The doorbell rang.
It was Uber eats with coffee and muffins I had ordered from Candy’s down the end of the street.
The delivery driver screwed up his face when I answered the door. “I thought you were going to be some disabled chick.” He handed me the bag. “Why didn’t you get this stuff yourself?”
There were a million reasons I might not have been able to walk the ten houses down to the shop. Surely we were well past needing to look impaired before people assumed our abilities. Alas, here we were.
And I wasn’t about to tell him that I was hiding from my ex-boyfriend and I was waiting until I felt ready to conquer the world before I left the house again.
This idiot didn’t deserve to know my personal agony.
I took the cups and brown paper bag out of his hand.
“Because I couldn’t be ass-ed. Is that ok by you?”
He shrugged and left.
I would have thought someone who made money from people’s laziness wouldn’t bite the hand that feeds them.
“Coffee is here,” I called out to James.
He was lying on the couch, where he had been since stumbling into my house at three this morning. I was still waiting for an explanation why he came home to me, instead of his apartment only five minutes away.
In his inebriated state, he said something about hiding. Whatever that meant.
“Give it to me,” James said, holding out his hand but remaining prone along the sofa. “I feel like I haven’t slept in weeks.”
“Was the party that good?” I asked him. I had been dying to know everything about Taylor’s soiree. From the stale red wine odor radiating from my lounge room, it seemed like an epic night.
Had I chosen to skip the wrong party?
No one had posted any pictures online yet. But I had seen pictures of Taylor and GG on Dailymail. I couldn’t figure out where they had been taken. It might not have been from last night at all.
“It was strange,” James began. “I had never seen so many sticks there in my life.” In this context, sticks meant skinny girls. Very skinny girls. 90’s thin.
“GG was introducing them to me, but she said it was the first time she was meeting them. They were all over Taylor. I told her to kick them out.”
I imagined them wandering around Taylor’s beautiful apartment, which was practically GG’s now, too. I had seen girls like this before trying to steal Taylor’s attention. He never gave in, ever, but it was exhausting to watch.
Especially because they weren’t that much younger than us.
“They were all over everyone. I can’t unsee it.”
In my head I couldn’t unsee the obvious; they were all over Douglas, too.
But had he been there at the party? I still had no idea.
You’re reading The Andie Chronicles, the 2023 romance-fiction series from the 1 Lovelock Drive (1LD) universe.
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