Episode 6: Meet Amrys Steely

Note from the author: Sorry gang. I've been so busy inhaling BigMac's and Frappes in celebration of my birthday I almost forgot to post. Please excuse my lateness. ;-)

“You little hussy,” Amrys Steely called out as she entered the office she shared with her older sister.

Jenna looked up from her computer, her reading glasses perched precariously on her nose. “Who are you talking to?”

“You, you skank. Why didn’t you tell me you and Aiden were back together? I swear. Nobody in this family ever tells me anything. I had to hear it from the girl behind the counter at the Donut Shack.”

Setting the cardboard crate of coffees on her desk, Amrys dropped her purse on the chair and looked back to her sister.

“We’re not,” Jenna muttered, dipping her head back down to glare at the computer screen.

Sipping from her coffee, Amrys carried the other cup over to Jenna. Her sister muttered her thanks but didn’t look up again.

Well, crap. Amrys had been tickled pink when Laurel had informed her that it was all over town that Jenna and Aiden had been seen kissing in the parking lot. She’d assumed that the two buttheads had worked things out.

Apparently not, she mentally sighed.

“So you’re not going to tell me why the town's buzzing that you are?”

Jenna yanked her glasses off and tossed them on to the stack of last night’s receipts. Jerking her coffee from her desk, she swore when the lid popped off and the hot brown liquid spilled down the front of her gray t-shirt. “Dangit, Am.”

“What? I didn’t put the stupid lid on. Go yell at Laurel.” Sauntering back to her desk, Amrys booted up her compute while watching Jenna from the corner of her eye.

“Stop staring at me,” Jenna grumbled. She wiped at her t-shirt with a tissue. “I don’t know why the town thinks we’re back together. Probably because no one around here has anything better to do than gossip about things they know nothing about.”

“So you and Aiden weren’t making out in the parking lot last night?”

Jenna slammed her hand on her desk. “No, dangit. And would you please stop saying his name?”

“Aiden, Aiden, Aiden,” Amrys taunted.

Her email popped up just then and she smiled at the list of new messages. Most of them from Nate. Jokes and forwards, looked like. Either he thought about her an awful lot or she’d somehow gotten on a group list.

Probably the latter, she thought morosely.

Nathan Matthews was simply too hot for his own good. And in his uniform? Fuggetaboutit. And though technically they were only friends, Amrys couldn’t help but fantasize that he wanted her. And why wouldn’t he? She knew she was pretty. She certainly worked hard enough at it.

Unlike Jenna. Amrys looked across her desk to Jenna whose desk faced Amrys’. Jenna’s hair was once again pulled back in a mostly messy ponytail and her face was scrubbed clean, save for a pale smear of lip gloss. And Amrys would give her eyetooth to look that good in a careless ponytail, stained t-shirt and jeans. Her sister was a natural beauty. The snot.

Glancing down at her own form fitting black sweater, camel colored skirt and knee high black leather boots, Amrys nodded in approval. She knew looked good, too. Surely Nate could appreciate that, right?

Aiden, she recalled rather dreamily, had sure always appreciated Jenna’s more natural beauty. The way he had looked at her sister sometimes stole Amrys’ breath. What she wouldn’t give for a man—any man—to look at her that way.

Jenna is so dumb, she shook her head and quickly went through her emails. Joke, joke, spam, joke, spam, spam, spam…Good grief, didn’t these people have lives? She wondered after deleting what felt like the millionth spam message.

“I’m going downstairs to get a root beer,” Jenna pushed away from her desk. The coffee stain on her t-shirt had spread across her left breast and Amrys tried not to laugh. Even as a ridiculous mess, her sister managed to look good. Too bad she was a waste of time to the men of the world. Jenna, she lamented, would never let herself give in to the idea of sharing her life enough to allow for something so all encompassing as romance.

Poor Aiden.

“No,” she told her sister but remembered the cake Dewey had left in there before he’d headed up to Oklahoma. “Wait, cake. Coconut cake. Just bring the whole thing and a fork,” she called after Jenna who was already halfway downstairs.

If she couldn’t have Nate the least she could do was enjoy a morning dessert.