These Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

Renee’s easy warmth was contagious. It seemed like she never stopped smiling. Even now, while talking to Cate, Renee was interrupted by someone shouting her name in greeting across the room, and a gay photographer named David who worked for the magazine leaned over and pinched Renee’s butt. Instead of reacting in shock, like Cate would have, Renee goosed him back, admonishing, “You little tease.”
    “Did you think I was Trey?” David asked.
    “In my dreams,” Renee responded. “I would’ve superglued his hand there.”
    “You and me both, honey,” he said. “Another drink? What are you having?”
    “Vodka on the rocks. Dieting.” Renee sighed.
    “I keep telling you, girl,” David said. “You wear your curves well. You need to embrace your inner Marilyn Monroe.”
    “It’s my outer Marilyn I’m more worried about,” Renee said. “Cate, how about you?”
    Cate held up her half-full beer. “I’m good.”
    “So I saw the note from Naomi,” Renee said as David wandered away. “I can’t believe she’s leaving in two weeks.”
    Cate nodded. “But she paid rent through the end of the month. She can’t ask for that back.”
    The ice clinked in Renee’s glass as she drained her drink. Someone jostled her as they squeezed behind her to pass, and she spilled the last sip of vodka on her shirt.
    “Damn,” Renee said, swabbing at the mark with a napkin.
    “It’s just vodka, right? It won’t stain,” Cate said.
    Renee nodded. “God’s way of telling me to stay away from fattening sangria, clearly. Everyone’s a critic. So any ideas about who to ask to move in? I just hate the thought of getting someone we don’t know. What if she gets all single white female and tries to kill us with a stiletto?”
    Cate laughed. “We could put up an ad on the Listserv at work. It worked for us.”
    It was true—that was how Cate and Renee had connected.
    “Maybe even start spreading the word tonight,” Renee said. “There could be someone here looking, or someone who knows someone . . .”
    Cate nodded, then reflexively glanced back toward Trey and saw him moving quickly across the room. Renee’s words trailed off as she turned to stare, too.
    A thin woman with long dark hair, maybe in her late twenties, was standing in the doorway. She was wearing jeans and carrying a backpack, and her eyes were huge. She didn’t shut the door or step forward; she just froze, like she’d entered the wrong doorway and the ground behind her had disappeared and now she was trapped, unable to move forward or back.
    “Abby?”
    Cate could hear Trey’s voice cut through the crowd. It seemed like the whole room went silent—laughter abruptly falling away, conversations halting in midsentence—as everyone turned to watch.
    “Abby?” Trey repeated, as if he couldn’t really believe she was there. He practically ran toward her.
    The dark-haired woman said something too softly for Cate to hear, and Trey wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up off the ground. Cate sensed, rather than saw, Renee stiffen beside her.
    Something was off about the woman, Cate realized. She was so pale, and the expression on her face was identical to the one Cate had witnessed years earlier when she’d stopped to help a woman whose car had skidded off the road and crashed into a tree.
    “It’s okay,” Trey was saying. He gently slipped off Abby’s backpack and placed it on the floor just inside the door. He kept an arm around her shoulders, and she leaned against him as he practically carried her out into the hallway, shutting the door behind them.
    “Who was that ?” David the photographer was back, holding out a fresh drink for Renee.
    Cate saw Renee’s shoulders slump as she blinked a few times, then took a long sip of her drink. When she finally answered, she said, “Whoever she was, she’s important enough to make Trey leave his own party.”

Three
    SHE HAD TO RUN.
    Abby Watkins tossed a few shirts, a pair of jeans, and her