She raised her pierced brow. “What about Blaze’s car?” she asked.
I struggled to keep a straight face. “With a name like Blaze, what else would he expect to happen to his car?”
She gave me a look. “You don’t have youth or inappropriate teachers to blame for that.”
“No one has yet proved, including the authorities, that I had anything to do with that,” I protested. I squeezed her silver-clad hand. “Plus, he hurt my baby Lol.”
Polly was six years younger than me, and if you put us side by side you wouldn’t say we were related apart from our matching violet eyes. Her hair was jet-black like mine but instead of my long locks, she chopped hers to her shoulders, messy layers giving her permanent bed head and a look that screamed she belonged in a rock band. Her music of choice was the Bobs—Dylan and Marley—while mine veered towards Bach and Beethoven and classic rock when around the club.
She was peace and love and lived most of the time in her head. She was the one who believed in fairy tales and princes and princesses. Though so far she’d found only frogs and fell in and out of love like I fell into trouble.
Hence why Blaze’s car got torched.
She was shorter than me, had more curves than me. Not that she would ever be called fat. She was beautiful, even at twenty years old, the kind of beauty that men stopped on the street for. And she wasn’t afraid of that. Of jumping into whatever lust they offered. Nor was she afraid of color. Or mixing prints. Or wearing too much jewelry. She was a complete original. And in need of protection because with her head in the clouds, too many men here on the ground wanted to take advantage.
It was mine and my dad’s job to do the protecting. Polly was an imprint of Mom, a dreamer with romance on the brain always and a little buffer between the real world and hers. I was an imprint of Dad, despite him not being my biological father. We were levelheaded, cool in a crisis but not afraid to laugh with the right people or while watching the right movies. Which we did, every month. Dad and Lucy movie night.
He was the only hero I’d met in real life. He’d saved me, Mom and Polly after all. The only one I could trust completely and utterly with my heart. The parts my biological sperm donor and he hadn’t ruined, anyway.
“Still, you didn’t have to burn his car to the ground,” Polly pointed out.
I grinned at her, happy to have distracted my easily distracted sister from my own distraction. “Yes, I did.”
She waved her hand. “Whatever, it’s done. He’s done.” Her eyes narrowed. “Now you shall tell me what you were thinking of.”
Damn, spoke too soon.
“Blaze’s car. And how I can perfect the gasoline-to-fire ratio next time,” I answered immediately. “Rosie wasn’t the best person. She just kept saying ‘more flames, Lucy, more.’”
Polly frowned. “You know what I mean, Lucy. Is it a guy?” Her eyes lit up, and she started bouncing on my sofa. “Has a man finally done it? Caught your attention?” She looked like she might burst into spontaneous applause at the thought of such a thing.
It was kind of a sticking point in my family. Polly had too many boyfriends traipsing over her heart, and Mom’s vintage Moroccan rugs and I didn’t have enough. Or any. That they knew of. And if they did know of the one and only, Polly would not clap. Her gentle heart might just shatter. And my dad, no matter how much of a hero he was, couldn’t save me from the past or ghosts, and I wouldn’t let him live with that.
“No,” I lied. I hated lying to my sister. I did lie to her, when I had to. To protect her. Like how I lied and said to my sobbing teenage sister that Laurie, the woman she’d thought of as another sister, didn’t suffer before she died. Or that she was in a better place. Or that Peter was our real dad.
But I didn’t lie about this kind of stuff.
Then again, I’d never had a man like Keltan get under my skin with just one kiss.
There were firsts for everything.
I jostled on the sofa. “I was just thinking about the future.”
Polly screwed her nose up. “Why?”
I sighed. “Because I hear that’s what responsible adults do.” I glanced to the online shopping package discarded next to my matte black coffee table. “Instead of maxing out their credit card on shoes that could have been half a month’s rent.”
Polly’s eyes went in that direction.
She glanced back at me. “Since when did shoes that could have fed a small African village—” She gave me a nonjudgmental look even though I knew her stance against consumer items such as this. “—not bring you happiness?”
Since Keltan.
I stood, padding over to the package and lifting the black suede Jimmy Choo’s, turning them in the light. “They do. But I want to have somewhere to wear them that isn’t the club or Laura Maye’s bar. And a use for them that isn’t to take a photo of me wearing some fabulous outfit looking like I’m not going to one of those places and posting it on my blog, giving an illusion of a life that I’m not really living.” I sighed, placing them down carefully.
“Wow. That’s deep,” Polly observed.
I sighed again. “Yeah.” I glanced up to see my sister’s face contorted in worry. I quickly straightened my shoulders. “Hey, don’t worry about me. I’m not eating carbs this week. You know that makes me melancholy,” I tried to reassure her.
Her frown only deepened. “You know you’re beautiful already and shouldn’t be doing things like that to perpetuate a stereotype of how women should look,” she grumbled.
I grinned. “I’m not doing it do perpetuate a stereotype. I’m doing it to ensure I can fit the sample sizes. They’re the only ones I can afford.” I winked.
She rolled her eyes, lifting herself off my black suede sofa and throwing down my white fur throw. “Whatever. I’ve got a poetry slam to go to, wanna come?” she asked, grabbing her fringed bag from the ottoman.
I raised my brow at her. “In what universe?”
She rolled her eyes again.
I folded my arms. “Actually, in what universe would you be going?”
My sister always had a passing fancy. Knitting. Jewelry making. Pottery. Mountain biking.
They usually had one thing in common.
“This wouldn’t have to do with a guy, would it?” I asked, smirking.
She scowled at me. “Of course not. Poetry is good for the mind. The soul,” she snapped.
I continued to look at her.
She blew her choppy bangs from her face. “Okay, it’s because of a guy,” she relented. “But Skyler is really the one. He’s soulful and kind and sensitive and—don’t say it!” she commanded, pointing at me as I opened my mouth to tell her that she’d had about fifty “the ones” in her short life. “This one is really special.”
I nodded, going to kiss her head. “Of course, he is, Lol. I’ll burn his car to the ground otherwise.”
She stepped back, hitching her bag on her shoulder. “You couldn’t do that, he doesn’t have a car. Doesn’t believe in polluting the environment with more fossil fuels. He rides a bike.”
I choked back my smile. “Of course, he does,” I said with a straight face. “Bikes can still burn too. With enough gasoline.”