She shook her head and gestured with her taquito.
"Help yourself," she said. "Car's already pretty dirty."
It was.
"You should wash it," I teased.
She snorted.
"I would if we weren't supposed to get two weeks of rain," she explained. "Starting tomorrow, we're supposed to have at least a fifty percent chance of rain every single day."
I grimaced.
Rain meant work. Work meant I'd never get to work on the house.
Wonderful.
The house would never get done at this point.
"Why the long face?" she asked, taking a drink from her cup.
The way she hovered over the straw had my dick stirring in my pants.
It was the familiar voice calling my name; however, that had that deflating in seconds.
"Tate!"
I looked toward the sound of the voice, and found my smile growing.
"Rosemary!" I grinned and stood up from my lean against Hennessy's car, fully facing the woman.
Rosemary was Ariya's sister. She was the one good thing that Ariya had, yet continued to treat like utter shit.
"I didn't know you were back!" she cried out. "How the hell are you?"
I shrugged. "Doing good I guess. Working. Seeing Ms. Hanes here."
Rosemary's eyes went from me to Hennessy, who was still leaning against her car, munching on her lunch.
"Hennessy!"
Hennessy grinned at Rosemary.
"I didn't know if you'd recognize me," Hennessy offered a huge smile. "You're looking well."
Rosemary looked down at her body.
She was in tight black yoga pants, a black t-shirt that had a suspicious white stain on it that resembled baby puke, and tennis shoes.
"I had to run to the store for chocolate milk," she held up the bag. "My daughter doesn't function well without her daily dose of chocolate."
"If I remember correctly, neither does her mother," I teased.
Rosemary grinned for a few seconds, then that grin faded. "Have you spoken with Ariya yet?"
I nodded. "Had dinner with her a few days ago. Saw her at the pediatrician's office this morning. That your little girl with all that red hair?"
Rosemary's face went ashen.
"Uhhh, no." She smiled. "I gotta go. It was good seeing you, though."
With that, she practically ran toward her car that was parked behind Hennessy's.
She jumped in, slammed the door, and backed out all within a few short seconds.
"Well, that wasn't weird at all," Hennessy drawled. "One mention of her sister and she's out."
I shrugged. "Rosemary and Ariya go together like a vagina and herpes."
Hennessy gagged on her taquito-her third if my count was right-and stared at me in horror. "That's just wrong."
I shrugged.
"The two of them have hated each other since they were old enough to realize that they had the same mom but different dads. Seriously the two of them couldn't hate each other more if they tried," I expounded. "It's amazing what good genes will do for a person."
"You're saying that Ariya has bad genes?" she questioned, licking her fingers.
One at a time.
Slowly.
Shit!
I shifted my stance, trying to alleviate the bulge that I knew I wasn't hiding very well, and nodded.
"Not bad genes … " I hesitated. "Ariya and Rosemary's mother was a good woman. She died of cancer when both of them were still teenagers. Each of them went to live with their respective fathers after that. One was good-Rosemary's. The other was indifferent-Ariya's."
Hennessy brought her drink back up to her lips. "What happened?"
I shrugged. "The usual. He treated her like utter shit. Never any new clothes to wear. Forced her to work, and then took the money that she worked for."
"And Rosemary?"
I smiled. "Rosemary has always been a sweet girl. Her dad had always been in the picture. Ariya, though? Rosemary's father didn't like Ariya. She was a bad influence on his child, and he disliked that. The moment that he got a chance to change it, Rosemary's father took her away and made sure that Rosemary kept her nose clean. Which in turn pissed Ariya off because it was as if Rosemary was too good for her." I sighed. "Instead of the two of them talking, Ariya just sniped at her sister, and Rosemary sniped back because Ariya was so vicious."
Hennessy snorted.
"I could've deduced that." She laughed.
There was no humor in it, though.
"What do you mean?"
"Ariya was a bully," Hennessy explained, taking another sip of her drink before she continued. "She made my high school life a living hell. And God forbid she be in my Sunday school class at church. That sucked worse than anything."
"What did she do to you?" I frowned.
Hennessy's mouth quirked. "What did she not do?"
My stomach burned, and I shifted from foot to foot as I tried to figure out what I wanted to say.
"You need to calm down," she laughed. "High school was a long time ago, and the things that she did are long over."
Just because they'd happened a long time ago, didn't mean that it should carry any less significance than it did.
I stopped pacing and took a seat on the bench that was underneath the awning of the gas station, and then patted the seat.
She got up from her lean against her car and walked toward me, taking a seat at my side.
"Tell me about it."
I hadn't realized that Ariya had been that way. Now I was curious to know what she'd done.
"Tell me."
Hennessy lifted the drink back up to her mouth, sucked on it until there was nothing left, and then set it on the ground by our feet before she dove in.
Head first, might I add.
"When I was in middle school, the day at the party where I got dressed up and my dad told me to wait in his office?"
I nodded, remembering that vividly.
"Later that night, I was in my room-grounded mind you, and Ariya came to the door."
I frowned.
I'd been with Ariya that day. I remembered it vaguely.
"She left to go get some dinner that day," I said. "Brought it back almost an hour later."
Hennessy started to laugh, but her laughter wasn't one of an amused woman. No, this was darker, more sinister.
"She came over and told my father that I stole her clothes," she admitted. "My father came back into my room after she'd left, and proceeded to let me know that if I ever did that again, I'd find myself kicked out of the house on my ass."
"I thought you said that Krisney let you borrow them?" I leaned forward, resting my elbows on my knees.
"She did."
I frowned. "Then why would she say that you stole them?"
"Because she walked by while my father was ripping me a new one in his church office, and I saw her outside. She had a smile on her face that clearly said, ‘Sucks to be you.'"
I gritted my teeth.
"Give me the rest."
She shrugged and flipped her hair out of her eyes.
"Little things. Went out of her way to buy the last roll at school knowing that I got to lunch late my senior year since I had to have surgery. Or complaining to teachers that I was getting preferential treatment since I was on crutches. It got to the point where they no longer argued with her and stopped letting me go early. Meaning that it took me forever to get to the lunchroom, and by the time I arrived, all the pizza would be gone. When I was forced to go in the main line, she'd purposefully go up there and get another tray. Taking her time, talking to the lunch ladies, and forcing me to wait for her. Then when the bell would ring for me to return to class, I'd only have half my lunch eaten."
That sounded like her. She was always petty when it came to fighting.
One time when we were just starting out, I'd decided to go hang out with my friends instead of her one Friday night after a baseball game.
Thinking that I hadn't gotten to visit with Baylor in quite some time, I'd decided to do the friend thing, but Ariya had called halfway through the night saying that something was wrong with her car, and she was stranded in the middle of nowhere.
When I got there, it was to find out that there wasn't anything wrong with her car as much as the woman driving it.
When I'd pulled in, it was to find that Ariya had ‘sprained' her ankle, and she couldn't press the gas to get home.
After taking her home, leaving my car on the side of the road, Ariya's ankle had suddenly, miraculously healed. Then I'd had to walk back three miles to my car, and she'd cried when I left, making me feel like utter shit.
"Sounds like something she'd do," I admitted. "But that doesn't really explain why you'd hate her. Or she'd hate you, for that matter."
"I found her sleeping with my father."
I blinked at the sudden outburst, and turned to study her seriousness.
At the complete lack of emotion on her face, I realized that she wasn't joking.
"When?"
She started to squirm in her seat.
"Hennessy."
She looked down at her hands and started fiddling with her fingers. "When you were deployed that first time."