Work In Progress (Red Lipstick Coalition #3) - Staci Hart Page 0,25

to woo her. But that wasn’t all I wanted. I didn’t want to dazzle her or blind her.

I wanted her to see me. And that was maybe the worst idea I’d ever had.

“So, tell me, how’d a girl like you get to be so shy?”

She turned to look at me with surprise in her eyes. “How’d a guy like you get to be so brash?”

“Years of practice.”

Her lips curled in a smile. “Same. And like I said, I don’t want to be like this. I want to be able to walk into a room like Janessa Hughes—completely unafraid and ready for anything thrown at me.”

“You shouldn’t want to be anything like Janessa,” I said, unable to keep the disdain from my voice. “And she’s not as brave as you think. She’s just as afraid as you or me or anybody. Her fears might be different from yours, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there.”

The thought seemed to strike her. “I…I haven’t really thought of it that way.”

“If I had to guess, I’d say she’s afraid of becoming obsolete. Irrelevant. She’s afraid to lose her power, and that makes her desperate.”

“What about you? What are you afraid of?”

Such a simple question. I was afraid for the pain my mother had yet to endure from her illness. I was afraid of losing my money, my means, and returning to the Bronx with my tail between my legs. I was afraid of many things, things I didn’t want anyone to know. Especially not someone who could turn my life, my pain, into fodder for the gossip cannon.

But looking into Amelia’s open face, her silvery eyes touched only with honesty and concern, I had to fight the instinct to tell her the truth.

The thought settled cold and sharp in my stomach.

So I smirked at her, enjoying the bloom of color on her cheeks. “Spiders.”

A laugh shot out of her. “Oh my God. No you aren’t.”

I held up my hands, palms up. “Honest. Theo used to put them on my pillow when he found them, and no lie, I’d scream like a girl. Still do. Once, he actually had someone lend him a pet tarantula. I pulled back my covers, and there she was, beady eyes and hairy legs and pincers like this.” I pinched my thumb and forefinger together. A shudder wracked down my back. “He’s lucky I didn’t smash the thing. Have you not seen the video?”

“There’s a video?” Shamelessly, she turned to her computer and started searching the internet.

“My brother is an asshole. It went viral, like, five years ago.”

She clicked the video, and I cringed as it started to play. I watched myself walk up to my bed, flip the covers, and jump backward with inhuman speed and a height I’d never been able to replicate. All to the soundtrack of my horror—a scream so high, I sounded like a teenage girl.

The loudest, bawdiest, hiccuping laughter ripped out of Amelia, the sound as incongruent as my screaming on YouTube. She was laughing so hard she could barely breathe, restarting the video the second it was finished. And then again as tears streamed down her face.

When she restarted it for the fourth time, I snatched her computer and snapped it shut. “All right, that’s enough of that.”

She didn’t even protest, just sat back on the couch holding her belly. “I…I can’t. That’s too good. Too, too good.” Bubbling laughter spilled out of her again before she seemed to get herself under control. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to laugh. It’s just that—”

She started giggling again, her face scrunched up. Another tear squeezed out of her eyes as she got ahold of herself, blowing out a controlled breath.

“That is one of my comedic weaknesses.”

“People running from spiders?”

“No, men screaming like little girls.” The sentence ended in a squeak and another fit. “That, and people running into glass doors. They never see it coming!” She dissolved again, which had me chuckling along with her.

“Mine’s pranks. I swear, the ones where they prank people in the shower with the never-ending shampoo. Have you seen those?”

“Nuh-uh,” she said, shaking her head and still trying to stop laughing.

“Here, watch this,” I said, turning to my laptop. I passed it to her as the montage began to play, already feeling the hysteria of her giggles and the anticipation of the video overtaking me.

There was a guy in a shower at a beach, rinsing out his hair. And just when he had it almost clean, someone would squirt more