Page 97 of My Favorite Bad Decision
But no, this is Maren.
“Borrow my lipstick. Umbrellas in Paris. It’s on my vanity. It’ll look amazing with those shoes.”
I throw my arms around her. “That’s my lipstick, you bitch.”
She laughs. “You took my ex. Let’s call it even.”
29
MILLER
Ileft the Hamptons a decade ago because I had to.
Maren and I had been…unhappy. On edge. Faking it. I had no idea how to explain that I couldn’t see a future with her, but I also didn’t want it to end.
I didn’t understand it myself.
We were there for her birthday, and the only bright spot of the entire week was Kit.
She looked so much like Maren, but increasingly, I found no similarity between them. Maren was sweet, but Kit was challenging. Maren’s eyes smiled and Kit’s flashed. Maren was pleasant, while Kit had a sauciness to her, a thing that said, ‘I dare you to try.’
She sassed me at every turn. She made fun of my swim trunks, called me a freeloader, asked me if I planned to devote myself entirely to defending rich douchebags when I finished law school or if I might consider defending other types of rich people too. In turn, I made fun of her taste in music, her bad temper, her sweet tooth, her ambition.
I wanted to take care of her—not the way an adult wants to care for a child, but the way I’d want to step up for anyone I saw being taken advantage of. Because Ulrika had, at some point, decided she and Maren were too fragile to fight their own battles and that she’d needed a sword, so Kit had fashioned herself into one.
Go tell those photographers to get off the property,Ulrika would command, and Kit, all curves in her tiny black bikini, would go out to tell them off.
Go tell the hostess we want our table. Tell that man to stop taking pictures of me.
I fucking hated it a little more every day, and that final morning in the Hamptons, when Maren let her dumb friends hit on Kit as if she wasn’t five years younger, it all came to a head. It was the only fight Maren and I ever had—she insisted Kit could defend herself just fine, and I insisted that she shouldn’t have to.
But I still didn’t put it together until that moment in the kitchen.
Kit had left the beach, and I knew why—because I’d been a dick to her. Because I’d wanted her gone, though not for the reasons she thought.
I went back to the house, presumably to refill the cooler, but mostly to check on her. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, still in that tiny black bikini, with one of her cherry popsicles.
I wanted to tease her. I wanted her to fight me a little, to let me know she was okay. “Is that why you left the beach? So you could sit up here and eat popsicles in peace? Maybe I’ll have one too.”
But she didn’t fight back. She licked down the side of the popsicle and I turned toward the fridge, wincing.
“You guys didn’t want me there,” she said. Blunt, but that was Kit. Either she was fighting with you, or she was brutally admitting things other people would not.
I hated it. I hated that we hadn’t wanted her. I hated that she knew.
“That’s not true,” I said, turning toward her.
Her mouth was around the popsicle. As she pulled it out of her mouth, it made this noise that seemed to suck all the air from the room. I couldn’t stop staring at her cherry-stained lips, at her pretty pink tongue.
“Yes, it is. You should realize by now it takes more than that to hurt my feelings.”
Her mouth on that popsicle, her tongue sliding over it…I was frozen, fighting a realization that was arriving far later than it should have. “That wasn’t about you,” I’d replied, trying to think ofanythingelse. “It was about that kid she knows from Columbia who kept hitting on you.”
Kit’s tongue coasted over the popsicle. A trickle of juice ran down her chin, and I thought my knees were going to buckle. “Why would it matter?” she asked. She caught the dripping juice with her finger and sucked it between her lips. And then it was the popsicle again.
That motherfucking popsicle.
“Because he’s five years older than you.”
