Frenemies(62)

“I had a sudden attack of adulthood.” I finished off my coffee and grinned at her. “It’s good, right?”

“I think I’m in love with your couch,” she said with a lustful sigh. “Yum.” She walked over and sank into it, and sighed again, with pleasure. “I can’t believe how great this place looks! It’s so …”

“Grown up?” I fished.

“Exactly.” She grinned. “Way to go, Gus! I didn’t think you had it in you!”

I was still feeling the buzz. I’d had no idea what a difference it could make to truly love the place where you lived. Who knew happiness was as easy as spring-cleaning?

“Are you ready?” Georgia asked around a yawn. “We have the open road to conquer, or anyway, the Mid-Cape Highway, so let’s get a move on.”

I smiled. “About that. We have a small, slight problem.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Don’t try me.”

I waved my hand at the dog.

“The kennel was booked through New Year’s,” I said, unperturbed. “I had to pick Linus up when I got back from New Hampshire, because they were above capacity.”

Georgia looked over to where Linus was stretched across the passageway between the living room and kitchen, his shaggy tail pounding out a staccato beat against the floor. He sprang to his feet the moment he realized we were looking at him, and came trotting over, all licks and wriggles.

Georgia dislodged Linus from her thigh, and then she looked at me.

“You want me to share a hotel room with this animal,” she said.

I opened my mouth to deliver the perfect retort, but she held up a hand.

“Don’t say it,” she said.

“You have no idea what I was going to say.”

“That I’ve shared a hotel room with far more offensive animals?” Georgia snorted when I tried to look innocent. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“He’s actually in a really obedient phase lately,” I lied. “It’s going to be fun, I bet.”

Georgia looked heavenward, and then heaved a sigh.

“If I ever find out that this was deliberate, I will make the rest of your life an exercise in misery,” she promised me.

“That was a very impressive threat, Georgia,” I retorted. “But you might want to consider doing something with your hair before you try it out again. No one takes Raggedy Ann seriously.”

Georgia reached up and tugged at one of her wild curls, which had escaped the bun she was sporting.

“Truly,” she said, “this hair is the bane of my existence. It’s always betraying me. That threat should have had you rolling around on the floor. Maybe even crying. It was that good.”

“Whatever, Raggedy Ann,” I said, swinging my bag to my shoulder. “Let’s go.”





chapter twenty





Linus stretched himself across the entirety of the backseat, and Georgia swung behind the wheel of what looked to be a Matchbox toy car. I was amazed she could fold her legs into the driver’s seat at all.

“Where did you get this thing?” I asked. “And why not a Tonka truck, if you were in that sort of mood?”

“This was the only economy car I could get on New Year’s eve,” Georgia told me. “You’re lucky we’re not taking the bus. Blame Amy Lee—we were supposed to road-trip with her, remember?”

We didn’t speak again until we’d loaded ourselves up with Starbucks goodies—lattes all around and several items from the baked goods case, because it was clearly that kind of morning. Georgia drove us out of the city, and once we started south on I-93 toward the southeast, Route 25, and the Cape, she adjusted her sunglasses against the winter glare and cleared her throat.

It was so formal, it knocked me right out of my zoned contemplation of the barren winter scenery, which I was busy melodramatically comparing to my emotional life. I turned to look at her.

“There’s an update,” I said with a happy sigh, reading her expression. “I knew it!”

I settled back against my seat, and listened.

Things with Chris Starling had been, as expected, awkward.

I don’t see any reason to hash things out, he’d told her when they’d next seen each other at the office. Right after the Sheraton Whore incident. What happened in Scranton should stay there. We’re both professionals.

“And he wasn’t kidding,” she told me, her voice gloomy. “All of a sudden he turned into Mr. Senior Associate. He stopped calling me by my first name, it was all Ms. this and Ms. that. He had his secretary call me instead of doing it himself.” She shook her head. “Basically he stopped annoying me, and the moment he did—the moment he became the lawyer I wished he’d been that whole time—I hated it.”

They’d been doing a round of very unpleasant depositions out in Seattle. Georgia only got two days to go back home to her family, which was tense because, as I could imagine all too well, her mother was unimpressed with any career that had so far left Georgia single, without prospects, and unable to spend a longer Christmas with her family as a loving daughter should.

She’d had to leave her mother’s house to return to Seattle, where Chris Starling continued to behave as if he were a run-of-the-mill corporate attorney. It was like out of the frying pan, into the fire. Although significantly chillier.