One Good Friend Deserves Another by Lisa Verge Higgins Read Free Book Online

again.
    Shoving her hair behind each ear, she hurried to the intercom and pressed the button, tensely balancing on her toes. “Yes?”
    “Kelly?”
    The voice gave her pause. “Who’s this?”
    “It’s Cole.”
    Kelly stared at the slats of the intercom, not understanding. She thought he’d said “Cole,” not “Trey.” She must have heard wrong. She pressed the button harder. “ Who is this?”
    “It’s me, Kelly. It’s Cole.”
    She knew that voice, though she hadn’t heard it in a long time. Disappointment dropped her to the soles of her feet.
    “Kelly, you there?”
    She fumbled with the button. “Yeah, yeah, I’m here.”
    She pressed her head against the wall and berated herself for her raised hopes. She had her own damn self to blame. Trey had promised he’d call the next time he had a chance to come over—and he hadn’t called tonight. She really shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. Look what she was becoming— exactly what she’d sworn not to be: pitiful Pavlov’s dog, salivating at the sound of the buzzer.
    “Hey, Kelly, it’s friggin’ pouring out here. Can I come up?”
    Kelly shook herself to her senses. “Of course.” She pressed the button to buzz the building door open. She wondered what Cole was doing here at ten o’clock on a Friday night when she hadn’t heard from him in months. After he and Dhara had broken up, Kelly had expected him to call her to commiserate about the state of the relationship and, perhaps, ask for her help to patch things up. But Cole had mumbled through every phone call Kelly had made to him, and so, after a while, she’d stopped calling.
    When he tapped at the door, she unbolted and unchained it, pulling it open to peer at him from around the edge.
    She started to say hello stranger, but the words died in her throat.
    Cole had been raised as a vegetarian on an organic farm in Oregon. He’d always been long-muscled and whip-lean, the kind of guy who could wolf down prodigious amounts of food and not develop a fatty bulge. But she’d never seen him so thin that his clavicle pushed against the wet cotton of his soaked shirt, his skin so pale that she could see the bones in his wrist where he braced himself against the door.
    “Hey, Kelly.” His eyes were lost in shadows. “Can I come in?”
    She swung the door wide, and he stumbled over the threshold. He looped an arm around her neck, almost taking her down with him. Kelly seized his wrist and steadied him as she caught a blast of his breath. “What the hell, Cole—you’re drunk!”
    “I had a few with the guys.”
    “A few what? A few gallons?” Stumbling under his weight, she kicked the door closed behind her and then led him teetering toward the sofa. “It’s only ten o’clock.”
    “Started after the markets closed,” he muttered, pushing aside the popcorn bowl and tumbling onto the couch. “No big deal.”
    Kelly took a good, long look at him. His once sun-bleached brown hair, chopped short years ago in deference to Wall Street conformity, had grown dark and far out of its cut. It curled against his neck and stuck up at odd angles from his head. His face was sharp-edged at the cheekbones and chin, and his green irises showed eerily bright against the bloodshot whites.
    Kelly didn’t always pick up on what the girls called normal social cues, but she didn’t need a neon sign to know that the drunk keeling over on her couch was in the midst of dealing with—or not dealing with—some serious issues. After Dhara’s sudden engagement last week, she had a pretty good idea what those issues were.
    Poor Cole. She dropped to one knee to pull his size ten shoes from his feet. “Jeez, you’re as wet as if you were out in a nor’easter.” She tipped the two-hundred-dollar Johnston & Murphy shoe to dump the water onto the carpet. “I didn’t think it was raining that hard.”
    “I walked. From Mondo’s.”
    Kelly frowned. The name was familiar. It was the kind of place that showed