Page 115 of The Fine Art of Faking It
Layla pushed her down on a stool. “Sit. I’m on coffee.” She bustled over to the coffee center, starting a thermos for the guests and a pot for the kitchen.
“I’ll make the gravy.” Sammy dunked Eden’s skillet into the sink and scrubbed at the mess.
“Gravy? What the hell is going on?”
The dogs—sensing nice, normal, friendly people—tap danced out of the pantry to join the fun.
“We’re making sausage gravy and biscuits for your guests before you turn anyone else off with your fruit and stale bagels like yesterday,” Sammy explained. “It was the talk of the town.”
Eden laid her head in her hands and moaned.
Layla put a mug of coffee in front of Eden. “Spill it.”
Eden looked down at the mug.
“Not the coffee. You and Davis.”
Eden sighed mightily. “Our pretend relationship is now one-hundred percent pretend. And even that will come to an end at HeHa when we rub the Beautification Committee’s noses in their failure.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” Sammy asked innocently, drying the skillet with a dish towel.
“Yes. At least I thought so, but we had this fight.”
“Did it involve makeup sex?” Layla asked.
“No, and apparently that’s the problem.”
“Davis didn’t like being used for some no strings attached fun?” Sammy surmised.
“I wasn’t using him,” Eden argued, though the allegation sat in her belly like a tray of ice cubes. “We had a deal. This was just temporary. Pretend. We were going to get our revenge and go our separate ways.”
“You’re still getting your revenge,” Layla pointed out, watching Sammy dump two pounds of sausage into the buttered skillet.
“Yeah, but Davis is barely speaking to me,” she said miserably.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Sammy reminded her. “Didn’t you just want to go back to the way things were before the fire?”
“I know what you two are doing,” Eden said darkly. Vader put her big head in Eden’s lap, her tail swishing. Eden stroked a hand over her dog’s smiling face.
“And?” Sammy prodded.
“And you’re right, and I’m wrong, but that doesn’t change anything,” Eden insisted.
“Let’s go back to the part about us being right,” Layla suggested.
“So maybe I got a little attached to Davis,” Eden sighed. “It was bound to happen, what with all the awesome sex and that time that he sketched me.”
Sammy spun away from the stovetop. “He sketched you? LikeTitanicsketched you?”
Eden nodded.
“God. That’s so hot,” Layla groaned.
“Yeah, well now things are pretty iceberg-y between us.”
“So, he wanted more, and you didn’t,” Sammy prodded.
They’d been over the big picture on the phone two days ago, squeezing in a video call between animal appointments, small town disturbances, and guest needs.
