Chapter 5
“Did you get the two boxes in the back corner?” Luke’s mother asked the next day as she surveyed the haul Luke had manhandled down the old ladder from the top floor of their home.
“Think so. It’s these two.” He looked over the boxes that were in horrible shape, and he was very glad they had stayed together on the descending trip. “What is all this stuff anyway?”
“Oh, it’s from my grandmother’s place. When she passed away, Mom and Dad didn’t have a good place to store it. It’s been up there for years.” She opened one flap which sent dust flying in all directions.
Luke waved at the onslaught. “I would’ve never guessed.”
“Ha. Ha.” She reached inside and pulled out a piece of a broken dish. “Well, we might not make it to the garage sale with any of it after all.” Two more pieces of the green, white, and yellow dish came out.
“Nice,” he said, nodding though the assessment was clearly sarcastic.
However, her face fell in sadness as she sighed. “I remember this dish. It used to hang in her living room. Wow. That seems like so long ago.” Setting it aside, she reached in to get the next object. And old box came out. “And her jewelry. Oh, wow.” With the medium-sized sea-blue, padded box in hand, she sat down on the ottoman and opened it on her lap. Amazed nostalgia coursed through her eyes. “Oh, wow. Look at this.”
She lifted one set of pearls out. “I remember her wearing these.” Reaching in again, she pulled a set of earrings out. “Oh, and clip-on earrings. I can’t believe they ever wore these things.”
Luke stood in the center of the living room, hands on belt line, watching though he didn’t fully understand the awe. It all looked like junk to him.
His mother lifted an orange plastic-looking necklace out, and he really didn’t want to know what one would wear with something like that. It looked like costume jewelry gone really, really, badly wrong.
“Oh, my.” She kept digging as if forgetting his presence completely. “I’m going to have to call Mom to see what she wants to do with this stuff. She might want some of it.”
Raising his eyebrows, he surveyed her. “Why?”
However, the look on his mother’s face told him there was far more to this story than he was grasping.
“Someday,” she said, gazing up at him wistfully, “you’ll understand.”
He half-nodded. “Well, that day is not today. You want me to start taking the stuff in the utility out to the van?”
“Yeah, go on. I think I’ll just give Mama a quick call.”
The second half of the nod escaped his being. “Works for me.”
Sage was summoned for breakfast and then lunch. In fact, every time she managed to escape forced family time, she was ruthlessly drawn back into it. She sat at the table, watching but trying not to as Jaycee sat on one side crunching on potato chips and reading the paper and Ryder sat on the other eating Cheetos and tapping on his video game. At the head of the table sat Mrs. Lawrence, clearly wishing she could be anywhere but here.
“Um, I was thinking we need to get to the library,” Mrs. Lawrence said, coming to life over the driest sandwich Sage had ever tasted. “We need to sign up for the summer reading program.”
“Ah, Mom,” Ryder groaned, and Jaycee looked like she’d been shot with a flaming arrow.
“The library? Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. I do not want your education to swirl down the drain just because there’s sunshine outside.”
Sage had learned to take very small bites and move as little as possible to draw no attention to herself. Carefully, slowly, she took a drink. No one could eat this and survive, of that she was sure. She had also learned that keeping her head down and just getting through things was the best bet in any situation involving North Carolina, and truth be told, she was getting pretty good at it. Not that life was any better from an actually getting better standpoint, but at least this way she could quietly disappear and no one seemed to notice the difference.
“I’m sure Sage would love to get out and see our fair little town.” Mrs. Lawrence dropped a bright smile her direction.
She smiled her winningest smile. “What? Oh, yes. Love it.”
The van was packed and loaded down with boxes from his sisters’ over-the-years collections. His mother was considering converting one of their rooms into a workout area, so that meant everything they hadn’t taken with them at Easter was fair game for the garage sale. However, if his mother decided things from the old boxes needed to go as well, she was going to have to make a separate trip.
“I’m headed to town,” Luke said, grabbing the keys from the little hook as he stepped back into the living room with one foot.
“Oh, okay. That’s great. Mom’s coming over. We’re just going to go through some of this before we decide,” his mother said, glancing up.
“Great by me. Nothing else will fit anyway.”
At the library, Sage conveniently went the other direction from the rest of them. Not that she was at all interested in modern architecture or space, but it was far safer than trekking around the fiction sections with Jaycee and Mrs. Lawrence.
Ambling once she got lost in the shelves, she came around the bookshelf really liking this escape plan when she met up with a solid, dark form coming the other direction. “Oh!” Just like that, she stopped, very nearly toppling backward. “I’m… sorry.”
“Oh! Hey!” Strong hands reached out and snagged her, righting her with no trouble. “Wow. No. Sorry. That was me. It was all…” At that moment the young man now holding her arms took a good long look at her and his smile spoke volumes of assessment that traveled all the way up to his gray-green eyes. “me.” Making sure she was on her feet and staying there, he reached up and swiped his fingers through the short-cropped dark hair. Football. Track. Soccer. Sports. Sage could see them written all over the tanned handsome face. “Oh. I’m sorry.” The smile was back on his lips and in his eyes. “Where are my manners?” He put out a hand. “I’m Rory. Rory Harris.”
“Well, hello, Rory Harris.” Sage pulled her best flirtatious pitch into her voice. “It’s very nice to meet you.”
He looked like he’d been hit by a Mars rock just before he shook out of the trance. “You… too.” Still holding her hand, he leaned in. “I’m sorry. Did I catch your name?”
Flirting came as easy as breathing. “Sage. Sage Wentworth.”
“Well, Sage Wentworth.” He let go of her hand and put his forearm on the shelf support next to them. “I haven’t seen you around, have I?”
She casually leaned her hip on the shelf well within his sphere of influence. “Maybe. Maybe not.”
His eyes drank her in. “No. No maybe to it. I would have remembered that, believe me.”
The giggle was soft, almost not there, and his delighted smile beamed down at her. His strong, handsome face was one a girl could definitely get used to.
“You’re not from around here,” he said, stating the obvious. “To what do we owe this pleasure?”
Okay, he was a kid from the sticks, but he was both charming and very smooth. She brushed her hair from her eyes and let her hand linger on her shoulder a second longer than it had to. “I’m visiting… family.”
His eyebrows bounced up. “Lucky family.” The smile was getting wider and speaking a lot of words his mouth wasn’t saying. “So does this family of yours have a name?”
Somehow she wondered if he would still be at all impressed when she uttered the word.
“Sage?” Jaycee came around the other corner, meeting up with their little tête-à-tête with a jerk. “What’re…?” Then she shrank back when she saw Sage’s conversation partner. “Oh, Rory.” She leaned back into the opposite bookshelf, trying to look smooth but missing by a country mile. “Hey.” However, she misjudged the shelf and hit the books instead. Mortified, she turned and started frantically righting the books as the moment shattered between Rory and Sage.
“Oh, Jaycee, here let me help you with that.” Rory sprang forward righting the books with her as Sage watched, knowing their nice moment was gone forever.
With the books back in order, Rory stood between them and crossed his large arms, nice arms, the kind that spoke of hours in the gym. He looked at Sage. “I guess this is the family.”
She smiled but said nothing.
However, he kept looking between the two of them. “Wow. You guys sure look a lot alike.”
Instantly, Jaycee dragged a fake, hard smile to her face and adjusted her glasses. “Um, I’m surprised to see you here. I didn’t know you hung out in libraries.”
He smiled that casual, smooth smile and leaned on the opposite bookshelf. Holy smokes that boy was gorgeous! “Just grabbing the summer reading for Ms. Kline’s English class next year. Thought I’d get a jump on it.”
Somehow Jaycee’s smile became wider. “Awesome. I should look into the junior list. Is it posted online?”
Rory crossed his arms again, and Sage was wondering how well Jaycee knew him, where he lived, and how hard it would be to wangle a date out of him. He could definitely be an improvement on her summer. “It’s on her little blog-thingy. Just put it up this morning.”
“There you two are,” Mrs. Lawrence came up from the other direction, and both Sage and Jaycee turned. “Oh, hello, Rory.”
“Hello, Ms. Lawrence.” He stood and stuffed his hands in the front pockets of his jeans, looking incredibly innocent and a little boyish which stole Sage’s heart with one look. “I’m sorry. We were just…”
“Oh, don’t mind me.” She waved him off. “I was just ready to get going, that’s all.”
Rory nodded. “Oh, well, sure. Of course.”
Mrs. Lawrence looked at him once more and nodded with a smile. “Well, let’s go, girls. I have a couple more stops to make.”
And with that they left Rory Harris standing in the middle of an aisle lined with books looking like a young Superman without the cape.
Luke had never been thrilled about the weight lifting classes he’d been forced to take for JV football his freshman year, but today, they were sure paying off. The garage sale was an annual event to benefit the church, and people came from far and wide to get a can’t-pass-up bargain on mismatched dishes and children’s clothes from a family whose children were grown and gone.
So Luke wasn’t at all surprised to see the church hall brimming with worker-bee ants hauling, sorting, tagging and organizing the boxes other worker bee ants had brought in.
“Oh, Luke,” Trent’s wife, Macy, said about two seconds after his foot first crossed the threshold. “I’m so glad you’re here. Can you help us move this television that the Johnsons brought in?”
Macy, a young mother of about 30, had two little ones and another on the way. With one look her, Luke knew he’d better be the one to be moving the television.
“Sure. Lead the way.”
They had been to the library, the grocery store, and the bank—such that it wasn’t. Who let people who worked in a three-room building keep their money? It was inhuman. In fact, Sage thought, they probably didn’t even have online anything. They might as well be living in the Stone Age. She tried to keep the sighs of boredom and annoyance from slipping out, but a few had, and every time one did, Jaycee would peg her hard and fast with that glare she was becoming famous for.
“Only one more stop,” Mrs. Lawrence said from the front seat of the van. Happy. She always sounded so blasted happy, which made no sense whatsoever because in that van, happiness was the last thing anyone else was feeling. “I just need to run by the garage sale and see if they have space for a few of our things.”
From the passenger’s front seat even Sage heard the exhale, and Mrs. Lawrence looked over to her daughter. Then she glanced into the rearview mirror at Sage and fought to smile. “It won’t take long.” Her gaze went back over to her daughter. “I promise.”
The television, an antique thing from probably the 60’s, had been relocated to the opposite side of the center, and Luke was in the middle of helping John, Macy’s other kidnapped slave, move an armoire that had to weigh half a million pounds back over to where the television had been. Why they had to do so was beyond him, but he was helping, not asking questions.
“Oh, it’s Emily!” Macy suddenly said, trekking off to the main doors and leaving Luke and John staring at each other around the hulking piece of furniture.
Carefully they both lowered it to the ground and turned to watch her. The first thing that hit Luke’s brain was he wondered if Jaycee was with her mother. The second thing was trouble had shown up right behind them.
“Emily,” Macy said, coming up to them and giving Mrs. Lawrence a hug. “I was hoping you would come. We are so short-handed this year. You don’t mind, do you? You’re so good at pricing everything. I’m just… lost. Who puts me in charge of anything, right? I know, it’s a lot to ask, but, would you mind? I mean, just for today. Please?”
Mrs. Lawrence was clearly basking in the glow of the young woman’s adulation. She nearly said yes and then seemed to remember her three charges. “Oh, well…”
“Oh!” Macy exclaimed. “They can help. We’ve got plenty for everyone to do.” Turning doe eyes on Mrs. Lawrence, she practically pouted. “Please.”
“Oh, okay. Where do we start?”
From across the room, Luke watched them—Mrs. Lawrence and Macy going one way, Ryder and Jaycee halfway following them, and Sage glancing back at the door. The sympathetic laugh bubbled inside of him. He saw her desperation, and he wished he could go over there, say something cute or humorous to sweep her off her feet. Instead, he shook his head and went back to work.
Boxes of stuff. They were everywhere. Along with tables that weren’t set up and chairs sitting willy-nilly all over the place. If a bomb went off, it would have looked more organized. Sage dared not touch anything. It was all… old. In fact, as she carefully stepped behind them, following the others deeper and deeper into the maze of junk, her shoulders began to curl over her arms which were securely around her middle.
Turtles had never been her aspiration, but at the moment, being one sounded heavenly.
“Yes,” Macy was saying at one of the tables. “We need all of this marked, and where is the best place to put the kitchen stuff? We were thinking over in the corner where it wouldn’t have as big of a chance of anything getting broken.”
“That’s where we had it two years ago,” Mrs. Lawrence said, “but you don’t get much foot traffic over there.”
“Oh, good point.” Macy thought for a minute. “Maybe it would be better in this area over here, by the door.”
“If you have more expensive kitchen items, that’s probably a good idea.”
More expensive? Sage wondered what that would even mean in this dump. Something in one piece? Something not completely covered in grease? What?
“Oh, Jaycee, sweetheart,” a woman from behind Sage said, and Sage turned.
“Oh. Um. I’m… sorry. I thought you were…” The woman, a tallish lady with dark brown hair that was probably from a bottle said, pulling up short.
“Hi, Mrs. Murphy.” Jaycee came up to stand by Sage though one step back. She smiled as the lady looked back and forth between them.
“My! They said you two favored each other.” Then she seemed to shake out of that. “I’m… sorry. Um, Jaycee.” She managed to take her gaze completely off of Sage and place it only on Jaycee. “Would you mind coming and helping me unload a few boxes? I only have a couple.”
A moment and Jaycee nodded. “Sure thing.”
As her sister walked off, Sage felt a sharp pang in her chest. What was she, chopped liver? She couldn’t help? However, she gave herself a good, hard, mental shake. What was she thinking? She didn’t want to help. She didn’t even want to be here!
When Luke and John got the desk thing in place, John went to find Macy to see what else she needed moved, but Luke knew that was a very bad idea. Without even trying to, he had followed the movement of the entire Lawrence clan, and he knew that Sage was way too close to Macy to risk being polite. So he turned and headed out to his own truck that had gotten next to nothing unloaded in the past hour.
In the bright sunlight of the parking lot, he opened the first door and dragged out two boxes. He had just made it back to the center door when he heard the call.
“Hold the door please.”
Of course, he couldn’t be rude, so he did as requested just a Jaycee came around the corner laden with boxes trailing Mrs. Murphy.
“Oh, Lucas. Thank you so much,” Mrs. Murphy said and thoughts of her daughter, Rachel, tinted his ears pink. “You are such a polite young man.”
He shook his head as Jaycee too crossed in front of him. “I do what I can.” Sliding himself and his own boxes into the room, he let the door go closed and followed Jaycee who was following Mrs. Murphy. “Fancy meetin’ you here.”
She barely acknowledged his entreaty. “Huh, yeah. Forced slavery.”
With a laugh and a smile, he lifted the boxes in his hands as well. “I hear you there.”
Thankfully, Mrs. Murphy led them through the tables to the center of the room where they carefully set the boxes on and under a table.
“Thank you, Jaycee,” the older woman said. “I sure didn’t want to have to make two trips.”
Jaycee set the boxes in her hands down as well and stepped back, putting her hands in her pockets. “Wouldn’t want that, would we?”
“Not if we could help it,” Mrs. Murphy said, and her laugh skidded right up to the line of annoying. “Well, good luck you two. I hope you get it all together.”
And with that and no more, she left Jaycee and Luke standing right where they had stopped. When she was out of earshot, Luke set his boxes down as well and leaned down to Jaycee’s shoulder.
“Sure, no problem. We’ll just get it all set up ourselves. No need to trouble yourself.” A moment and he looked down at Jaycee whose smirk was cracking through the sides of her mouth.
It made it all the way to a smile when she looked up at him. “I dare you to go say that to her.”
Luke shook his head and set his boxes down. “Uh, no. I like my skin, thank you very much.” Together, they turned and started out for the rest of his boxes. At least that’s where he was going, he wasn’t at all sure about Jaycee, but she was following and he wasn’t arguing. When they got to the door, he spun on her as he opened it. “And you wanted me to ask her daughter out. You do realize if Rachel and I hit it off, she would be my mother-in-law.”
Jaycee corkscrewed her face. “The man does have a point there. Yes. Yes, he does.”
At his vehicle, Luke gave her boxes as if they had discussed this whole thing. Strange how easy and natural everything was with her.
Sage hung out as close to the wall as she could get without going right over the table and through the sheetrock. Ryder had asked to go with some other young boys, so he too had abandoned her. She watched, trying not to, as Jaycee and the guy from church made several trips across the center. They were laughing most of the time, and she wondered what they were talking about. Probably nothing important, but at least it was something. Absurd loneliness began a slow coil around her chest. Why did she feel like crying so often here?
Tired of standing, she found a lone chair at the end of one of the tables and sat down. Her mind drifted back to the library and Rory. She wondered what he was like. He was definitely easy on the eyes. Maybe she should ask Jaycee about him. Then again, that probably wasn’t the smartest idea in the whole history of ideas.
Still, she thought as she looked up at the blank beige-yellow wall, what else was there to do in this dumpy little town? And Rory wasn’t that bad, in a backwoods, North Carolina kind of way. Sure, he wasn’t the guys from her high school. Then again, nobody was them. Money, cars, trust funds. No. Nobody was them.
She thought about McKenzie and Ben. Lucky girl that McKenzie. Not that it would last. They never did. High school flings weren’t supposed to last. In fact, the drama would surely start any day now if it hadn’t already. That’s just the way things were in her world. Temporary. Very, very temporary.
Laughter from the other side jerked her attention that way, and a sinking feeling dropped into her stomach as she watched them. While everyone else on the planet went on with life as if it made sense, here she was in po-dunk nowheresville praying she could stay sane enough to get out of this alive. Life wasn’t fair. At least not hers anyway. For absolutely everyone else, it seemed just peachy.
The effort to keep Jaycee happy while simultaneously worrying about the teen beauty queen over by the wall was about to split Luke in half. Of course, he didn’t know Sage, and he couldn’t and wouldn’t imagine just going up to her to talk. But he kept an eye on her just the same. She looked like an exquisite statue, sitting there primly on the chair, certainly not like a teenage girl his age. She was a goddess, a starlet—fascinating and completely and utterly out of his league.
However, he also couldn’t shake how very abandoned she looked, sitting there all by herself as all of life went on around her.
“Don’t you think?” Jaycee asked next to him as she busily refolded the clothes from Mrs. Murphy’s boxes.
“This is me you’re asking,” Luke said, falling so easily into their normal roles. “Do I ever think?”
Jaycee’s smile, the full mega-watt one, beamed up at him. “Well, that’s true.” She folded another pink child’s jumper. “I don’t know. I mean, getting some college courses out of the way now sounds like such a good idea, but I don’t want to fall into the Christina trap either. I watched her last year. Four dual credits and one with Ms. Kline would be enough to kill anybody.”
Without him so much as willing it to, his gaze floated down to her, and he shook his head. Then he went back to unloading the boxes. “Thankfully, I don’t have to worry about that problem. I did good to get through Algebra II last year. I’m not taking dual credit anything.”
Her gaze slipped over to him. “You are such a slacker. You could totally do it if you put that head of yours into it.” Leaning over, she bumped his shoulder with hers very nearly sending him toppling the other direction.
“Now why would I want to do that? I’m trying to make sure us slackers are well-represented.”
“Well, you’re doing a good job of it,” Jaycee said, swaying into him again, and the glint in her eyes swept his heart away from him.
Sage shook her head, pursed her lips and tried with everything in her not to watch them. She couldn’t believe how thoroughly her radar had been off before. They were so clearly a couple—Jayce and church guy. What was his name again? Luke.
Yeah, Luke. Watching them without even trying to or meaning to, Sage cataloged everything that screamed their coupledom. First, it was how very closely they stood together, working, yes, but practically in the same space. And then there was the look. They both had it in every glance. That look, the one she had hungered for her whole life, spoke more volumes than had ever been written. It said, “I care about you. I see you. I’m enjoying being here with you. I want to spend every minute with you.”
True, she’d come close to getting the look with a couple guys, but their versions always turned into “how fast can I take this without completely freaking you out, so I can get what I want and get out.” She sighed. Too bad more than one had found out she wasn’t into them getting what they wanted. When they found that out, well, it was never long before she got the text or the call… or they just showed up to school with some random cheerleader on their arm. Oh, yes, she, the great Sage Wentworth, had been completely and utterly ignored on Monday morning when a Saturday night hadn’t panned out the way said Look Boy thought it should have.
“Oh, hey.” The words from behind her nearly sent her crashing right off the chair as she spun to find none other than Rory Harris coming up, holding two boxes in his gorgeous, strong hands. “I thought that was you.”
“Oh.” Sage brushed the six strands of hair from her forehead, falling expertly into the coquettish debutante role life had assigned her. “Hey.”
Luke nearly dropped the Crockpot he was holding for Jaycee when he glanced over to where Sage had been sitting alone. His heart did a war dance through his chest. What’s he doing here, and why is he talking to Sage? Heat and not the harmless kind surged through him. He jerked his gaze away from them, hoping Jaycee hadn’t seen. Too late.
She followed his gaze, and in the next second, her face fell and her hands went into hyper-action mode. “I think we should put that over here,” she said, stepping away from him toward the front doors, all laughter gone.
Rory had clearly come in from the back doors through the kitchen, and now he was towering over Sage, his foot up on the chair in front of her. They were talking. Sage was talking to Rory Harris. It was amazing how many ways Luke’s brain could find to state and restate that horrific thought.
“Yeah,” Jaycee said, sounding very much like someone was strangling her to death, “I think Mom said over here by the door. Probably by this kitchen stuff.” At the far table, she started moving and sorting things Luke wasn’t even sure she could see.
“We could set it on the floor, under the table so it doesn’t get broken.”
“No. Here. Here’s a spot. It’ll be good right here.” Jaycee slapped the table just a little harder than she had clearly meant to. That sent her hand back up to her other as she fought to not let him see how out-of-control she had gotten in the last three minutes.
“Here?” he asked as if he was too clueless to make a move without her express approval.
“Uh, yep.” She nodded more times than was necessary as she backed away from him and put her hands near her back pockets. “I think that ought to work. Looks good. Great. Yep. I think that’ll get it.”
With that, she turned and headed back to where they had been. Luke watched her carefully, feeling the earthquake building beneath his feet. At the table where the aisle started, Jaycee missed the turn badly and rammed her thigh into the table’s corner.
“Ugh.” She shook her head, making her ponytail swing. “Stupid. Idiotic…”
With one glance over into the corner, Luke wished with everything in him that he could remove Rory Harris from the map and never have to deal with him again.
Sage giggled. She was good at giggling, and she hadn’t giggled in what felt like forever. “Aw. I’m sure you say that to all the girls.”
Rory leaned down so his elbows were on the back of the chair he was already leaning against. “Nah. Just the really pretty ones.” His dark eyes burrowed into her and right through her to the soft-shelled core around her heart.
She didn’t have to pretend to blush. It was for real.
“I can’t believe I was lucky enough to run into you twice today,” he said. “What’re the odds?”
Lifting her eyebrows, Sage decided to play his game, and she knew very well she was better at it than anyone else he had ever met. “Well, I’m a lot less concerned about the odds of meeting up twice in one day and more concerned about what the odds might be of seeing you again sometime.”
He looked very pleased by the statement. In fact, he graced her with front-row view of a perfect row of sparkling teeth for her effort. “Pretty and she knows what she wants. I’m liking this one more and more.” One nod as if he was thinking about it, Rory perused her as if deciding. “How’s this weekend? One of my friends is having a bonfire on Friday night.” He shrugged. “It’s not wine and cheese with the upper-crust but it’s something to do.”
Considering her other options, it sounded wonderful. However, Sage didn’t want to sound too eager. She leaned back, perusing him herself. “So, you know, just out of curiosity. Not that I’m saying yes or anything.” She took a strand of hair and wound it around and around her finger, making sure he could see her perfect fingernails in the process. “What would a girl wear to something like that? Hypothetically I mean. I’d hate to be too overdressed.”
With no effort at all, his gaze slid down her figure before latching back onto her gaze. “I’m sure whatever you wear I won’t be able to take my eyes off of you.” His smile was back, wider now, more inviting, more charming.
“Oh, well, then I’ll have to look especially good…”
“Rory!” someone called from the kitchen and that jolted his gaze up to it.
He jerked his head up in affirmation that he had heard to whoever was standing in the kitchen behind her. “Be right there.” Then his gaze was back, drilling into her, pinning hers to his. “I’ve gotta go. So, like eight on Friday?”
She shrugged as if her heart wasn’t jumping out of her skin. “Sounds great.”
“What did I ever do to deserve this?” Jaycee asked, and her anger was hotter than the sun outside. “This is unbelievable. Completely and totally unreal.” She slammed another box onto the table and started yanking stuff out of it. “I’ve been here my whole, entire life. She’s been here for like two minutes.”
Luke didn’t know what to say to calm her down. Worse, he wasn’t having any better luck calming himself down.
“You know how Rory is with girls,” Luke said dismissively, but that statement didn’t help either of them.
“Great. Now I get to watch Ms. Perfectly Perfect Perfection herself steal the guy I’m in love with away from me. This is just great.”
It wasn’t at all clear how many swords she could stick into him before he bled to death, but at that moment it felt like she was trying to find out.