Page 9 of Wild Card

When I got really stressed out, I ran. It probably wasn’t healthy to associate running with the stressful moments of my life, but here we were, me running like a murderer was after me, all so I could work out a way into that party.

I had considered wearing a disguise, acting like a vendor of some kind, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t normal for beer vendors to attend team parties. I could have gone as a player, but I’d have needed to up my makeup game quite impressively. I thought maybe I could just try my luck at showing up and stay until I got kicked out…which was the current plan. Taylor refused to hang with me, which was rude, in my opinion, but I also understood it on a strange level.

Opening my front door, I hobbled inside and nearly collapsed. I’d run six miles, and I was not a runner. It had taken me half the day, which was pretty embarrassing, but whatever. I could run the six miles; I didn’t think how fast really mattered. Unfortunately, I felt like my heart had caught fire and was about to plop out of my chest any second. I was breathing so hard I didn’t realize my stepsister was missing.

Finally recovering, I flipped to my stomach and started crawling down the hall to her room.

“Tay?” She should have been getting ready for the party. “Uh…Taylor, where are you?” I pushed her bedroom door open, but from my vantage point, it looked empty. Then I heard moaning coming from her bed. It wasn’t the happy kind of moaning, so I got to my feet and made it to the side of her mattress.

Her room was a mixture of teal and white with a few golds thrown in, all perfectly designed on my father’s dime. My bedroom was a mashup of different thrift finds I’d acquired over the years, and the striking differences made me want to laugh. I wasn’t very good at spending my father’s money, and while I may have resented Taylor for having zero issues with it, at least her things matched and looked nice.

“Tay, you okay?”

A lump in the blankets revealed little except the blonde strands of her hair. I tentatively touched where her shoulder should have been and tried to get her to look at me.

“Taylor?”

She finally lowered the blankets.

“Mal, I feel like death.” She sniffed and wiped her reddening nose with a Kleenex.

No…she couldn’t look like this. “What happened?”

“I think I must have just caught a bug. I have no idea, but there’s no way I can go tonight.” She blew her nose and coughed into her shirt.

My heart turned to goo. My little stepsister didn’t do well with sickness, mostly because she was so spoiled, but also because her mother wasn’t very maternal when it came to things like this. I knew from when we were younger that she just wanted someone to take care of her.

“Want me to call Bev, see if Gareth can come get you? It’s Friday, so you can go recover at home where they can take care of you.”

Bev and Gareth maintained my father and stepmother’s estate while doing whatever else they needed. Bev cooked all the meals and cleaned the mansion, and Gareth drove my father and stepmother wherever they needed or wanted to go. They were really good to us, and I knew they’d come get Taylor in a heartbeat if needed.

“Or I can take you myself if you want,” I offered, realizing she might not want anyone to see her like this.

“No, I want you to go to the party tonight. I want you to get your story and come home and tell me about it. I will call Bev and see if she wouldn’t mind driving over some soup or something.”

An objection was already on the tip of my tongue. Regardless of how badly I wanted into that party, taking her place wasn’t an option. I started to shake my head when Taylor reached over to the other side of her bedside table and grabbed her card.

“Here…first, sanitize this so you don’t get sick.” She shoved the card in my hand. “Then, I want you to call Hillary and have her come do your makeup and hair…and wear that one black dress you have in the back of your closet.”

“It’s too—”

“Short, I know,” she finished for me, shaking her head. “It looks like sin on you, and you don’t even know it. Do not wear that godawful shapewear you like to wear with it.”

“It’s slimming…” I shrugged.

“You don’t need it, and if you end up getting my home run, you don’t want him to have to use a knife to get you out of it.”

I snorted. “I’m not taking your home run.”

She swiped her matted hair away and let out a small laugh. “You want the story, Mal…go be the annoying reporter you are and scoop them. It’s not like they will ever give me a redo…that’s never happened, so we might as well put the card to use.”

Her blue eyes stared at me, making sure I caught how serious she was. I let out a heavy swell of air, realizing she was right.

“Are you sure?” I hated taking this from her, but then again…maybe this was a blessing in disguise if the guy on the other end of the card was a bad person or she could get hurt or something.

“I’m sure. Go have fun tonight, and I will hopefully still be alive when you get home.”

I stood, pushing some of her hair to the side. “Call Bev—you know she’d want to come take care of you.”

---