Free Closer Than They Appear by Jess Riley Page B

being win at everything?”
    Josh craned his neck to see where Matt had gone, wearing a vague expression of curiosity. It looked like he was trying to solve a sexy riddle. “Pencil erasers. Huh.”

Harper
    “HONEY, I NEED you to pick me up on Tuesday at two in the afternoon. Are you free on Tuesday afternoon?”
    “Why?” Harper asked, bleary-eyed. She turned on her bedside lamp and glanced at her alarm clock. Seven o’clock on Sunday morning, and she had a headache.
    “I need you to take me to a funeral,” Ginger said. “Jim died while we were having sex. He had a heart attack on top of me.”
    “What?” Harper sat up quickly and her head began to pound like a drum. “What happened?”
    “I’m just kidding. Jim’s fine. But I do need to go to a funeral. Walter Bergman finally died, the miserable old dum-dum. He once pinched my ass so hard I had a bruise for three weeks!”
    “It’s too early to be having this conversation.” Harper got out of bed and padded into the kitchen for a glass of water, then to the bathroom for some aspirin. When did she start getting hangovers after only two beers? “And you shouldn’t joke about people dying!”
    “All right, Miss Priss. But will you take me to the funeral?”
    “Why do you even want to go if you didn’t like him?” She opened the blinds to let the morning sunlight in, which immediately seemed like a bad idea, so she closed them again.
    “Because everyone’s going! What, do you want me to stay home and crochet doilies?”
    And there was another thing she could look forward to in old age. Funerals as social events. As she made a pot of coffee, she began to piece the night together. Sam, of course. She’d talked with Sam for nearly an hour. And somehow, she resisted his inevitable advances, ending the night with ice water and a few forkfuls of cold, leftover spaghetti over the kitchen sink.
    It helped that he’d asked minimal questions about her life now.
    Of course he texted around two a.m. ( Miss u already, still up? Want company? ); but if she gave in last night, where would she be today? No orgasm was worth the emptiness and disappointment she’d feel mere hours later, when he slipped out the door in the middle of the night, leaving her with a rushed, perfunctory kiss on the forehead. The entire pathetic scene played out in her mind before she told him good-bye at Oblio’s and again when she deleted his text unanswered, because she’d seen that movie a thousand times.
    “You did the right thing,” Natalie said on the drive home from the bar.
    “I guess so.”
    “You walked away a noble woman, with your head held high!”
    “And a sad vagina.”
    “You’re crude after a few drinks. I like it! But you have nothing to complain about. Married sex is one thing, but unemployment is a real drag on the libido.”
    “Oh, go put on some sexy underwear. Brian will think he died and went to heaven.”
    “Are you kidding me? I tell the front and back of every single pair of my underwear apart by which side has holes blown in the seam. But thank you for not saying ‘panties.’”
    “So it sounds like Sharon has a good job lead for you,” Harper said, digging through her purse for a tube of lip balm. “Does it involve helping people ‘uncontaminate their brands?’” Harper was directly quoting Sharon, who once used this very phrase to try and explain why you’d want to “force” someone to unfollow you on Twitter.
    “But isn’t the point to have more followers?” Harper had asked, confused.
    Sharon nodded. “Yes, but only if they reinforce your brand and message.”
    The whole exchange had left her cold and mildly nauseated.
    “I think it’s mostly low-man-on-the-totem-pole stuff, but it’s a foot in the door,” Natalie said. The red glow from the car’s dashboard gave the tiny pearls bedazzling her shirt a pink hue.
    “Okay, but if you regularly start to use the word ‘brand’ as a verb and you’re not talking about cattle