How to Marry Your Frenemy - London Casey Page 0,25
invite.”
He backed away and wiped his jaw like I had spread the plague on him.
This conversation did not go the way he planned it.
And there was no escaping me either.
We were together now. We’d be together later.
And during the in between time?
We were still neighbors.
Time to go home.
That came with its own sense of happiness and strangeness.
My goal was to get to my apartment without running into Jackson.
I had to find something to wear and prepare myself for a night of hanging with the guys.
The guys.
I hated it so much.
Of course Jackson picked a strip club on purpose. He wanted me to feel uncomfortable. He wanted me to stick out like a sore thumb. He wanted to sit there with his uncle and drink expensive whiskey and flirt with women who were only interested in their wallets and not their dicks. And believe me, no matter what they said, their wallets were most certainly bigger than their dicks.
But I could handle myself.
I could drink like the guys. Flirt like the guys.
I was going to have a great time watching Jackson slowly slip into a state of erection shock. He would be so fucking hard that he’d have to excuse himself and send a load of mini Jacksons into the toilet at the strip club.
As for me?
I’d walk out of there just fine, proving to myself, Jackson, and Vince that I could handle any situation.
Hello, promotion.
Goodbye, Jackson.
Simple as that.
I opened the door to the hallway and froze when I heard a familiar sound.
It was… literally this…
Err-arr-err-yay-err-arr-err-say!
I cringed when I saw Sunny twirling with her blanket like shirt flailing through the air.
The person making the noise was Joni.
She cupped her hands to her mouth and sang like she was about to win a recording contract.
She couldn’t sing.
She knew it too.
But she didn’t care.
That was the whole point of being a free thinker and all that.
My mother looked at me and shrugged her shoulders.
In her hands was something.
Whatever it was, there was a blue piece of cloth covering it.
“Oh, no,” I whispered.
“Come here, Callie!” Mom called out.
Joni let out another err-arr sound and Lake reached out and grabbed her shoulder.
Joni stopped singing and looked at me. “Just spreading good vibes. Good tunes. Cleansing the hallway of any negativity that could exist from the previous tenant’s life.”
There were a lot of things I could say to what was happening in the hallway to my new apartment, but I just bit my tongue.
I walked to my door and hurried to find my keys.
“Wait,” Lake said. “We need to speak first.”
“What?” I asked.
“Look,” she said. She opened her hand. There was a rock resting on the palm of her hand. “This is where we charge up.”
“I’m not a cellphone,” I said.
“Callie,” Mom snapped. “Be nice.”
“I have to get moving here,” I said. “I have an important dinner tonight.”
Tits and shots!
“So you need all the energy you can get,” Joni said. “Should I sing some more?”
“No,” I said. “I mean… no, thanks. You did great already.”
“You can’t go in there yet,” Lake said as I stuck the key into the lock.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I wanted to give you something,” Mom said. “From all of us. We’re so happy and proud of you, Callie. You’re really becoming something.”
“But don’t forget yourself,” Lake said. “You must sit back once in a while.”
“Or for good,” Sunny said.
This was Mom and her crew.
Sunny’s real name was Sheila. She couldn’t get pregnant so her husband left her.
Lake’s real name was Lisa. She lost her boyfriend when they were both eighteen and she never got over it. Even forty years later, the pain stuck with her.
Then there was Joni. That was her real name. Her husband died of pancreatic cancer.
They somehow all found each other, and they were the lifeblood to my mother and her business… and quite honestly, a pain in my ass.
“Look at this,” Mom said.
She wiggled the blue cloth away and there was a piece of bamboo in a small, red pot.
The bamboo had quite the shape though…
“Mom?” I asked.
“What?”
“Look at that thing,” I said.
“So?”
I traced my finger up and around the bamboo then back down.
When nobody said a word, I did it again.
Slowly.
The bamboo was thicker at the top. Where it made the half circle.
“You can’t see it?” I asked.
“No,” Lake said.
“It’s for good luck,” Mom said. “You carry it into your apartment and you’ll have good luck the entire time you’re here.”