“You just said you didn’t know his name!” Scarlett’s eyes bug out like king toads.
“Since when is that a crime?” Just the thought of me bedding some nameless frat brat makes my stomach twist in a hot revolution. I would never not know his name.
Piper chokes on her coffee. “Since it happened to my best friend.” My heart warms when she officially bestows me with the bestie moniker. “Now, can you pick him out of a lineup?”
“WTF!” Why do I get the feeling this snowball is going to avalanche into a heart-shaped disaster the likes of which Whitney Briggs has never seen?
Piper frowns. “Nobody actually says WTF, Cass. It’s what the fuck. Get your big girl panties on and say it—or did Mr. Dope You Up with My Love chew those off of you last night?”
Both Scarlett and Daisy growl at the panty-nibbling prospect. These girls are so whipped up, they’ll have Cade strapped to the electric chair by midnight and bring weenies of their own to roast right off his smoldering body.
Piper glances over my shoulder a moment. “Family!” She jumps up, and I cringe. Here it is. The moment of my reckoning coming a bit sooner than expected. I turn with all the enthusiasm of a dental drilling, only to find her clutching to a peppy little blonde.
“You guys remember Marley, right?” Piper runs her hand over the length of the girl as if she were a prize, and, for a moment, my dirty, dirty little mind envisions a larger-than-life version of her brother’s penis in her place.
Gah! See? I just want to slap myself into oblivion. That, right there, is exactly why it was a lousy idea to bed her brother—perhaps anybody’s brother. In my defense, Caila was haunting me with her piss-poor back alley ho ways, and I was left unsupervised.
The three of us offer somewhat subdued hellos as Piper pulls out a seat for her. Marley is a tall, blonde, beauty queen herself. She’s Piper’s half-brother’s significant other, so, in that respect, she totally qualifies as family.
“I was just running in for a quick cup.” Marley waves off the spare chair Daisy just pulled up. “I can’t stay. Wyatt’s here picking up some paperwork, and then we’re heading up past the Witch’s Cauldron for a quick little hike. What are you ladies up to?” She gives a few quick blinks as if calling us on our bull, and it’s all I can do to grin and bear it.
Piper falls back in her seat and glances over with that snotty little smirk that says the jig is up. “One of us took the walk of shame last night. She knows a detail or two, but she’s decided to hold back all of the valuable info. Don’t you think that a good friend would spill all the dirty deets?” She kicks me from under the table, and I kick her right back.
Marley’s face turns an instant shade of pomegranate. “Really?” Her eyes light up as if one of us were harboring a newborn puppy underneath our sweaters. “Which one? No, wait. Let me guess!” She slaps her knee as if this were the best new game to play. “It’s not Piper, or she would have never gone there with me. Plus, we all know whose sheets she’s wrinkling these days.” She gives a quick grimace. “Your brother would kill me if he ever heard those words come from my lips. If you try to quote me, I’ll deny, deny, deny.” She gives a hard wink. “So that leaves you three.” She examines us all in turn. “You girls in the back look a little peeved to me, but not nearly as vexed as this little precious thing right here.” She takes up one of my curls between her fingers and gives a little yank. “Winner, winner chicken dinner!”
The entire table breaks out in hoots and hollers, and, before I know it, half of the coffee house cranes their neck in my direction.
I give a beauty queen-worthy wave before slinking down in my seat.
“So, what gives?” Marley shrugs over at Piper. “You can’t stand to give the girl some breathing room? I promise you, nothing breaks up a relationship, or a friendship quicker than sex shaming. I’m sort of a qualified expert on the subject, a sexpert if you will.” She takes a tiny bow before turning her full attention to me. “Any time you want to talk about you-know-who—find me. My door and my inbox are always open to you. I happen to pen the Sex and the Coed article in the school paper. I used to have a room right here in Prescott Hall, but I’m living with Wyatt at the moment.”
“At the moment?” Piper pulls her back to get a better look at her in the event she should be reading between the broken-hearted lines. “Tell me there’s not trouble in paradise. Do I need to smack my brother into submission?” She swats Marley on the arm because, well, Piper is feisty that way.