Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(75)

“We might go to the pub,” Alex corrected. “We don’t even know if she drinks.”

“If she doesn’t, she can have lemonade and peanuts. There’s nowhere else interesting to go.”

“We can grab some Thai food and eat in the park like respectable reprobates.”

“You think I’m putting vintage Cavalli on grass?” Tessa demanded.

“Hold on,” Eve said, “there’s Thai food here?”

“See?” Alex grinned, triumphant.

“Eve, no, don’t, don’t be seduced by Thai food.” Tessa came over and put her hands on Eve’s shoulders, at which point Eve finally realized the woman seemed so tall because she was wearing killer heels. But, judging by Alex’s height in shiny, flat brogues, they were also simply very tall regardless. “Listen to me,” Tessa said, low and urgent, as if imparting state secrets of international importance. “We can get Thai food whenever we want. Tonight is our first night of meeting and we’re supposed to become best friends—”

Alex snorted loudly in the background.

“Which means either we have to get drunk together, or we have to make terrible decisions together. I am entirely open to either, but the point is we need to go out and make absolute tits of ourselves in order to forge a lasting best friend bond because—”

“What the hell do you need a lasting best friend bond for?” Alex demanded. “You have a twin.”

“Because,” Tessa forged on firmly, “all friendships are better in threes, like the three musketeers or Totally Spies, so Alex and I need you, and also because you’re driving Jacob sideways up the wall and off his trolley—I salute you by the way—and also because I saw you at the supermarket three days ago wearing a T-shirt that said UNFUCK YOU, OR WHATEVER and I desperately need to know where it was from.”

“Well,” Eve said, faintly stunned. “My. Goodness.”

“I never,” Alex said dryly, “should’ve let you open the rosé.”

“I, er . . . I don’t receive many instant offers of best friendship,” Eve admitted.

“Then you really must take this one,” Tessa said reasonably.

Eve found herself smiling. “Yes, I suppose I must.”





Chapter Seventeen


Mont’s pub, the Rose and Crown, was a cozy mixture of dark wood and green velvet that seemed infinitely suited to the Lake District, and to Montrose himself. Eve spotted him as soon as she entered arm in arm with the twins; he was pouring a glass of gin with a practiced air while chatting to a grizzled customer who looked alarmingly like some sort of biker.

“Mont’s cute, don’t you think?” Tessa said over the speakers’ frantic cascade of “From the Ritz to the Rubble.”

Eve blinked, caught unawares. “Erm . . . weren’t we just talking about macramé?”

Alex rolled her eyes. “Tess thinks that if you ask people unexpected questions they’ll get confused and tell the truth.”

“Oh. Well. Yes, your brother is cute.”

“Perfect,” Tess beamed. “Want to date him?”

“No, she doesn’t want to date him, genius,” Alex interjected. “Anyway, we’re supposed to be bonding. No man-talk. It’s boring.”

Tessa gave a mournful sigh. “Fine. Fine! Come on. Eve, lemon or lime?”

Eve wrinkled her nose as they approached the bar. “You need to be more specific. In general? In drinks? Appearance-wise? As the base flavor for a citrus drizzle cake?”

“Oh my God, all of those.”

“Okay, well, lemon is better in drinks—sharper. Limes look more interesting. But lemon goes better in cake, unless it’s cheesecake.”

“Best color for a Suzuki GSX?” Alex asked.

“I have no idea what a Suzuki is, but I’m going to say lime.”

“Amazing,” Alex said. “You don’t even know what you’re saying and you’re saying everything right.”

Eve laughed, feeling strangely . . . light. She’d never been in this situation, the kind where you met new people with the aim of making friends, yet didn’t experience the crushing weight of self-consciousness. With everyone except her sisters, she felt a slight pressure to perform, to hide away the most annoying parts of herself in order to be liked.

But she hadn’t bothered to do that with Jacob, because she hadn’t wanted him to like her, at first. So maybe now she was out of the habit, and she was forgetting to do it with the twins. Or maybe she simply wasn’t as worried about being annoying anymore, because she hadn’t annoyed herself in quite a while.

Here in Skybriar, there was no pandering to friends who found her more useful than lovable. No whining about mistakes she hadn’t bothered to fix in her journal. No avoiding her parents’ disappointed stares, pretending she couldn’t see them or didn’t deserve it. No wriggling out of the first difficulty she encountered. These days, Eve felt like someone who kept going, and she liked that someone, so she didn’t care quite as much if everyone else liked her, too.

Interesting.

“Eve,” Mont said, appearing in front of the barstools they’d commandeered and snapping her out of her thoughts. “The bloody hell are you doing with these two?”