Page 1 of EverGreene
Chapter 1
Ever
God, I needed to get laid. Or as my friend Katy would say, “You need a good dickin’, Ever.”
She was wrong.
I needed something far more carnal than a good dickin’. A good dickin’ would have satisfied my needs months ago. What I needed now was on a whole nother level. What I needed now, as in right now, was a toe-curling, leg-numbing, vagina-wrecking, cervix-bruising pounding. I needed to be thrown against a wall, chained to a bed, made to ride the handle of a knife?—
Okay, maybe not that extreme.
Yet.
That would require a level of trust and intimacy I wasn’t looking for right now—and perhaps never would again. Tonight, I needed a good old-fashioned one-night stand. Bonus points if the guy knew what the fuck he was doing. And then, after it was all said and done, I needed him to leave, disappearing into the night like the ghost of every poor decision I’d ever made.
And what better place to find my next big mistake than a costume party.
I leaned against the vinyl siding of my friend Katy’s condo, shivering as I stood on the back deck, wishing I’d dressed up as Chewbacca instead of the sexy peacock I picked up at Spirit Halloween after I finally caved in to Katy’s insistence that I be here. Every year on the Saturday before Halloween, Katy and her roommate Jem hosted their annual Monster Slash Bash, drawing practically everyone living within a fifty-mile radius of our mid-sized Midwest town to their cramped condo—or so I’d been told. I’d only been living here for just over a year, meeting Katy by happenstance when a piece of mail belonging to her was delivered to me by accident.
“I can’t believe you drove over here just to bring this to me,” she’d said after opening her door and finding me standing on her porch. I’d wanted to be anywhere but standing on a total stranger’s porch, clutching their mail in my hand. Her deep blue eyes inspected me, boring a hole into my soul as her brow arched suspiciously above one eye as though expecting me to whip a Dyson out from behind my back like a rabbit from a hat while I extolled the virtues of using bananas as lube. “You know,” she’d said, “you could have just writtenWrong Addresson the envelope and slipped it back in the mail. For all you know, I could be some deranged serial killer who chooses her unsuspecting victims by sticking random flyers”—she looked down at the piece of paper she’d pulled from the envelope—"offering to extend my car’s extended warranty into mailboxes just so I can murder them for sport when they show up at my door.”
“That all may be true, but to be honest, my biggest concern was that you were going to invite me in to play euchre, which seems to be a requirement for citizenship in the Midwest. Also,the name Katy didn’t exactly scream, ‘This is the name of a killer, Ever.’”
She stood, staring at me, the corners of her lips tugging ever so incrementally northward into a smirk as she grasped the flyer most likely referencing the Toyota Corolla sitting in her driveway between a pair of perfectly manicured stiletto nails in a startling shade of onyx.
“I’m going to go,” I’d said, pointing needlessly behind me with my thumb as I turned to walk down the concrete steps back to my own mid-sized sedan.
“Ever, wait,” she’d called after me, stopping me in my tracks. “If that’s actually your name.”
Oh God, this is what I get for venturing outside my house after work hours.
I turned to face her, already wishing I could teleport back home to the confines of my Snuggie and daily diet of murder shows. “It’s Everleigh, actually, but my friends call me Ever.”
At least, that’s what I wanted them to call me whenever I had friends again.
“I haven’t seen you around here, and I know everyone.”
“You know everyone in a city with a population of seventy thousand?”
“I know everyone who matters.”
“Well, that explains it, then. I don’t matter.”
“I find that hard to believe. Where are you from? Because I know it’s not from around here.”
“Nowhere,” I’d answered, feeling the gnawing bite of nausea that tugged at my stomach whenever anyone asked me anything about my personal life.
She’d squinted at me, giving me the impression that no one had ever denied her anything she’d ever asked from them before. “Huh. Secretive.”
If you only knew, Katy. If you only knew.“Yeah, well, that’s me. International Woman of Mystery.”Jesus take the wheel, Ever. Shut your hole right now and get out of here. “It was nice meeting you. Hope that warranty works out.” At precisely the moment I’d thought I’d gotten off scot-free, Katy stopped me once more.
“Ever, why don’t you stay. We just got the cards out to play some euchre. I could use a new partner.”
“I, uh…”
A wide shit-eating grin spread across her face. “I’m just fucking with you. But my roommate and I really are making margaritas and vegging out in front of the TV to watch aScreammarathon. We’re going to dissect our attraction to morally gray men. You’re welcome to join us.”
And that’s the story of how I was adopted by Katy Vickers.
