Follow Me(26)

Audrey’s aqua-blue eyes flashed briefly, a dare, and then she looked away. “Just remember you asked for this, okay?”

I nodded and steeled myself for the worst.

“I went to high school with this girl named Tara. She was . . . well, she was weird. She never washed her hair and she shopped at Goodwill, but not in a cool way, you know what I mean? She was a punch line for our whole class.” Audrey paused and studied her nails, frowning at a chip in the gold polish. “Senior year, my biology teacher, this vindictive troll of a woman who’d always had it out for me, I swear to God, assigned Tara to be my lab partner. And . . . I mean, I just lost it. Trust me, I know how it sounds now, but at the time I really couldn’t imagine anything worse. What if we, you know, had to study together outside of class? What if people saw us? What if they thought we were friends? God, it would have ruined my social life. Or, I mean, I thought it would have. I was being dramatic, I know, but I was seventeen years old, so cut me some slack.” She glanced quickly at me, ready to defend herself, but I said nothing. She sighed and continued. “Anyway, Tara was nothing but nice to me, and I . . . I just was mean. Like, I barely spoke to her, would only answer direct questions. Mostly, I just rolled my eyes at her and called her stupid. And . . . um, well, I started spreading these rumors. I told everyone that her parents were cousins and that was why she was so stupid.”

My heart clenched. I knew what it felt like to be the Tara of the story. I knew the desperation, the feeling that you would do anything—anything—to escape the torment.

“I don’t know what I was thinking. I was just . . . well, anyway, Tara took an overdose of her mother’s sleeping pills.” Audrey noted my shocked expression and quickly added, “She’s fine. I saw her on Facebook a couple of years ago, and she’s an executive with some tech company out in California. She’s doing well for herself. But at the time, I felt awful.”

“You should have,” I said, still aghast.

“I know. Trust me, I know. And so I decided to be different. I wasn’t going to be that sort of mean girl anymore.”

Suddenly, I remembered why Audrey was telling this story, and sour saliva filled my mouth.

“Wait a second. So what you’re telling me is that you’re friends with me as a way to atone for bullying some poor girl into attempting suicide?”

“Jesus, Cat. No. That’s not what I meant. I just meant that the thing with Tara made me more aware of other people’s feelings. I started to pay more attention to those in the room who might need a friend.” She looked at me baldly. “And you, Kitty-Cat, needed a friend.”

“What about now?” I asked hesitantly. “Is that why we’re friends now? Because you think I need someone?”

Audrey looped an arm around my shoulders and grinned. “Don’t be silly. You know why we’re friends. Besides, you have more people in this city who love you than I do.”





CHAPTER NINETEEN





HIM


If you asked the regular commenters on the Overexposed forums, no worse place exists to meet a woman than in a bar. To an extent, I agreed: the floors are sticky with spilled drinks, the music drowns out any chance of meaningful conversation, and the air of desperation hangs heavy. But I disagreed with the party line that the only women you’ll meet in bars are promiscuous binge drinkers who use alcohol as a substitute for personality. I knew that wasn’t the truth. After all, Audrey frequented bars and she wasn’t promiscuous or a binge drinker. She was just social.

Bars and parties had always been part of her life, for as long as I had been following her. Her college blog had been chronicles of one party after another, and when she lived in New York, her Instagram feed involved a regular rotation of artistic craft cocktails, mint sprigs sticking jauntily up from highball glasses, rocks glasses with enormous square ice cubes. The images were so impeccable that if they had been posted by anyone else, I would have sneered, imagining them selecting their drink to match a color scheme and micromanaging the bartender in order to obtain that perfectly coiled lemon peel garnish. I knew that wasn’t how Audrey operated, though. Beauty simply came to her. Like attracts like.

Now that she lived in DC, however, the fashionable cocktails in her feed began giving way to Stories showing draft beers and house wines from trivia night. Those images might not have been as photogenic as the cocktails of the past, but they didn’t dim her sparkling persona one bit. She remained the brightest light in the room, the sun around which the rest of us orbited.

I watched her standing at the bar, her small, bejeweled hands toying with the stem of her empty wineglass. I knew I shouldn’t stare, knew that it would be all over if she caught me, but I was powerless to drag my eyes away from her. Her skin, glistening faintly, looked as though it were covered in millions of tiny diamonds. She shook her head and her glorious mane rippled, shimmering like it was spliced through with spun gold. She was stunning, a physical punch in the gut. It took all the strength I had to not seize her around her dainty waist and bend her sylph-like body backward as passion overtook us both.

I swallowed hard and pressed my hands firmly against my sides to prevent them from reaching for her.

Soon, I promised myself. Soon.





CHAPTER TWENTY





AUDREY