Bet on It (32)

“Y’all are so fu—” Olivia stopped her sentence abruptly, then gasped, making all of them look at her in alarm. “I fuckin’ forgot to tell y’all. Guess who I saw at the Piggly Wiggly the other day?”

“I swear if this is about that raggedy-ass ex of yours…” Miri muttered into her glass.

“I’m ignoring that.… You remember Wally Abbott? From high school?”

The comfortable bubble Aja had found herself in disappeared with a pop that left her ears ringing. Hearing Walker’s name come out of Olivia’s mouth was so shocking that it made her head rush.

“Wally Abbott…” Miri’s face contorted in confusion. “Abbott … Abbott … Abbott…”

“You remember!” Olivia insisted, brushing her long red hair over one shoulder. “Tall white boy, quiet, blond. He used to eat lunch every day at the table right near the boy’s bathroom.”

“Wait…” Jade put her wineglass down on the table. “You mean the one who beat the fuck out of Spencer Bell that one time?”

Miri gasped. “Oh yeah! That was senior year, right? Ol’ boy who worked Spence over in the teacher’s parking lot because he talked spicy about his daddy or somethin’?”

“Yes!” Olivia cackled.

“I haven’t seen him in years,” Jade said thoughtfully.

Olivia nodded. “Well, he’s back, and he’s fuckin’ gorgeous.”

That made Aja’s throat tighten up. Was that … jealousy? She thought on it and decided that yes, it was. She also decided that there was absolutely no reason for her to be feeling it. Not a logical one. Walker wasn’t hers. He was barely her friend. She had no claim to him, and whatever bizarre level of possessiveness she felt at other people finding him attractive was ridiculous.

He was leaving in six weeks and their friendship would be going out the door right along with him. Aja would be left in Greenbelt, though with what she hoped would be the friendships of people other than him. If she was lucky, Olivia might become one of those friends. Allowing some misplaced jealousy to mess that up was completely out of the question.

“I mean, you know I have that thing going with Ivy right now so I’m not exactly on the market, but if I was, and I was ever willing to date another straight cis dude again, I would have jumped at that shit. Y’all should have seen those shoulders of his,” Olivia moaned into her fist.

Neither Miri nor Jade seemed very interested in the comments about his looks, which Aja counted as a blessing. She would push down the jealousy as much as she physically could, but her self-control only extended so far.

“I wonder why he’s back…” Miri said aloud.

Before she could hold herself back, Aja spoke. “He’s taking care of his grandmother. She fell and broke both her arms a few weeks ago.”

All three women damn near snapped their necks turning to look at her, their eyes varied in shape and size and color but equally unwavering in their gazes.

“We met at bingo.” Her explanation sounded insufficient, even to herself. “He’s nice.”

It was almost cartoonish the way grins spread across their faces slowly and in tandem.

“You let me do all that talkin’ about Wally without tellin’ us that you were messin’ around with him?” Olivia asked.

“He prefers to be called Walker.” Aja cut her eyes to the ceiling. “And I’m not messing around with him. Like I said, we’re friends.”

“As attractive as you both are, you expect me to believe that you don’t have any kind of hokeypokey? Not even a piece of a chunk of a smidgen?”

“Hokey … pokey…?” Aja was glad, not for the first time, that she was a master of avoidance.

Miri made a crude hand gesture, pressing her index and middle fingers together and swirling them around in the air before making a “come hither” motion.

“Hokeypokey.” Jade pointed at Miri’s action.

“No hokeypokey at all.” Aja put a hand to her heart. “I swear.”

“That’s a shame.” Miri took a slow sip of her wine. “If he’s as fine as Olivia says, some hokeypokey might be good for you. It might loosen those shoulders up some.”

“I doubt they’d be very happy about us having … hokeypokey on one of the tables at bingo.” Aja snorted at the thought, then heated. “Not that we’d be having any anyway because like I said, we are just—”

“Friends,” the three others chimed in along with her. None of them, not even Aja, sounded entirely convinced.

“Exactly,” she said anyway.

“Well.” Olivia turned her face back into her wineglass. “If you and Walker ever become more than friends, promise you’ll let us know. I need details about whether or not that little ass of his is actually as tight as it looked in those jeans he had on.”



* * *



She was walking up the steps to her apartment when the call came. The phone’s ring was so loud, even from inside her purse, that she jumped, then struggled to retrieve it. It was late, nearly midnight, and it was unlikely to be one of the many scam calls that came through over the course of the day. So she answered without looking at the screen.

“Hello?”