Winning my Best Friend's Girl - Piper Rayne Page 0,15
through my fingers. “Feel like going for a drink?”
She hops up and rushes to her locker. “I never thought you’d ask.”
Five minutes later, her purse is crossways around her body and we’re walking out of the employee locker room toward my car. I need a friend right now, and Allie’s the first one here to truly try to befriend me. I love Cami from my time working with her at County, but we never clicked enough to become close friends. I feel that spark of female kinship with Allie. Like we fit. I’m willing to trust that she’ll keep my secrets. Because I do not want Anchorage Memorial Hospital to turn into Lake Starlight High School 2.0 and have the gossip drive me out.
“Can I have a quesadilla with guacamole and sour cream, as well as…” Allie’s eyes scour the menu. “Oh, truffle fries.” She glances at me over the top of the menu as if I should be jumping up and down. She really is cute. “And an order of truffle fries. And I need a water as well as the beer please.”
The waitress nods and heads to enter in our order.
“Okay, I’ve patiently waited for us to get here and sit down. Then I waited for the waitress to come over and take our order. I will not wait for the meal to arrive before you start to spill. I need at least a morsel of information.”
I lay the cloth napkin in my lap and glance out the window at the snow that’s floating down. You know how horrible it is to have snow always remind you of someone you lost? It sucks.
My mind travels back in time through my history with Kingston. “Owen, Kingston, and I were friends when we were kids from the time I moved to Alaska. In a town the size of Lake Starlight, you have no choice but to be friends with everyone. But then high school started, and all the hormones kicked in. Kingston would always flirt with me. Putting his arm around my shoulders in the hallway or leaning his shoulder on the locker next to mine. Owen kind of kept his distance, which surprised me. Owen was always the in-your-face, over-the-top personality and Kingston was the shy guy.
“They both played baseball. Kingston was a great pitcher while Owen was the catcher. They were best friends. The kind where they retold stories again and again about the stupid shit they did at parties when they were younger and everyone would laugh. People were envious of their friendship. It was thick and woven deeply through their lives. They balanced one another. When Kingston got too crazy with his stunts—”
“Stunts?” Allie interrupts.
The waitress arrives with our drinks, and we thank her.
“Kingston is, for lack of a better word, a daredevil. He loves the thrill of teetering on the line of sanity. You know he’s a smoke jumper, right?”
She nods. “It’s one of the things that makes him sexy.” My immediate thought must show on my face because she quickly places her hand over mine. “I’m not interested in him though. He’s hot, but I’ve been through the type. Not that he’s a bad type, but I’m glad I never wanted him because the tension at the nurses’ station earlier was intense.”
The truffle fries arrive and Allie picks one up and slides the basket to me. “Carry on. Their friendship was the kind everyone wants to have.” She waves for me to continue.
“Owen asked me to homecoming junior year, and I accepted. We started dating right after and that changed everything.” I can feel the anxiety ramping up in my body all over again. “It was as quick as a snap-of-a-finger. Kingston stopped coming to my locker between classes. When it was time to pick partners for an assignment in social studies, he didn’t even glance my way. He started hanging out with other guys, and by the end of junior year, he sat at a completely different lunch table. But the big rumor that made the rounds was that he asked his brother, who was the baseball coach, to not have Owen catch for him.”
She dips her fry in the aioli sauce and stares at me. “That’s a big deal?”
“Well, before then, Kingston wouldn’t use any other catcher besides Owen. They just had a connection, and it worked well for the team.” It’s hard to explain the disaster it all turned into to someone who isn’t from Lake Starlight, who didn’t bear witness