Wild Like the Wind (Chaos #5)(88)

Bev gave me a look through her opened storm door before she busted out laughing.

This meant I came through, gave her a kiss on her laughing cheek and did both smiling.

She took the stuff from my hands.

Like her home was my home, as I always did when I hit her pad, I tossed my bag and jacket on her couch as I made my way fully in.

She went right to the kitchen, and by the time I hit it, she had her head in the fridge. She came out with a bottle in cellophane and lifted it up, my bottle in her other hand, and they were identical.

“Great minds think alike!” she cried.

“Gurrrrl, I shoulda Ubered,” I told her.

“We shoulda done this not on a school night,” she replied, putting my bottle in and keeping her bottle out, starting to take off the cellophane.

For a special night, even though I’d never done it (before yesterday), I would have called off work for Bev. Since I took off yesterday to have a fuck festival with Hound after my declaration of love (he celebrated mine way better than I celebrated his), I couldn’t.

But I could go to work hanging. It’d been years since I’d done that too. In fact, I didn’t think I’d ever done that since I’d been at the school.

It was now time to learn if I still had it in me to ride out a hangover.

Best part, if I got trashed, by that time, Bev would know about Hound and he could come and get me.

We hadn’t had drunk sex yet.

Trashed it was.

“Uber doesn’t mind I leave my car in your driveway and you probably won’t either. I should have brought two bottles,” I said.

“We’ll call Dutch and tell him to bring us another one. I’m pretty sure waiting on old ladies, even de facto ones like us, is part of recruit duties,” she returned right before the cork popped.

“I’m on glasses,” I declared and headed to her cupboard that held them.

“I’ll pour,” Bev cut me off on my way. “I made one of those charcuterie boards. Tad taught me how and I’ve decided to do that at least five nights a week. All you do is open a bunch of jars and packets of different kind of salamis, cut some cheese and voilà! Dinner!” She jerked her head to the fridge. “Go grab it.”

I grinned at her and headed to the fridge, pulling out the big wooden board filled with meats, cheeses, pickles and olives she had in there.

Bev got the wine sorted and cut up some wedges of store-bought but fresh-baked bread, and we sat at her cozy kitchen table because she didn’t have a dining room and we usually camped out there because, as I mentioned, it was cozy. It was also closer to the fridge so we could keep our champers chilled.

I dug in.

She didn’t touch the food.

She yanked out the black teddy from the bag. It was made of mostly see-through mesh that melded with beautiful lace around a very plunging deep vee at the breasts (that very meaning it went all the way down to your midriff and opened all the way across to barely cover your nipples), had little ruffles along the hips and at the ends of the three-quarter sleeves.

We were sisters so I had no problem buying the same thing for me to wear for Hound. Except, in order not to make it gross, mine was red.

“Holy crap, Keely, this is beautiful,” she said reverently, stretching out the mesh to see the shape of it.

“I’ll buy you a white something-or-other for the big day,” I told her. “That’s for fun now.”

Her pretty blue eyes slid to me.

She’d changed over the years, her girl-next-door beauty maturing into woman-that-had-been-around-the-block beauty, but it was still beauty, and I’d watched as she’d done it.

She dyed her hair almost the exact blonde it used to be, maybe a shade darker. She still wore it long, with a tease at the back and flippy bangs that brushed her lashes. She had a few lines around her eyes, like I did. A few around her mouth, like I did not.

She’d probably put on fifteen, twenty pounds since we traipsed around the Compound in frayed-edge, jean miniskirts or skintight jeans with slits in the knees, or, if it was a special occasion, spandex pants that had wide laces up the sides showing skin, these coupled with tees slashed down to our tits or tanks so tight, you couldn’t miss it if the day was cold.

But even back then, she’d looked like she was in costume.

She’d always looked more like the retired cheerleader, current banker’s wife who shopped at Nordstrom and sipped wine while her husband had his scotch while they watched Shark Tank on Friday evenings.

Or, maybe, the wife of an insurance salesman who was so happy she was wearing his ring, it was him that went out and bought bridal magazines for his forty-something second chance at love.

“I should have been more supportive from the beginning,” I started. “I should have immediately helped you plan a course to finding your happy.”

“I told him I was done with Chaos,” she proclaimed.

I stared and then did what Hound did a lot.

A slow blink.

“Sorry?” I asked.

“I thought he was going to start crying,” she told me.

My back started to go straight and she reached an arm out across the table to me.

“Not like that,” she said quickly. “He wasn’t being like that. He knows all about my past with the Club. About Boz. He doesn’t care. He doesn’t have a judgmental bone in his body. But he probably knew better than I did that I was holding on in the lame way I was to the life I’d had there in order to hold on to Boz. When I said it was done, he knew I was done with Boz.”