You Say It First - Katie Cotugno Page 0,32

Mase,” she promised. “I’m good.”

“I mean, you seem good,” he clarified quickly. “I don’t mean to imply—I mean, I didn’t think—I guess I just want to make sure you’re not, like . . .” He trailed off.

Meg raised her eyebrows. “Crying into my pillow over you every night?” she supplied.

“What? No!” Mason’s smooth cheeks turned pink. “Well . . .” He hesitated. “Sort of, I guess.”

Meg snorted; she couldn’t help it. “No, Mason,” she promised patiently. “I am not crying into my pillow over you every night.”

“Okay,” Mason said, nodding so hard in agreement Meg was surprised his head didn’t pop clean off. “I’m glad.”

There was no reason for her to think about Colby just then, the bluntness of his questions and the grumble of his voice in her ear. They were friends, that was all—and maybe they weren’t even that much. Not to mention the fact that they’d never actually met. And if he knew more about her than anyone else in her real life—if he was, possibly, a big part of why her relationship with Mason didn’t feel like such a giant loss anymore—well, then that was nobody’s business but her own.

“Thanks again, dude,” she said now, shaking her head to clear it. “I’ll see you around, okay?”

“See you,” Mason echoed. Meg tapped the window once with her fingernails before she turned and went inside.

Twelve

Meg

That night’s shift at WeCount was uneventful, mostly. Lillian brought cupcakes Maja had made: a pineapple situation topped with coconut buttercream. Rico’s ancient handset inexplicably started emitting a high-pitched, extraterrestrial-sounding squeal. Meg got three voters registered, though, which was a pretty good night, all told, and she was feeling sort of pleased with herself by the time she logged out of the system and headed downstairs.

Her car hadn’t been ready at the mechanic’s that afternoon, so her mom had dropped her off at work and promised to pick her up later, though she wasn’t waiting when Meg and Lillian got down to the quiet, empty street. “I can hang out until she gets here,” Lillian said, tucking her hands in the back pockets of the dark-wash men’s jeans she always wore. Intricate tattoos of vibrant plants and wildflowers snaked up both of her pale arms.

Meg shook her head. “You don’t have to do that,” she protested. She remembered this feeling from birthday parties when she was little: that faint anxiety that nobody was going to pick her up at all and she’d be stuck at Funtime Arcade for all eternity, forced to disinfect the ball pits to pay for room and board. “She’ll be here in a minute.”

“It’s cool, Meg,” Lillian said with a smile. “I don’t mind.”

“No, I know, I just don’t want you to have to—oh,” Meg said, catching sight of her mom’s Volvo jerking to a sudden stop at the red light on the corner. “See, there she is. Thanks, though.”

“Anytime,” Lillian said, holding her ring of keys up in a salute before turning in the direction of the tidy little Volkswagen she and Maja shared. “See you.”

Meg waved back, frowning a bit as the light turned green and her mom stepped hard on the gas, speeding halfway down the block before braking close enough to the curb in front of the designer home-goods shop that the front tire of the car scraped against the concrete. “Hey,” she said, opening the door and setting her bag on the floor of the passenger seat, then wrinkling her nose: the inside of the car smelled, not faintly, of booze.

“Are you drunk?” she blurted before she could stop herself. She’d never said the word out loud in this context before; it landed between them like a dead toad falling out of the sky.

“What?” Her mom whipped around to look at her, squinting across the interior of the car. “No! Of course not.”

“Really?” Meg raised her eyebrows, fingers curled tightly around the top of the door. “Are you sure?”

Her mom’s eyes narrowed. “You can keep the attitude, thank you. Come on, get in the car.”

Meg didn’t budge. “Mom, seriously,” she said. “How much did you drink before you came here?”

“I’m not—you’re not the parent here, Meg,” her mom informed her crisply. “I had a glass of wine at home, not that I have to justify it to you.”

“You’re lying.” Meg couldn’t believe her. She couldn’t believe this was actually happening, here on the street in front of WeCount and not in a movie on the Hallmark channel. “Mom, seriously? Give me the keys.”

“Okay, enough now.”