Breaking Bro Code (The Line Up #4) - Misti Murphy Page 0,40
too.
“No. I don’t think.” I smack my lips together. I didn’t think. I mean I may have thought about it when I was younger. Changing my hair to red in order to draw his attention. Because that’s what teenagers with a crush on a boy do when they haven’t worked out who they are yet. But tonight when I was getting ready, all I was thinking was that girls just wanna have fun. Besides, Vale Westerly is two thousand odd miles away. He’s never going to see me this way.
Or anyway but as his friend’s kid sister. I know this much is true.
“I’m just saying if he was here he would be all over that.” She takes my lipstick and glosses her own pout.
“I never understood it.” I rest my hip against the counter while I wait for her to finish. A girl behind me jostles me, trying to jockey herself closer to the mirrors. “I get that most people are biologically attracted to a certain look, or pheromone, or feature and that makes sense from a genetic standpoint. But this isn’t about procreation. This is either obsession or avoidance. I don’t know which one.”
“Okay, smarty pants. Enough with the big words, and the scientific dissection of the dill pickle.” She hands me back my lipstick. “It’s time to put him behind you. Move on.”
“I don’t know how to,” I admit. “I thought I was over him. I thought after I dated Jeremy in college that I clearly wasn’t still stuck on him. If I could date and lose my virginity to someone else then it had to be just a silly little crush, right? I convinced myself.”
“That’s called self-preservation, Lilly Pilly. Perhaps even common sense. There was no point pining over him then. There is no point now.”
“I know that.” I sigh. The whole thing gives me heartburn.
I’m jostled again by another girl, trying to push her way closer to the mirrors. “Excuse me.”
“Sorry.” I give Kiki a wide eyed woops look. Grabbing her hand, I dash out of the bathroom and into the main bar.
It’s toe to toe packed. People in power suits and shoulder pads and neon tutus are everywhere. Girls in high cut leotards and leg warmers dance on the ends of the stage where a DJ is mixing. Whitney Houston is singing about wanting to dance with somebody.
We snake our way through the crowd to the closest bar. It’s lit up with neon lights, and two shirtless bartenders are throwing bottles around à la Cocktail. A movie Hud only made me watch twenty or so times while he learned to juggle bottles of spirits in our grandparents’ lounge room.
“This is better than Line ‘Em Up at home.” Kiki squeezes my hand. “The guys are hot and strangers. If I wasn’t in love with Dal. You know what? You’re going to have to flirt with them for me.”
I could. It would be fun. Purely from the standpoint that there’s no one here to tell me to behave myself or treat me like I’m a kid who will get herself into trouble at any moment without some big strong man to keep an eye on me. Like Vale did with that guy at the end of the bar that last night I saw him. I should have been mad at him, but I wasn’t, because I thought… I don’t know what I thought. That maybe I wasn’t all alone in my emotions. He was so jumpy and off-kilter.
“I don’t know how to get over him, Keeks. I want to. What is wrong with me that I still look at him and my lady biscuit weeps tears of joy at how gorgeous and sexy he is?”
“Your lady biscuit,” she spits the word out as though she’s grossed out, “is weeping because it hasn’t been touched in four years. It has nothing to do with that particular dill pickle.”
“I touch myself regularly,” I argue. “That has nothing to do with it.”
“Mmhmm.” She moves closer to the bar as the bartender makes his way toward us. “But do you know where your clitoris is? Because, girl, you are uptight.”
“Of course I do,” I scoff. I can get myself off. Does she think I would have survived being single this long if I couldn’t reach the holy land of the orgasm on my own? What I feel for Vale isn’t just attraction or sexual frustration. If it was that would make life a helluva lot easier.