The Nine Lives of Chloe King by Liz Braswell Read Free Book Online Page B

if they didn’t look it? Could you carry diseases under your nails? What about toxic fungi?
    “Yes, yes, and yes,” the woman replied, zealously buffing. “I knew a girl once, she went to a place—not here, a dirty place—she got a pedicure and had to have her whole toe removed afterward. Nasty infection. Anyway, this will take care of all that. You could eat with them now.”
    Chloe felt relieved. And guilty. She hoped Xavier was okay. She had to somehow check on him later.
    It was kind of funny, though, that she’d managed to spread something diseaselike to her partner before she’d ever even had sex. Funny in a loose sense of the word, of course.
    “This is perfect,” Amy said, admiring her nails. “We’re going to the Temple of Arts tonight—this will freak the shit out of all the vampire role players there.”
    “Cool. I haven’t been there in so long.” Chloe didn’t have anything planned for that evening, except for cooking with her mother (mother-daughter time), something she was anxious to get out of. And it would be an excellent way to get over whatever weird rush she’d felt with Paul earlier that week. The three of them just hanging out would be a good thing. “I promised Mom I’d help her with some weird and complicated recipe tonight, but I should be done by nine or ten.”
    “Oh.” Amy stared more intently at her nails, blushing. “I meant, like, just me and Paul. Like a date.”
    “Like a date?” It had been just a casual, high-tension kissing session before. … When had their status changed? “Oh.” Chloe fidgeted, prompting a smack from the woman working on her. “Oh. That’s cool. No problem.”
    I will be the cool friend.
    “How about tomorrow? We could totally get together tomorrow,” Amy suggested eagerly.
    “Nah. I’m taking my new bike for a ride.” Disappointment and embarrassment and anger raged through her brain, making it difficult to sound casual.
    “All day?”
    “Yeah,” Chloe said firmly, staring at her nails. “All day.”
    At home Chloe began to feel bad about breaking her “I will be cool” mantra when Amy obviously was already embarrassed by the whole discussion. And she had kind of acted like a baby. Of course she and Paul wanted to spend time together. They were dating, dummy. Chloe finally e-mailed:
    You wanna hang Sunday night? Rent a movie or something … xo, C
    That didn’t stop her from being grumpy about it, though. Chloe drowsed on her bed, visions of Xavier, Alyec, and—yuck—Paul spinning around in her head before her mom finally demanded her help with dinner. She was silent in the kitchen.
    “Is something wrong, Chloe?” Her mother was in a rare, selfless good mood.
    “No.” She smashed a clove of garlic with the side of her knife for emphasis.
    Her mom looked at her sideways but didn’t say anything.
    Dinner was fabulous if weird, as all of her mom’s Saturday night attempts tended to be. While Mrs. King napped on the couch in the living room afterward, Chloe channel flipped, pausing at some sort of nighttime soap she never would have normally given a second thought to, but a handsome couple was making out on the beach at night. Chloe watched them wistfully, imagining sand under her own head and lips against hers.
    “How was your bike ride, Chlo?” Amy asked in line for lunch on Monday.
    “It was great.” It really had been. And if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with how pissed she was at Paul and Amy and how she really wanted her own boyfriend, it would have been perfect. She had never noticed how many goddamn happy couples there were all across San Francisco before. Making out in public. Everywhere.
    She felt in her pocket for a quarter that wasn’t there and tried to find something interesting in what the lunch hag was doing. “You never replied to my e-mail.”
    “Sorry about that,” Amy continued bravely. “My phone ran out of juice. I didn’t get the message until this morning.”
    “No problem.” Chloe