Faking Ms. Right (Dirty Martini Running Club #1) - Claire Kingsley Page 0,90
wanted. I was precise, disciplined, and cold.
Or I had been before Everly turned me inside out.
After the movers left, Ethan wanted to talk more. But I was done talking. I thanked him for his concern, and his help, and went back to my office. Cleaned up the mess I’d made getting plastered in there the day before.
Then I got to work. It was what I did. What I’d always lived for.
It was all I had left.
32
Everly
“Everly?”
I heard Nora’s voice through the door, followed by three sharp knocks.
“Everly, are you in there?”
“Come in.”
The door opened, but I couldn’t see Nora. There were too many boxes in the way. The movers had dropped off my stuff yesterday and I still hadn’t lifted a finger to put anything away.
She peeked around a stack of brown boxes. “Ev—oh god. Hazel, it’s worse than we thought.”
Nora tiptoed into the room, like she was afraid to touch anything. Hazel was right behind. They both looked around my apartment, vague expressions of horror on their faces.
“Stop judging me,” I said.
It was a ridiculous thing for me to say. They should definitely be judging me. I was in an old pair of pajamas that I’d been wearing since I got home two nights ago. My hair was in a messy knot on top of my head—and not the cute kind of messy. I hadn’t put any makeup on in days, but somehow I still had mascara flecks on my cheeks.
I was surrounded by the shameful evidence of my post-breakup pity-fest. A box of chocolates, a bite taken out of each until I found the two that I liked. A half-empty ice cream container, the remnants a soupy mess. A litany of sad love songs played from my Bluetooth speaker—I’d found a breakup playlist on Spotify—and I’d started at least five poems in a spiral notebook I was now calling my poetry journal.
Nora pinched the top of a pizza box and looked inside, wincing. “Everly Dalton, what the hell?”
“How long have you been home?” Hazel asked, eying a stack of self-help books I’d dug out of the depths of my dusty bookshelf.
“I came back Tuesday night.”
“You did all this in less than seventy-two hours?” Nora asked. “Why didn’t you call us sooner?”
“I wasn’t ready to face you yet.”
“Oh honey.” Nora picked up a box of pink hair dye. “Really?”
“I didn’t use it.”
“Thank god.” She tossed it over her shoulder.
“Not yet. I’m waiting until after my hair appointment.”
Nora made a pained noise. “Hazel, do you mind taking notes? I don’t want to forget to cancel Everly’s hair appointment.”
She already had her phone out. “I’m on it. Which salon, Everly?”
“You’re not canceling my hair appointment.”
“Of course I am,” Nora said. “I don’t trust you to do it, and I would be a terrible friend if I let you go through with a breakup haircut. I fell down on the job when it was Hazel and we all know how that turned out.”
“It took me a year to grow out those bangs,” Hazel said.
“Trust me, Everly, now is not the time for rash hairstyle decisions. You’ll only wind up with a lot of pictures that you’ll regret. And they’ll be on social media where they never, ever go away.”
“I barely even use social media.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she said. “Tell you what, if you want to go pink, we’ll do something temporary, like some clip-ins or chalk.”
I groaned, pulling my knit afghan around my shoulders. “I don’t care about the pink.”
“Okay, but we need to make some progress here,” Nora said. “Otherwise, you’re going to be in the wallowing stage for months.”
“It’s been less than three days,” I said. “I can still wallow.”
She sat down on the edge of the couch near my feet and squeezed my leg. “Yes, you can. And we’re all going out to get breakup drunk tonight. But maybe let’s wallow in clean clothes.”
“Everly, I still need the name of the salon,” Hazel said.
“Red X on Capitol Hill,” I mumbled.
Nora rubbed my leg. “Do you want to tell us what happened now, or should we go get drinks?”
“It’s morning,” I said.
“Do you remember who we are?” Nora asked. “Breakfast drinking is why they invented bloody marys and mimosas.”
“Good point. But I drank some wine last night and I don’t think I’m ready for more alcohol yet.”
“How much wine did you drink?” Hazel asked, picking up the empty bottle.
“Yeah, that.”
“Just the one?” Nora asked.
I nodded. “But I didn’t use a glass.”
“Oh lord,” Nora said. “Okay, honey, just tell us what happened.”