The One Who Loves You (Tickled Pink #1)(56)

I also know he’d rather be mowing the grass, but he can’t do that while the storm is raging outside.

I have no idea where Gigi is, but I’m sure it’s somewhere plotting ways to make all of us suffer while she watches and declares that management of other people’s improvements is good for her soul.

Or that her new mission in life is to write a book and commission a movie about herself in the name of warning other socialite heirs and heiresses against the horrors of living an indulgent life like she has.

I snort.

I snort.

I don’t snort. I’m a damn Lightly. We huff delicately. We look down our noses. We purse our lips in distaste. We don’t snort.

Yet here I am, doing my best angry-bull impression, marching into the damn community showers, where—“Aaaaaahhhh!”

Gigi spins in the shower, giving me a full frontal.

But that’s not the worst of it.

No, the worst of it is that there’s a naked man in here with her.

A familiar naked man.

An old, familiar naked man.

“Aaaaaahhhh!” I scream again.

She says something back at me, but between Carter’s music and the headphones, I can’t hear it.

All I know is that my grandmother’s not even trying to cover all her lady bits, unlike her companion with his liver-spotted hands cupping his manhood and his wet gray hair sticking up like she was running her fingers through it.

Gigi has assumed her regal, nose-in-the-air, shoulders-back, hands-on-hips, I will chew you up and spit you out for daring to walk into this bathroom right now position while her hair drips down her makeup-free face, and my grandmother is Gollum.

My grandmother is that freaky, weird character from The Lord of the Rings when she’s naked, with just a little more hair and saggy old-lady boobs.

“You didn’t put the sign on the door!” I screech.

I’m screeching.

At Gigi.

It’s like asking to have my food poisoned. Not enough to kill me, mind you, but enough to remind me that what Gigi hath given, Gigi can taketh away, and a Lightly doesn’t embarrass herself with repercussions of food poisoning in public.

Her companion—oh my God, it’s her butler.

Gigi’s getting it on with her butler. She brought in a booty call from New York.

She’s doing the nasty with a man she pays on the regular.

Gigi’s butler is her gigolo.

Oh my sweet holy Oprah.

He slips a hand onto her shoulder and leans in to whisper in her ear while water streams out of the middle locker room showerhead, letting his dangly bits show, just like Whitney Anastasia having an affair with the neighbor next to the post office in the movie, and oh my God, I cannot.

I can’t.

Not anymore.

Gigi’s still lecturing down her nose at me as my legs finally engage to turn on their own and carry me back out of the locker room.

I don’t head to the stairs.

Not when I know I can get out of the building through the janitor’s exit on this level.

It takes me moments to push through the crowded room, overflowing with ancient equipment that we haven’t begun to dig through yet, to get to the door leading to the half stairwell up into the pouring rain, and a split second to decide what I want to do next.

It’s dumb.

It’s so dumb.

I’m wearing a bathrobe and slippers.

They’re Versace, but they’re still a bathrobe and slippers.

Probably all the more reason that I shouldn’t.

But I still march away from the school, my slippers slapping on the cobblestone street, which I can hear reverberating through my body, past Café Nirvana, past the Pink Box, past the square and the place Tavi got a questionable shampoo and blowout yesterday, past Carter’s new favorite bar, until the businesses fade and the bass beat of my brother’s synthesizer fades and I’m in a residential area that leads to a goat farm three blocks down.

Thunder cracks around me, cutting through my headphones, which will probably short out on my ears in the rain, and is that really a bad thing?

Here lies Phoebe Lightly, a woman on a mission to get her life back when it was cut short by her wireless headphones serving as the lightning rod to take her out of her misery.

I don’t think that’s actually possible, but I still yank them off and toss them to the goats once I’ve climbed the fence.

And as I realize the goats aren’t actually out in the rain, I remember that I don’t have to climb the fence.

There’s a damn staircase on the connected tree house on the other side.

I’m soaked to the bone. I probably look a little like Gollum myself. My robe might be ruined. I just stepped in wet goat poop in my $500 slippers. I’m still clutching the ridiculous shower caddy I bought myself so that Carter wouldn’t steal my shampoo, which I miraculously found at a drugstore in Deer Drop yesterday, and now I have to pick my way through the field to the gate or climb back over the damn fence to get to the steps.

Don’t cry, Phoebe. You are a Lightly. Lightlys don’t cry. We fight. We manipulate. We overcome. But we do not cry.

Fuck it.

I’m going to cry.

Again.

And that’s before the elevator drops from the tree house. “Need a lift?” a deep voice says.

A deep, sexy, dry voice that says he’ll be happy to pick at me until I’m back to being myself so that I don’t have to cry in front of him, and that very act of kindness itself is enough to make my eyes burn.