“What the hell?” she said over the music, jerking off her goggles, eyes flashing in anger.
I had no idea what I’d done, other than startle her, but she was really pissed. Not just a little. There’d been a time in her life when she’d looked at me with wide, adoring eyes. Eyes begging me to see her in a way that had forced me to run from every room we’d ever shared. Now, there was no lingering trace of that adoration.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets. “What are you doing in here?”
“You can’t come into my lab, bringing all your contaminants with you,” she yelled over the music.
“What. Are. You. Doing?” I shouted back.
Instead of answering me, she disappeared through the flaps, and regret flew over me. She’d been happy when I’d shown up, bubbling with normal Vi enthusiasm, and I’d somehow blown it to smithereens. The music was clicked off, and the silence that followed it was almost louder than the beats themselves had been.
I saw a blurry version of Violet reach under the table to grab whatever had rolled away, and then she was back at the plastic, pushing her way through.
She took off the paper gloves and shoe coverings, shoving them into a garbage can, before washing up at the ancient sink. Her hairnet went into the pocket of the lab coat that she hung on a hook before she opened the garage door and waved me through.
The sunlight hit her white-blonde hair, making it glow. It was wrapped in a braid-like contraption she and Jersey were both known for, surrounding her head like a crown. Shimmers of purple gleamed through the twisted strands, faded but still there. A color I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her without. A color that always highlighted the shade of her eyes. She was the only female I’d ever met with eyes the color of storm clouds hit with a sunset. Lilac. Soft and hazy.
But where her face had once been filled with wide-eyed innocence, there was a maturity to it now.
My little genius was all grown-up.
It should have made me happy. It should have filled me with relief that I no longer had to chastise myself for having dreams about someone so much younger than me. And it did, but it also made me feel like I’d lost something of hers I could never get back.
It was then that the alarm bells rang through my head. I could no longer use her age as an excuse. But my anxiety lessened with the knowledge that there were other excuses…other reasons. The fact that she seemed to have a shithead of a boyfriend being one. Her sister being married to my brother was another. The three phones banging against each other in my pocket and the three lives that went with them was the strongest reason of them all.
I brushed a hand over my face, the wired energy that was keeping me afloat sagging.
I dragged my eyes down her. She was in a pair of jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt that clung to her frame. But it was the Birkenstocks on her feet that she never would have been caught dead in when we’d first met that had my lips twitching.
“Are you curing cancer in the garage?” I asked.
Something flashed over her face. Not quite regret, but maybe wariness, and it caused my almost smile to slip away as fast as it had come.
“No. I’m not curing cancer,” she said with a defiant lift of her chin.
“Whatareyou doing?”
“Why do you care?” she came back with. This was the Vi I knew. Smart. Sassy. Daring you with just a look.
“I need to know whether I’ll have to send the DEA dogs on a detour or save you from some Russian spy who wants your recipe for free energy.”
“The Saint? Really? You’re tossingThe Saintat me?” It was her turn to have lips quirking upward, and I couldn’t help the pleasure I had at seeing the soft smile. So much better than the anger she’d thrown at me in the garage.
The memories hit me like waves on the hull of my boat. Strong and relentless. Violet, in pajama shorts and a tank top that should have been outlawed, sitting cross-legged on the couch with a pillow tucked in her lap, hiding the see-through tank top and the black bra that she had on underneath it, but also pushing up the small swell of her breasts so that they were clearly visible above the pillow’s edge.
She was staring at the screen, completely engrossed in Elizabeth Shue and Val Kilmer’s race from the Russian mafia through the sewers of Moscow. And all I’d been able to do was watch every single expression that crossed her face with my fists balled so hard that the nails had bitten into the skin so I wouldn’t touch her.
“It’s your favorite movie. You watched it half a dozen times that summer.”
I’d said more of the wrong things, because the smile that had been starting to form on her lips went away at the mention of that summer together. Truck and I had just moved out of the Victorian and into the cottage downtown when the termite damage at the B&B had sent everyone scurrying. Mandy and Leena had taken off to Eli’s place, but Jersey and Violet had moved in with Truck and me. The little two-bedroom, one-bath house had been so small we could barely stand with two people in the kitchen.
It was the place where Truck and Jersey had fallen in love. It was the place I’d avoided like the plague so a sixteen-year-old energy ball didn’t cause me to do more things I’d regret in my life.
Now, that sixteen-year-old was a twenty-one-year-old dynamo.
This wasn’t just a distraction.
This was a catastrophe.
