Page 21 of The Spider Queen
Usually she dated a guy for a few weeks and then broke up with him. She grew bored easily. I expected that she’d grow bored with Jonah, too. I didn’t fault her for how she went about dating, but I wasn’t sure I understood it.
It took a lot for me to even notice a guy, let alone give him a chance. I envied how open she was, how she put herself out there. I’d seen her hurt a few times by guys that stuck around longer than a few weeks. But she always bounced back, and she was always willing to give it another shot.
But her parents were still together. And happy.
My phone vibrated. Anita. She promised she’d be home by nine, ten at the latest.
I didn’t want to be in the apartment, so I headed to the school library. I spent the rest of the afternoon looking through encyclopedias and books on arachnology, sifting through the zoology and biology sections, but there was no information hinting at the type of spider I had in the glass cube. It was like it didn’t exist, or hadn’t yet been discovered.
Hunter had noticed the change in the spider’s color, too. Maybe the spider had been preserved with a specific chemical that reacted strangely to sunlight. It was the best theory I had to offer at the moment, so I went with it.
As the sun set, I left the library, discouraged and hungry. Plodding home, I thought about what was in the fridge that I could scrounge together for a meal. I unlocked the front door and yelped in surprise. “You’re here!”
Anita looked up at me from her spot on the couch and grinned. “I live here.”
“Yeah, but you said you’d be home at nine. And it’s—” I looked at the clock, “—seven. I thought for sure I wouldn’t see you until—”
“Tomorrow morning?” she finished for me and winked. “Had to leave him wanting more.”
I laughed.
“Besides, I’m dying to gush. And I want to hear about you and Hunter.”
“Let’s order food,” I suggested.
“Yes,” she agreed. “What are we drinking?”
“What do we have?”
“Shitty beer.”
“Shitty beer it is.”
Once we ordered Chinese, I took a load off and sipped from my bottle of beer. Facing my cousin, I commanded, “Start at the beginning.”
She laughed. “You were there at the beginning!”
“Okay, then two minutes after the beginning.”
“So I fell into him.”
“Right. Saw that. He was talking to someone else, wasn’t he?”
“Just a friend,” she assured me. “And when Jonah went to get me a drink, his friend asked me how I’d made my stumble look so real.”
We laughed.
“She’s pretty cool. And I’m glad he wasn’t with her—I wouldn’t feel right about stealing another woman’s man. Gotta stick to the code.”
I smiled. “The code. Yes. You’re adamant about the code. How is he in bed?”
“He was better this morning than he was last night.” She laughed. “So I have high hopes it will get even awesomer.”
“Awesomer isn’t a word.”
“I’m making it a word. Now you,” she said, eyes bright with interest. “Tell me everything there is to know about Hunter.”
“I think he’s legit,” I intoned. “We met at the library, he annoyed me into talking to him, and then he wanted to see my sketch—my spider sketch.”
