The Duet(34)
“That poor condiment never did anything to you,” LuAnne joked as she watched me stabbing my knife into the jar of mayonnaise.
“The mayo is substituting as the person I’d like to be stabbing,” I muttered, recapping the jar and stuffing everything back into the refrigerator.
Jason walked into the kitchen as I grabbed my plate. I glanced at him over my shoulder, watching him drag his hand through his hair. He looked tense, like a coiled wire ready to spring open, but I brushed past him with my plate before he could speak and make the situation worse.
…
After taking lunch up to my room so that I wouldn’t have to talk to Jason while I ate, I dialed Cammie’s number.
“Whattup, cutie?” she asked after picking up. And just like that, I was in a better mood. The girl was better than Buddha.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to hear your voice,” I admitted, falling back onto my bed and letting the blankets envelope me.
“Ew, easy on the cling. What’s going on?” she asked.
“Oh nothing, just everything sucks and Jason is a dickhead. What’s new?”
She laughed. “Hold on, let me step out of the studio so my classmates don’t overhear me and try to sell the story to the tabloids.”
“Didn’t they just hear you say that?” I asked.
The distinct sound of a door opening and closing was followed by the sound of traffic in the background. “No. I sit next to a foreign-exchange student that doesn’t speak English. She can design a house in like ten seconds flat though, so whatever.”
“Maybe she just pretends to not speak English so that she doesn’t have to talk to you all day,” I quipped.
“Wow, someone ordered spicy mustard on their gluten-free panini today. Or is the ‘tude because Jason has your vajayjay worked up?”
“Oh my God, I can’t handle your slang. Vajayjay sounds like a bad rapper name.”
Cammie cracked up. “Objection sustained.”
“How’s your project going?”
“Same ol’ same ol’. I’m counting down the days until I get to come to see you. I have seven days until I present my final project and then I get to come stay with you for three days. Montana better call in the National Guard because we’re going to whore it up big time.”
I covered my eyes and smiled. “Oy vey.”
“So have you been collecting boys for me to hang out with while I’m in town?”
I ran through the mental checklist of people I’d met in Montana so far. “Well you can take your pick between Jason the rockstar assface, Derek the cute, but cliché cowboy, or Logan, Jason’s cousin who isn’t a day over fifteen.”
“Sounds like you’re only a construction worker and a Native American short of a Village People cover band,” she said.
I laughed. “The real gem, though, is LuAnne. She runs the place while Jason is gone and I’ve had more fun with her than anyone else so far. Last night we finished off a bottle of wine and she showed me her tramp stamp of a black stallion.” I couldn’t quite figure LuAnn out. She seemed so proper, and then out of nowhere she’d whip out the wine and talk about her glory days. I’d decided she’d been quite the flower child.
“Wow. So you’ve gotten farther with the housekeeper than you have with People’s sexiest man alive 2013?”
“I’d totally swap teams for LuAnne. The woman would make me garlic mashed potatoes for every meal.”
“Oh damn, I’d swap teams for some mashed potatoes right now, too. But, seriously, are we going to get to the pertinent info here or are you just going to distract me while I should be busting my ass in the studio?”
I laughed, “You make it sound much worse than it probably is.”
“Last night half of us slept at our desks. I woke up with an indentation of my keyboard on my face and my nose had typed 149 pages of m’s.”
“Cammie, that’s not right! Give me the number to your advisor so I can call and yell at them.”
She groaned. “Yeah, no thanks, psycho. It’s part of the system. Everyone has to go through it and we end up stronger architects in the end. Like Spartan warriors.”
“Really? Or do you just end up with back problems and poor hygiene habits?”
“Brooklyn Josephina Heart, enough. Tell me what’s bothering you or I’m hanging up.”
Josephina was not my middle name.
I finally caved and filled her in on the last few days of Jason nonsense. I told her all about the failed attempts at writing and his comment in the Jeep on the way home.
“So you guys are going to go horseback riding tomorrow, yes?” she clarified.