Beneath the Glitter: A Novel (Sophia and Ava London) (18 page)

Liam swallowed hard. “Yeah.” He pointed to the parking lot. “I’m thinking—”

“Me too.”

Liam handed the man a hundred-dollar bill for the Slurpee, said “Keep it” when the guy reminded him about his change, and they bolted to his car. They got inside, locked the doors—

And were kissing again. The single soft kiss on the lips became even more captivating and they lost themselves in it completely. Until another set of headlights raked the car and they realized where they were and what they were doing and cracked up.

“I guess we should get out of here,” Liam said.

Ava laughed. “Yeah. And I should get home. We have an early video shoot tomorrow and Sophia will go nuts if I’m too late.”

They didn’t talk on the way to her house but held hands, both of them sitting way back in their seats with their heads against the headrests. Every time they stopped at a light Liam would turn his neck so he could look at her and give her this adorable, goofy smile. “How great is this, eh?”

“Pretty great.”

When they pulled up at her building she stopped him before he could unfasten his seat belt. “I wish I could ask you to come up but I can’t,” she said. “We have a No Boys on Work Nights rule.”

“But it’s Saturday.”

“We have that video shoot tomorrow. Besides, I don’t want to wake Sophia up and—there will be other chances.”

“You bet there will.”

They grinned at one another for a while. “Well, good night, Liam,” she said.

“Good night, Ava,” he said.

And then they were kissing again, Liam’s seat reclined and Ava half over the cup holders, and between kisses they laughed and stopped and looked at each other and then kissed some more.

Ten minutes later Ava said, “Well, good night, Liam.”

And he said, “Good night, Ava.”

She sat there smiling at him. He reached out to touch her cheek and his thumb brushed her lips and as though completely out of their control his mouth sought hers and she leaned into him and their lips brushed and Ava yawned.

Not a small yawn either, a really big yawn.

Liam pulled away with a completely different expression on his face than the one he’d had less than a minute earlier.

“I’m so sorry,” Ava said, covering her mouth with both her hands and feeling her face flush with embarrassment.

Liam chuckled. “No one, not one single other girl, has ever done that to me before,” he said, then yawned. They both cracked up and he shook his head. “But you’re one of a kind, aren’t you, Ava London?”

Ava’s heart began to pound very, very hard. “I’m glad you”—
yawn
—“think so. Okay, I have to go.”

Liam yawned again. “Yes you do.”

He came around and opened her door for her. “Thank you for being a great date,” he said. “They love you.”

“They?” she said, copying his gesture from the convenience store.

“Everyone.”

Ava was still grinning when she opened the front door. She listened for a moment to see if Sophia was up or asleep but she didn’t hear anything so she was asleep. Or that’s what she thought until she got into her room and found the kitten without a name asleep on Popcorn’s stomach. As cute as that was, it was odd. The kitten always slept with Sophia. Ava picked him up and tiptoed into Sophia’s room to put him in bed with her.

But she didn’t need to bother because Sophia wasn’t there.

LonDOs

Your boyfriend’s face on a chocolate coin

Slurpees

Sunday pizza night

KISSING LIAM CARLSON

LonDON’Ts

“L.A. Sky”

Sisters who don’t come home

16

pacific coast myway

Ava checked her voice mail, sure the message was from Sophia.

It wasn’t.

It was their mom. Ava promptly called her back, and got the latest scoop on life in Georgia. Ava always loved talking to her mom, but when she clicked off the phone, her smile faded fast.

Sophia hadn’t left any message whatsoever. She. Simply. Hadn’t. Called.

Which was fine, Ava assured herself, lighting the candle by her bed as she forced herself to go through her normal nightly ritual. They were their own people. She sprayed the sheets with scent. They didn’t have to share everything, she thought as she climbed into bed.

Except that they had shared everything for the past few years. They’d been more like Siamese twins in some ways than sisters. And now, suddenly, it was as if Sophia didn’t want that anymore. Ava realized she’d forgotten to brush her teeth or wash her face so she got up again.

As she stood in front of the bathroom mirror removing her twenties’ eyeliner, Ava found herself thinking of the trip her family had taken to Italy when she was eight. They’d just finished having this amazing pizza for lunch and they were standing in a piazza waiting for her dad to figure out where they should go next. That always took forever, so when Ava spotted a woman with a dancing dog across the street, she’d gone to look at it. It was pretty amazing—it did this Russian dance on two legs that she’d tried to teach every dog she’d had since then, with zero success—so she had gone to get her family and show them.

Only they were gone. Vanished!

She figured that as soon as they realized she wasn’t with them they would go back to the hotel to wait, so she went straight there. But they must have gotten lost because she’d been there for hours before they got there. The concierge was really nice and got her tea, but Ava hadn’t learned how to ask for the bathroom in Italian so she started to feel like she might burst.

The only other dark spot was that she’d lost one of her new pink mittens. Not only did she love them, but her mother had stressed that they were pretty fancy for a little girl and she had to promise to take good care of them. And now one of them was gone. She started to imagine it as the price she had to pay for wandering off, and made a solemn decision never to wander off again.

When they finally got back to the hotel hours later, her parents had practically devoured her with kisses. But not Sophia. Sophia had looked at her like she was a spoiled brat and said, “Here’s your mitten.” Restoring it to her just like magic. She’d gone to hug Sophia but Sophia had just pushed her away and said, “Don’t thank me. This shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

Ava remembered standing there with the mitten in her hand and the sinking feeling in her stomach that Sophia would have been happier if she’d never come back.

A feeling she was starting to have again.

At least, she thought as she climbed back into bed, the next night was Sunday, which meant pizza night. Maybe once she and Sophia had spent some time together, everything would feel better. Happier with that thought she picked up her book and started reading.

Suddenly, she was kissing Liam and her eyes were closed but she could tell from the golden light coming beneath her eyelids that it was daylight. She wondered where the time had gone and why Liam was poking her in the side but the kissing was nice. Really nice, nicer than it had been in the car. She went to take a breath and opened her eyes and woke up. But in the split second before she woke up she’d seen the face of the guy she was kissing and it wasn’t Liam. It was Dalton.

It took Ava a moment to register her surroundings. Her light was still on, and her book had tipped out of her hand so it was poking her in the side. It had been a dream. Just a dream, it didn’t mean anything.

She blew out the candle, put the book on her bedside table, and turned off the light. But she lay awake in the dark for an unusually long time afterward, the image of a pink mitten floating at the edge of her mind as she listened for Sophia’s key in the door.

*   *   *

When Hunter found out Sophia had never been to Gladstone’s he insisted they go there for dinner. He gave her his jacket so she wouldn’t be cold and they sat on the patio that overhung the beach, shelling peanuts and listening to the surf while they waited for their blue crab cakes and curried coconut shrimp. Over dinner he asked her if she’d used the camera yet and she said she had.

“But I’m afraid to get the film developed,” she admitted over the top of her strawberry daiquiri.

Hunter almost coughed out the beer he’d been drinking. “That’s absurd. Why?”

“I was thinking I should stop now. If I do that, I can just have enjoyed the experience. But if I get the film developed and it’s bad, then I won’t be able to look back on it the same way.”

“And if you get the film developed and it’s good, your photos might end up in a gallery.” He took another sip of beer. “If they’re bad, then you use them to figure out what would work better the next time.”

By the time dinner was over she’d agreed to let him get the film developed. “Do you need to go home right away?” Hunter asked as he gave the waitress his black card for the bill. “My family has a little place up the beach and it’s a great place to just sit and chill.”

Sophia pulled his jacket more tightly around her shoulders. “I should probably get back.”

“But do you
want
to?” Hunter perched his elbows on the table to explain. “One thing I’ve learned from my father is that you can divide the world into two kinds of people. There are the ones whose first thought is whether they
should
do something. And the ones whose first thought is whether they
want
to. The
shoulds
tend to be the ones you can rely on because they’re always thinking of someone else. But the
wants
are the ones who make exciting things happen. I feel like you might be a
want
trapped in the life of a
should
.”

Sophia laughed at that, but something about it resonated. She was enjoying talking to Hunter and there really was no reason she
had
to go back yet. “I’m not sure I’m
want
material but I guess I don’t have to get back right now.”

She should have expected that Hunter’s idea of a “little place” wouldn’t match hers, but she was still unprepared for the Roman villa they pulled up in front of.

“Actually it’s not a villa,” Hunter explained. “The design was based on the archeological findings of the bathhouse at Pompeii. But the idea is similar.”

He brought her one of his stepmother’s cashmere track suits and a bottle of Perrier—“as long as that’s what you
want
to drink, not what you think you
should
”—and led her onto a stone terrace that overlooked the beach. There was a mosaic-bottomed pool with lounges along one side, but he gestured her toward a set of couches around a fire pit that ignited with the touch of a switch.

“I never realized the Romans had self-starting fire pits,” Sophia said.

“Of course. They were also really big on four-car garages,” Hunter joked. He settled back against the couch cushions and took a sip of beer. “So, I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”

“My what?” Sophia replied quickly. Had she been wrong about him? Should she not have come?

“Sad sad love story.” Sophia had opened her mouth to object but he went on over her. “You wouldn’t be doing a boytox if you didn’t have one.”

She was about to object to that as well, but stopped herself. Maybe he was right. Maybe her problems dating really were all about what had happened with Clay.

And maybe it was time to tell someone. Someone who didn’t know her, someone whose scorn wouldn’t hurt her.

So she did. Without looking up, she told him about Clay and how the breakup had taken her by surprise. How she’d thought everything was wonderful between them, how hard she’d worked to be the perfect girlfriend, and how wrong she’d gotten it.

How since then she’d been afraid to make any decisions, and was always second-guessing herself because she’d been so wrong about their relationship. And because she was afraid that if she made one mistake everything she’d built would fall apart.

And when she was done Hunter said, “I know that exact feeling. About being scared you’ll say one wrong thing and send the person away.” He reached out and took her hand in a comforting, but not romantic, way.

It was amazing having a guy as a friend, Sophia thought. A guy you could talk to about guys.

She said, “Okay, your turn.”

“I was sort of hoping you’d forget about that.”

“Not. A. Chance,” Sophia told him. There were blankets at the end of the couch and she took one now and wrapped it around herself. “I’m waiting.”

“Well, there was this girl,” he said. “And I was crazy about her. And she was crazy about me, I thought. But it was the old story, she started doing drugs, and then the drugs started doing her, and she changed, completely. I stayed with her and tried everything I could to get her clean but she wouldn’t stop. She’d moved into my apartment when things were good and I couldn’t kick her out with her doing so badly. Plus, to be honest, I thought if she stayed with me instead of going back to her family she might get clean.” He shook his head. “I had to go to Vegas for a bachelor party one weekend and when I came back, the apartment was empty. She’d stolen everything and sold it for drug money. She didn’t even leave me my toothbrush.”

“What happened to her?” Sophia asked.

“I don’t know.” Hunter finished his beer. “Her father was a con man, her brother a thief. We can’t pick our families. So unfortunately she’ll never get the help she needs from them.”

“No,” Sophia said, having pulled the blanket a little more tightly around her shoulders at the word “family.” Family had always been everything to her but recently she’d been feeling as though hers—or anyway, Ava—had been slipping away from her. And, like with Clay, she couldn’t really understand why.

Sitting side by side they watched the sunrise over the ocean. It was a magical moment, maybe even more magical, Sophia thought, because they were just friends.

“Thank you for being the perfect date, um, friend,” Hunter said as he dropped her off.

Sophia kissed him on the cheek. “Thank
you
for being the perfect friend.” She riffled around in her evening purse and pressed something into his hand.