Wrapped Up in You - Jill Shalvis Page 0,94

beach, vacationing, and there’s a hot surfer coming out of the water. Wait, scratch that. A hot Australian surfer coming out of the water, heading for you with a sexy smile—

Someone tugged her fingers from her ears. Her best friend and EMT partner, Jenna. “It’s over,” she said. “You can look now.”

Piper opened her eyes. No warm beach, no sexy surfer. She was still at the Whiskey River Bar and Grill, surrounded by her coworkers and so-called friends, and way too many birthday streamers and balloons, all mocking her because someone had thought it’d be funny to do it in all gloom-and-doom black.

“You do realize that turning thirty isn’t exactly the end of the world?” Jenna said.

Maybe not, but there was a reason Piper hadn’t wanted to celebrate. She’d just hit a milestone birthday without being at any sort of milestone, or anywhere even close to a milestone. Certainly nowhere near where she’d thought she’d be at thirty.

“Hey, let’s sing it again now that she’s listening,” someone called out. Ryland, no doubt. The hotshot firefighter was always the group’s instigator.

And so everyone began singing again, laughing when Piper grimaced and did her best not to crawl under the table. Truth was, she’d rather have a root canal without meds than be the center of attention, and these asshats knew it. “It’s like you all want to die,” she muttered. But someone put a drink in her hand, and since she was off duty now for two days, she took a long gulp.

“I was very clear,” she said when the alcohol burn cleared her throat, eyeing the whole group, most of whom were also first responders and worked with her at the station or hospital in one form or another. “We weren’t going to mention my birthday, much less sing about it.”

Not a single one of them looked guilty. In fact, they ignored her. “To Piper,” Ry said, and everyone raised a glass. “For gathering and keeping all us misfits together and sane.”

“To Piper,” everyone cheered and drank, and then thankfully, conversations started up all around her so that she was finally no longer the center of attention.

Her friends, God love them, were all used to her ways, which meant they got that while she was touched they’d all remembered her birthday, she didn’t want any more attention. Easily accepting that, they were happy to enjoy the night and leave her alone.

“Did that hurt?” Jenna asked, amused.

“What?”

“Being loved?”

In tune to the sounds of the bar behind them—someone singing off-key to Sweet Home Alabama, rambunctious laughter from a nearby table, the slap of pool balls . . . Piper rolled her eyes.

“You know one day those eyeballs are going to fall right out of your head, right?”

Piper ignored this and went back to what she’d been doing before being so rudely interrupted by all the love. Making a list.

She was big on bullet journaling. She’d had to be. Making notes and lists had saved her life more than once. And yes, she knew she could do it on a notes app on her phone, but her brain hadn’t been wired that way. Nope, she was annoyingly old school, so she had to write that shit down by hand to make it stick.

She had pages dedicated to:

Calendars

Grocery Lists

Future Baby Names (even though she didn’t plan on having babies)

Passwords (okay, password, single, since she always used the same one—CookiesAreLife123!)

And then there were random entries, such as:

Life rules

—Stop eating entire bags of Cheese Poofs in one sitting.

—Don’t cut your own bangs no matter how sad you are.

—Never ever EVER under any circumstances fall in love.

She had a bucket list of wishes. Oh, and a secret secret bucket list of wishes . . .

Yeah, she probably needed help. Or a little pill.

Jenna leaned over her shoulder and eyed the open page. “New journal?”

Her vices were simple. She didn’t drink much, never smoked, but . . . she was an office supply ’ho. A never ending source of amusement to Jenna because Piper was also a bit of a hot mess when it came to organization and neatness. Her purse, her car, her office, and also her kitchen always looked like a disaster had just hit. “Maybe.”

“How many journals have you started and either lost or misplaced since I’ve known you, a million?”

Piper didn’t answer this on the grounds that it might incriminate her.

Jenna played with the pack of stickers that Piper had tucked haphazardly into the journal. “Cute. But I feel like stickers are cheating.”

“Bite your