Page 12 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
The Miller twins, Emma and Olivia, were arguing about scarf placement for their next craft show near the refreshment table, their voices overlapping in a way that made my brain feel staticky.
It was almost too much, and the meeting hadn’t started yet.
“Sorry,” Josh, my best friend, apologized as he dropped into the seat beside me with enough force to make the chair groan—which made me almost groan. “I got held up.”
“You're late,” I muttered, glancing at my watch. Three minutes past our agreed-upon time. “We said 6:45.”
“I arrived before the yelling,” he said. “That counts as on time.”
He shoulder bumped me—harder than necessary—and I winced, pulling away slightly. Josh was built like a lumberjack on steroids with a protein shake addiction, neither of which were true. He’d never fully accepted that not everyone else was built like a brick wall. He only reinforced the stereotype when he opened Axe-Hole, the axe-throwing place attached to the bowling alley.
Josh was my buffer at events like this. My translator for the unspoken social rules I still struggled to navigate at thirty-two years old. We’d been friends since kindergarten—the day another kid had decided my confusion about a group game was funny and Josh had decided that the kid would regret it. He’d been stepping between me and the world’s more confusing parts ever since.
Movement near the door caught my attention.
Delaney.
She’d changed clothes since this morning, and she’d pulled her jet black hair up into a ponytail with the purple ends swinging with every movement. Gone were the leggings and sweater. Now she wore flowy pants that shifted when she walked and a cropped top that showed a sliver of golden-tan skin when she lifted her arms to wave at someone across the room. My brain stalled, the noise of the room fading to background static as I tracked her movement. She maneuvered the space with this easy confidence, like she’d been a Ruby River resident her whole life instead of just the past three months.
Our eyes met.
Hers narrowed immediately, expression shifting from neutral to hostile in the span of a heartbeat before she deliberately looked away. Delaney sat down in the open chair between Cheryl and Adele, who’d taken over her parents’ bookstore, and had known Delaney since they were kids. It also didn’t escape my attention that those seats were as far away from me as physically possible while still being in the same building.
My chest tightened. My ribs suddenly felt too small for my lungs to expand.
“Don’t be so obvious,” Josh said loudly enough to make me jump.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I pulled my gaze away, forcing myself to look at the podium instead.
He snorted, the sound derisive. “You stare at her like a stalker. Like you’re cataloging her for some kind of weird science experiment.”
“I do not,” I grumbled, heat crawling up the back of my neck.
“Bro,” he said, lowering his voice to something approximating discretion, “if she turns around right now and catches you staring, she’s calling the cops. And I’ll be asked to be a witness for the prosecution.”
“I wouldn’t be interested in someone who hates me,” I muttered, which was true. Logically true. Except my traitorous brain apparently hadn’t received that message and continued to notice things like the way her hair caught the overhead lights and how her laugh soothed a part of me.
“Right,” Josh drawled. “That sounded convincing.”
Damn shit-stirrer.
The crack of Everly Grant’s gavel cut through the room like a gunshot.
I flinched, my whole body jerking.
No one else reacted.
She banged it again for emphasis.
Still nothing. People just kept talking, like the sharp sound hadn’t just ricocheted through my skull.
“That thing’s decorative, Everly,” Reggie Jones shouted from the middle section. He was one of our oldest residents, probably in his nineties, and treated the town meeting like it was his personal comedy show.
“So are you, Reggie,” Anita Macguire snapped from the front row, not even bothering to turn around. She and Reggie had been nemeses for as long as I could remember, something about a broken engagement between the two, according to town whispers.
Laughter rippled through the room—too piercing, too sudden, too loud. My heart rate jumped, adrenaline spiking for no good reason. I counted my breaths the way my therapist had taught me. In for eight. Out for eight. The overhead lights buzzed with that fluorescent hum that most people couldn’t hear. Someone’s bag crinkled. A chair scraped. Old Man Jenkins muttered something I couldn’t quite catch as the microphone squealed when Everly spoke into it.
I fumbled in my pocket for my noise-reducing earbuds and slipped them in quickly. The world softened immediately, edgesblurred, and the volume dropped to somewhat survivable. Not silent—I could still hear—but manageable.
