Page 54 of Anger Bang
“I promise,” she said between gritted teeth because of how her sister was squeezing her knuckles together.
Jackie lifted a perfectly shaped eyebrow.
Thea let out a pained huff of breath. “I promise not to let someone I love go.”
The pressure on her hand eased, but Jackie didn’t let go. Instead, she swallowed and looked up at Thea with big, rounded eyes.
“That includes me?” she asked.
The tip of Thea’s nose tickled with the rush of emotion. It had been years since she’d experienced that sisterly connection like they used to have. But somehow in all this craziness, they’d found a way to excavate, brush off years of dirt, and shine it to a perfect sheen.
“Yeah,” Thea said, her voice breaking, “that includes you.”
Jackie threw her arms around Thea in an awkward sideways sitting-on-the-bench hug. “I love you, too.”
By the time her sister sat back, they were both wiping away fat tears from their cheeks with the backs of their hands, but they were smiling. Huge grins. The kind that made a person’s cheeks hurt.
An old eighties song about it raining men blasted through the speakers. The bridesmaids let loose with some high-pitched, drunken “wooooooooos” of approval and started calling for Jackie to join them.
She got up and took a step toward the dance floor before turning and looking at Thea with a grin. “So are you going to blow them away with your moves or what, Tiffany?”
Thea snorted at the idea of playing her last TV role one last time. “Tiffany Twist is retired.”
“So is Crystal Cancan.” Jackie smiled and jerked her head toward the dance floor. “For old times’ sake.”
Thea had never been a rush-out-on-the-dance-floor kind of person. She liked to chair dance, maybe stand in a corner half hidden by a fake tree or something and break out those old Tiffany Twist moves that she still knew two decades after that show ended. But her foot was tapping against the ground, and Jackie was giving herthatlook—the one that when they were growing up had always led to trouble and a helluva lotta fun.
“My name is Crystal,” Jackie said in a singsong voice that made her part of the theme song sound even dorkier than it had been with backing vocals and the house band. “I like to cancan on the dance floor. Are you with me?” She planted her hands on her hips before singing her line again. “I like to cancan on the dance floor—are you with me?”
Shaking her head, Thea mumbled the scripted response back.
Jackie made a tsk-tsk sound and waved her finger in time with the beat they both knew by heart. “Tiffany Twist, your dance floor awaits.”
Thea rolled her eyes. “No more Jell-O shots for you.”
But she got up anyway and walked arm in arm with her sister out to the dance floor, not because she felt she had to so she could avoid a blowup but because she wanted to. Thea didn’t miss the cameras or the yelling directors or the pressure of being a child star, but she did miss silly moments like this with her sister.
So she took the dance floor with her sister, and they reenacted the opening dance sequence to the one kids’ show they’d been on together, portraying sisters with more enthusiasm than skill at an all-girls dance academy. It had been one of the best summers of her life, filming those episodes with her sister. The show had only lasted a few episodes before cancelation, but Thea and Jackie still knew the moves by heart.
That’s the way it worked on the really good days. The palpable sense of happiness and feeling that things were going to be better from now on found a way to burrow into a person’s heart and power them forward. Tonight didn’t just feel like one of those good days. It felt like the best of them.
And the only thing that could have made it better would be if Kade was here, too—which was pretty much the last thing Thea should be thinking but was still the only thing on her mind.
Thea ignored the tightness in her chest as she swung around into the next sequence of choreographed steps without thinking—all the while praying she wasn’t going to have to keep her promise to her sister later tonight and tell Kade she was starting to fall for him. At best, he’d feel sorry for her and pretend until the bride and groom said “I do” so he wouldn’t hurt her feelings. At worst… Well, the “at best” was pretty bad, so there was no way she’d even try to imagine the worst. Instead, she’d just dance and pretend that the wedding was still a week away.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Kade had no fucking clue what he was doing.
For the past ten minutes, he’d been lurking on the path that led to the pavilion where the bachelorette party was in full karaoke mode, by the sounds of it, trying to decide if he should follow it or just wait for Thea to leave the bachelorette party. It wasn’t that he’d planned on coming down here to find her—he’d just gone for a walk and had ended up here, leaning against one of the trees and straining to hear her voice in the screechtacular version of “We Got The Beat.”
He closed his eyes so he could better focus on each individual voice. The high-pitched one had to be the short bridesmaid. What was her name? Pansy? Pepper? Piper—that was it. The low, I’ve-been-done-wrong one couldn’t be anyone other than Jackie, and it was tinged with enough true emotion to make him wonder if there was more to her than just being a bitchy bride. That left the hesitant middle voice that always came in with the lyrics half a beat behind. He tried to imagine that singing voice coming out of Thea’s mouth, and for some reason, it just didn’t fit.
“Just the man I was hoping to see.”
His eyes snapped open at the sound of Thea’s voice.
She was standing a few feet away from where the path curved around a large growth of sagebrush. Her hand was on her hip, and the glow from the path sconces bathed her in soft, golden light. She had this relieved look on her face as if she was so fucking happy to see him, and everything inside him settled. All the questions about what he was doing, how long he’d skulked around, and where he should go next were answered in a heartbeat. He was waiting for Thea, for as long as it took and wherever she wanted.
