Free Tonic by Staci Hart Page B

okay?”
    I smiled a little wider. “Okay.”
    The stairs creaked under my feet as I climbed them, and within a minute, I slipped back into bed, tea still steaming. He’d picked my favorite, jasmine tea, and I wondered if it was a coincidence or if he somehow knew I’d like it. I shouldn’t have been wondering about him at all. But I was. I wondered what he’d done all that time. Kaz jumped onto the bed and into my lap, curling up into a purring ball, and I wondered about that too, how Kaz, the spawn of the Devil, would have befriended Joel. I wondered what Joel was doing just then, what he’d do for the rest of the night, when I’d see him again.  
    But those roots of decision wound around my heart and squeezed. Joel and I made no sense. He was charming and annoying and bossy and hairy and all wrong. He was everything I wasn’t. He was everything I’d tried to avoid in my life. He was the opposite of what I needed, of what fit into my plan. And that was exactly why I had to put him out of my mind, put him into a safe, lock it up, and throw away the key.  
    But even though my mind tightened up the reins, my heart whispered the assent, too soft for my mind to notice.

WANG FEAST

    Joel
    “HOW DO MY BOOBS LOOK?”
    I glanced over my shoulder with one eyebrow cocked, but Penny wasn’t talking to me. Her hair was hot pink this month, and it was all done up like a pinup girl. She shimmied around her breasts in her bustier, and Veronica laughed from the chair next to me in makeup, which used to be my stock room.
    “They look perfect. Stop worrying.”
    My makeup artist turned my face toward her and kept dabbing at me with a makeup brush.  
    “You have great eyes,” she said.
    “Thanks. It’s genetic.”
    She chuckled.  
    “I’m not really worried,” Penny continued. “Mostly excited. We’re gonna be on TV, Ronnie. Like, you realize we’re about to become a household name?”
    I found myself frowning, that familiar apprehension winding through my guts.
    “Maybe I’ll get a deal for my own line of makeup, like Kat Von D,” Penny mused. “Or hair dyes. You should get one for eyeliner, Ronnie. Nobody rules the cat-eye like you.”
    Veronica chuckled. “One thing at a time, all right? We haven’t even started filming yet.”
    “But we will today,” Penny sang. “Man, you also realize we’re about to have access to pretty much any man we want? It’s going to be a freaking man-buffet. A shlong smorgasbord. All-you-can-eat wang feast.”
    “And what makes you think all those men are going to come running?” I teased.
    She gave me a look. “Have you met me?”
    I couldn’t help but laugh. I’d seen hordes of men trip over themselves for Penny, pretty much since the second I’d met her. But she was about as attainable as world peace. “Bunch of suckers. Always wanting what they can’t have.”
    She shrugged. “That’s on them. I don’t make promises I can’t keep.” She smiled at that and winked at me, and I shook my head.  
    Penny and Veronica kept talking, but I zoned out, my eyes fixed on a point across the room where shelves used to be. Luckily, we stored most of our supplies at our stations, but it peeved me to have my space packed with mirrors and makeup and lights, making it unfamiliar to me, changing the space I’d practically lived in every day for the majority of my life to something unrecognizable.
    Better this than Hal , I told myself for the eleventy trillionth time. So many times, in fact, that it had nearly lost its effect all together.
    I heard a voice in the front of the shop and turned my head, certain it was Annika. The makeup artist guided my head back toward her with the patience of a saint, but my heart ticked up just a notch, just enough to notice.  
    I hadn’t seen her since I’d left her house on Saturday. It was Monday. It could have been a month, as much as I’d thought about her. I spent all Sunday working, replaying the day before to the steady hum of my