Page 2 of Heart to Heart
Cringing, I could feel eyes from every table within a wide radius around us on me as all conversation ground to a halt. Having been on her way to our table at the time of my outburst, our waitress—a young girl I didn’t recognize—had stopped dead in her tracks, only reanimating again when we locked eyes.
“Sorry about the wait,” she announced with an awkward laugh, setting plates of food down in front of us. Guy had ordered a burger loaded to the brim with onions. On a good day, my stomach could mildly tolerate the stench of onions.
This was not a good day.
“Is there anything else I can get you?” she asked with a flip of her auburn ponytail.
“Not right now,” Guy muttered, clearly trying to recover from my outburst.
“Okay, I’ll be back to check on you in a few.” She scurried away, relieved to be getting the hell out of Dodge.
Meanwhile, my queasiness had been amplified to the nth degree. Why the hell Guy chose to make his confession to me before dinner while also still expecting me to eat, I had no idea. Across the table, everything appeared right as rain with him, with a stack of meat shoved in his mouth and a strip of onion dangling from his chin. A great way to avoid having to answer my question if I ever saw one. He was not a confrontational sort, Guy. Choosing to ignore the problem instead of tackling it—or just ridding himself of it altogether.
He didn’t need to answer my question. I knew the answer, and he knew I knew the answer. But the thought of him with another woman—talking underneath the stars, laughing with her, making love to her to the sound of rain falling against the window, was all too much for me to digest. Actually, I wouldn’t be digesting anything, for that matter. Not with the cramping inmy stomach and the telltale burning of bile working its way up my esophagus.
I stood up suddenly, the need to vomit intensifying by the second. But with the particularly crowded patio acting as a barrier between myself and a bathroom, I was trapped. With my mouth watering like it always did right before I tossed my cookies, there was no time. I had to think of something fast.
“So, you’re just going to leave like that, are you?” Guy asked as I hurriedly made my way from the table to the railing separating the patio from the beach. “You know, I thought we could be adults about this and stay friends. I guess I was wrong.”
Without another glance in his direction, I stuck my middle finger up in the air to collective gasps, pushing my way past tables filled with people, each step jostling my stomach contents. Had it not been for the vomit swiftly making its way up my digestive tract, I would have cheered when I made it to the sanctity of the railing. Instead, the moment my hands gripped the cold steel, my body heaved forward, expelling what little I’d eaten into the water lapping the shore.
CHAPTER 2
AVERY
“I’d liketo buy a vowel, please.” KiKi smoothed my hair with her delicate hands. My head rested in her lap as I blubbered incoherently. We’d been this way since I’d walked through the door of the off-campus apartment we shared. “Oh, shit,” she’d sighed, taking in my red-rimmed eyes and mascara dripping down my face like a Tammy Faye caricature. “Who do I have to kill? Tell me all about it.”
And tell her all about it I had. Some of it was indiscernible English, but I’d given her an earful, nonetheless.
Kiêu Ho was among the first people I’d met after moving to Ann Arbor. With the look of a lost puppy—or so she likes to tell people—I was a lonely small-town girl in a bustling college town, miles away from any familiar faces, until a pretty girl with the largest almond-shaped eyes I’d ever seen plopped down in an empty chair across from me and proceeded to pull her bra off from underneath her shirt, stuffing it inside her purse.
“God, I’ve been wanting to do that all day,” she sighed. “But apparently high beams are a violation of our dress code, so cage the lady lumps we must. Isn’t that right, Bryce?” She’d purposelyraised her voice to address the mortified barista who’d been staring at her from behind the counter.
“You work here?” I asked, taking an amused sip from my vanilla latte that had cooled from scalding hot to lukewarm in the time I’d been sitting there.
“Yeah, it’s my side hustle.” She took her hair out of the high, messy bun she’d been sporting, allowing her long raven locks to flow in a waterfall of tresses down her back. I ran a hand through my own unruly mop of long, dark curls, sure we looked like a before and after picture for Frizz Be Gone. “When I’m not in class, I work as a receptionist at a dental office to get a taste of what my life sentence is going to be.”
I nodded, thinking of my own upcoming paid internship at Walker, Wilson, and Webber, a local law firm I hoped would pay for my living expenses to take some of the burden away from my parents.
“I’m Kiki,” she held her hand out to me, which I took with a smile. “Kiki Ho. Yes, that’s my last name, and yes, I’ve heard just about every joke from all the misogynists on campus.”
“I’m Avery Martin.”
“Well, Avery Martin, I think we just became friends.”
She was right. Two hours and one ice-cold coffee later, Kiki and I had made plans to go apartment shopping. Two weeks later, we were roommates. She’d saved me then the same way she was saving me now.
“What kind of name is Guy, anyway?” She took a spoonful of Chunky Monkey and held it to my lips. I opened my mouth, knowing she wasn’t going to be happy unless I helped her destroy the pint of ice cream she’d fetched from the freezer. “Did his parents blank out on names after the doctor ripped him from his mom’s hoo-ha and proclaimed they’d had a son? Was the name Boy already taken in the family?”
Giggling, I pushed myself up to a sitting position on the couch we’d found stranded on the side of the road. It was a KiKi find, the brown pleather eyesore. Still, since we’d been sitting on milk crates and I had grown tired of rubbing away the diamond-shaped indentations they’d left on my rear, I agreed to the couch adoption, provided it would be professionally cleaned first.
“It’s a family name, actually—Guy. Four generations back.”
“Some traditions should just die.”
The click of the deadbolt drew our attention to the door, where Kiki’s boyfriend Ethan let himself in with the key Kiki had given him.
“Hey, Ho, what’s for dinner?” he called to her affectionately.
