Page 23 of June Bride
“The natives are growing restless in here,” Anita said withwaytoo big of a grin. “It’s time for the big girl to make her reappearance for the rest of her presents and some games. Maybe it’s time for you to go, Brandy. Assuming you’ve said everything that…”
Brandy rounded on Anita. “Why are people commenting about our sex life?”
Anita snapped back like she had been slapped in the face. Oh, that wasn’t shock. That was“oh shit!”Caught!
“I may have said something really, really stupid,” Sunny fessed up. “I’m sorry, Bran.”
“Did this something have to do with me being awet fish?”
“Ah, well…”
Anita not-so-subtly motioned for Sunny to get back in the bar. A small group of women, most of whom Brandelyn barely recognized when her eyes glazed over in the red of anger, pushed by with unsolicited judgments on their lips.
“Better get back in there, Sunny!” one of them shouted. “Someone started taking off her clothes! It might be your last chance to see a pair that’s not telling you what to do!”
Everyone turned around to laugh. Unfortunately for them, that meant they saw Brandelyn glaring at them from the darkness.
“Oh, shit!” From the way those tipsy women scattered, they must have been Brandy’s patients. That was the extra kick to the teeth – knowing she would be seeing them soon, and they woulddefinitelyremember her.
“Somebody gets a little mouthy when she’s drunk, huh?” That was directed at Sunny, who scuffed her shoes against the concrete and looked like she was about to vomit her liquid dinner. “Well, sorry I crashed the party.” Brandelyn collected her bearings – what were left of them, anyway – and kept her head up as she turned to the ramp. “I’ll leave you be. Have fun.”
“Brandy, wait…” Sunny grabbed the railing, but didn’t make it much farther than the first part of the slope. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean…”
Brandelyn didn’t stop to hear whatever apology she felt like spewing with her beer. She kept walking, ignoring the cajoles of drunken women who apparently now knew quite abitabout her personal life, as filtered through a jilted, drunken woman at her bachelorette party. It was one thing for a woman like Anita to hear a few unsavory things in private confidence. Quite another for half of Paradise Valley’s gossip mongers to pick up the half-truths and spread them around like summer wildfire.
She made it all the way to her car, where she sat down, plopped her purse into the passenger seat, and banged her forehead against the steering wheel. Her first, loudest sob drowned out the monotonous honking that raised the ire of more than one person in the street.
Brandy had half a mind to run them over.
Chapter 14
SUNNY
“I can’t believe I said that.” Sunny held back another noxious burp that carried with it the remnants of her drunken mistakes. The sun was so bright that she swore her brain was about to explode and dribble out her ears. Every time she opened her eyes, she saw the searing sight of Brandelyn, her ire as powerful as the blazing sunlight threatening to pull Sunny’s ocular orbs out of her head.Look at me, super hungover and still remembering words like “ocular.”It was instinct. Pure, literary instinct. She couldn’t tell a soul what the hell “ocular”meant,but by God, she remembered that was the word to use.
Anita wasn’t hungover, but she might as well have been from how she looked. Perhaps that was pity swarming her face. The same kind of pity she offered students when they failed yet another English test.“I know you try your hardest, Sunny,”Ms. Tichenor would say to her biggest flop of a student,“but I can’t help you if you reach this point and still don’t know the difference between ‘you’ and ‘you’re.”
“I’m still reeling from the secondhand embarrassment you passed out like booby candy last night.” Anita shook her head. “When you decided to have that sixth beer, I knew things were going to get bad.”
“You could’ve stopped that sixth beer, you know,” Sunny spat. “Told you to get a Coke.”
“Ididget you a Coke! You were the one who dragged your own ass up to the bar and got ‘one more beer, because my fiancée looked at me like I’m Charles Manson.’”
“I did not say that.”
“You totally did, and italmostworked getting people to stop parroting that ‘wet fish’ bullshit. Seriously, Sun, you had to go with fish?Wetfish?”
“I’msorry.”
“Don’t apologize to me. You should be apologizing to Brandy. Now everyone in town thinks she’s terrible in bed and will tease you two relentlessly about it for the next twenty years. Rumors like those donotdie down, especially when it helps every mediocre woman around feel better about their own lackluster love lives.”
Sunny snorted.Ow. That hurts my head.“You would know something about that, huh?”
“You’re talking to the woman who got caught fingering her girlfriend at the drive-in. Remember the drive-in? Rememberthat?”
“Don’t deflect. I remember drive-insandeveryone twiddling their fingers at you every time you entered a room.”
“For the record, we only got caught because Bonnie has a very intense O face.”
