tell me what’s going on.”
He sniffled, but like he often did when I used that tone on him, he wailed, “She wants to steal Sarah!”
My brow furrowed. “Who wants to? Andrea?”
Andrea was their surrogate, and Sarah was the baby.
Well, they didn’t want to know if they were having a boy or a girl yet, so by the end of it, the kid could be called Darren for all they knew.
“Y-Yes,” he sobbed. “She isn’t answering her phone, and the last time we spoke, she said how she loved being pregnant—”