Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 94531 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94531 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 473(@200wpm)___ 378(@250wpm)___ 315(@300wpm)
Now that our moment was ruined, Felicity and I ventured into the kitchen. The coffee had just finished brewing, so I grabbed two mugs. Sigmund stood at the counter mixing eggs for what I assumed were omelets.
“How do you take your coffee?” I asked.
“Black, like Sigmund’s soul,” she teased.
“I think you meant steaming hot like Sigmund,” my cousin fired back.
Felicity laughed, and Sigmund smiled as he continued cooking. It was nice to see them getting along. I’d worried he might have gotten under her skin, though she’d likely never admit it. But if I didn’t know better, it almost seemed like she enjoyed his company.
I poured four coffees, serving Felicity first and then the Marias.
Sigmund’s girlfriends began talking to each other in Portuguese, and I noticed Felicity blinking rapidly as she listened, like she was trying to decipher what they were saying.
Finally, she blurted, “It’s the way I go down on him.”
Say what?
“That got your attention, didn’t it?” she added.
Both women froze at once.
“I’m lost,” I said. “What’s going on?”
Felicity turned to me. “They aren’t sure what you see in me. I told them it must be the way I go down on you.” She looked back over at them. “Kidding, by the way. I haven’t done that to him…yet. It was just the first thing that came to mind.” She placed her hand on my knee. “They’ve been talking shit about us from the moment they came downstairs.”
I didn’t know what affected me more—the nerve of these girls or the fact that Felicity had implied she planned to go down on me.
“You speak Portuguese?” Maria One asked, looking dumbfounded.
“One of the foster moms I had growing up was from Portugal. Her mother, whom I called Vavo—which, as you know, means grandmother—used to teach me Portuguese. So, while I don’t speak it often, I can understand it really well.”
“Shite,” Sigmund muttered. Even he looked embarrassed at the behavior of his friends.
But I was proud of the way Felicity had handled it.
“If you’re gonna talk shit about someone, you should probably make sure they don’t speak the language,” Felicity added. “Not everyone is unilingual.”
“I’m sorry. We didn’t mean anything by it,” Maria Two said.
“You mean, you didn’t mean for me to understand. You most certainly meant what you said. It’s pretty sad when women decide to talk smack about other women before they get to know them. You’re lucky I’m smart enough to understand what’s really going on when that happens. You do it to feel better about yourselves. I mean, how insecure do you have to be to simultaneously fawn over the same man, right? You’re so wonderful that he needs two of you? Think about it. It’s pathetic.” Felicity took a long sip of her coffee. “Anyway, we’re even. You said a mean thing. I said a mean thing. Now let’s just forget about it and eat some chorizo and eggs. Life’s too short for this bullshit.”
She turned to me before looking back at them. “Incidentally, I’m not entirely sure what he sees in me, either. But I’ve been trying to lose the guy since I first met him and can’t seem to do it.” She winked at me.
God. I wanted to lift her up and kiss her so hard, but I was speechless at the moment. What did I see in her? That wasn’t a short answer. It was more like I couldn’t see anything else whenever she was around.
Remarkably, the rest of breakfast went relatively well. After Felicity put the Marias in their place, she spent a good portion of the morning chatting with them. She even asked them to test her Portuguese, so she could prove just how much she remembered.
By the time Sigmund and I had cleaned up everyone’s plates, you would have thought the three of them were friends from the way they were laughing together. All was apparently forgotten. It takes a special kind of person to befriend people who were trying to kick her down just moments earlier. Felicity undoubtedly had practice proving herself to people who made assumptions about her.
Later that afternoon, Felicity and I went over to Mrs. Barbosa’s to put the finishing touches on the interior before we’d have to pause to let the electrician come in and do his part.
To my dismay, her ex, Matt, showed up to help, along with Bailey and Stewart. He said it was his final day before he was set to return to Pennsylvania.
Things were fairly routine until the end of the afternoon when Matt asked Felicity if he could speak to her privately. She followed him to the backyard, and they sat on the swing where Theo had held me hostage. My blood boiled.
As I lingered in a spot where I could see what they were doing, I muttered, “What does he want?” I hadn’t realized I’d asked that question aloud until Bailey answered me.