Series: Webs We Weave Series by Krista Ritchie
Total pages in book: 130
Estimated words: 126927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 635(@200wpm)___ 508(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126927 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 635(@200wpm)___ 508(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
“You’re a bitchy asshole and an assholey bitch. Happy?”
“To be two things at once in your eyes, I’m over the fucking moon.” I check a buzzing text message on my phone. Nova. Phoebe’s “oldest” brother. He’s asking how far away I am from Seattle. Not responding, I slip my cellphone in my pocket.
Phoebe eyes my phone with slight skepticism, then gives me a strange once-over, and she’s stalling on my gold watch. Worth more than ten grand. She knows that I have more power if I appear rich. And without power, I can’t really help her or Hailey when all of this goes south.
I slide past Phoebe, staring her down while she tries to stare up at me. I ignore the flex of my muscles and the heat in my blood. Quietly, I manage to whisper, “Move out of this rich bitch’s way.”
Her shoulders thrust backward, but she doesn’t say a thing in response. Just watches me walk past to the trunk. Hailey pops it from the key fob, and I grab my sister’s duffel.
Phoebe sidles next to me.
I take a short glance at her. “Can’t stay away from me?”
She’s glaring ahead, and she reaches for her luggage. “I’ve got mine.”
“I wasn’t going to touch yours,” I tell her casually. “I know how you are.”
“Independent, capable, wonderful.” She hikes the strap of her bag over her shoulder. Eyes set on me in defiance.
“Stubborn, snide, quite the opposite of wonderful.”
“Sounds like you.”
We are similar. I can’t even deny that. It’s partly why I was fucking confused she didn’t pump the brakes on Hailey’s plan. To want to live a moral cookie-cutter life—that’s not Phoebe.
That’s not me.
We stare one another down. Neither of us even blinks as we refuse to break our petty contest.
Hailey taps the hood of the car. “Hey, we’re already five minutes late.” She skirts around us, the chains on her belt loops rattling while she walks briskly onto the path. “There’s no time for you two to argue right now.”
Phoebe mutters under her breath, “We can make time.”
I don’t know if she intended for me to hear, but I just act like I don’t. Hailey texts while Phoebe and I trail slowly behind her.
A deep blue apartment door is next to the entrance of the bookshop, but there isn’t a buzzer or keypad. We let Hailey outpace us, and we fall further back. This is something we do.
Phoebe and me.
We consciously put ourselves side by side during jobs. And outside of jobs.
A piece of her blue hair has escaped her pony. It splays against her white strawberry-printed tee. She liked Strawberry Shortcake the way that kids like unicorns and ponies and wholesome shit when they’re younger.
She’s grown out of the cartoon, but if she ever sees anything with a strawberry, she’ll be tempted to buy it. Usually only things she can pack. Baseball hats, T-shirts, the occasional key chain and magnet. Sometimes I think about the soup-bowl strawberry mug she left on the bed’s end table in a Four Seasons.
I called once we were long gone, but housekeeping couldn’t find it.
I scrape a coarse hand through my hair the more this nostalgia barrels through me. Reminiscing about the good times is dangerous because the bad times are hot on its heels. Then I’ll find myself cradling a fistful of gnarled memories, trying to squeeze them to death. And never succeeding.
Strawberries.
Phoebe catches me staring at her. “What?”
“Nothing.” I focus ahead.
“You’re being weird,” she snaps back.
“I could say the same about you. Ever since the last job—”
“Leave it alone, Rocky,” she whisper-hisses. “Seriously.”
I shake my head a few times, grinding my teeth, and it’s fucking impossible to drop Carlsbad. How can I? What happened during that job? I have no clue, and yeah, it’s grating on me like I’m eating sandpaper. Because I know something bad went down, but neither Hailey nor Phoebe will explain it to me or to Nova. Not even when we picked them up from the bus stop that night.
They just say the same things:
We’re fine.
The job is over.
Just leave it alone.
And now all of a sudden they’ve decided to stop grifting? I catch her blistering gaze. “You both chose to stop doing what we do after the fallout of the last job. One plus one equals—”
“Two, yeah, great—you can do math. Bravo.” She’s prickly.
I’m rougher, and the heat of her glare isn’t smoothing my grating edges or the glare I send back. So she lets out a long-winded sigh and spins toward me while we’re on the sidewalk.
Hailey is busy phoning the landlord outside the apartment door.
As a jogger passes us, we both politely wave. He nods back, and then a thirtysomething woman pushes a baby in a stroller along the cobbled sidewalk.
I nod. “Good afternoon, ma’am.”
She smiles. “Afternoon. Ugly weather, huh? Looks like rain.”
I look at the graying clouds with interest, even though I couldn’t give a flying shit about a storm. “Hopefully it’ll pass. You stay dry out here.”