The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [88]
“That sounds great. I love that kind of thing,” Bean said. She was a liar. Bean, while a nice enough person, had never spent any sort of time considering community service. In spite of (or because of) having spent so much time in a city with so much misery all around her, she had willfully shut out the idea of doing for her fellow man until that very moment.
“Great. You want to come by and we’ll kick together some names and make some calls?”
“Sure. Day after tomorrow? After I finish here?”
“That’s fine. I’ve got to leave at six, though. I’m heading up to the city to see some friends.”
“Oh,” Bean said. Honestly, she had hoped they might do their business, and then she could suggest a glass of wine, and then they would talk....
“I’ll see you later, then,” he said, and disappeared into the stacks.
Bean stood upright, stretching her shoulder blades back where the books had dug into her skin. Looking casual was so much work.
She went back to straightening the shelves, flicking her finger along the uneven tops of the books. It interested her that some of the shelves were so much dustier than the others. Apparently nobody in Barnwell was big on self-help books or slow cooker recipes.
Aidan puzzled her. If this were New York, she’d have been fairly sure he was stalking her, what with the running into her all the time, but here, there were a limited number of people you could run into. It was all coincidence, she was sure. Except today he’d clearly wanted to talk to her. Was he . . . interested in her?
Someone had left a few books on one of the tables, and Bean scooped them up as she passed by, looking idly at the numbers and then searching out their homes. Dating Aidan wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility—he was young and single and cute, and so was she.
Her better nature leaped into her throat and she shook her head, slipping the last wayward book onto the shelf. Yes, Beany, you’d make a great partner for him. What with the embezzling and the adultery and the drinking. That’s what every man wants in a wife—a vaguely alcoholic, fornicating thief.
No, he was just being nice. She’d take it as nothing more than that. Well, maybe she could drink a little less. And make sure that she looked good when she went out for a run, just in case. And Edward . . . She wasn’t quite ready to give up that particular drug yet. No. It was so nice to be able to forget for a little while.
FOURTEEN
The fluorescent light flickered, idly threatening to burn out altogether. Cordy stared up at it, her eyes burning from the disco-ball sputters, and waited. “This will be a little cold,” the nurse said, and held up a tube of gel, drizzling a thin line on Cordy’s stomach as though she were topping a sundae. The sensation was, indeed, cold, though less unpleasant than a chilly stethoscope or, worse, an icy speculum. Cordy turned her head to see the monitor as the nurse pressed the wand against her skin.
Nothing for a moment, a blur of white, the pressure of the plastic against her belly, and then the nurse pushed harder, angling her hand back and forth. “Your uterus is retroverted,” she said conversationally, and Cordy said, “Oh,” as though she knew what that meant.
“No big deal,” the nurse said, continuing to press. “It’ll tip itself the right way by the second trimester.” She slid the wand, and then stopped, pushing again.
“Ah-ha!” she said, as though she had just located an elusive contact lens, and clicked a few mouse buttons, marking tiny plus signs on the screen. She pushed again, slid over the slickness of the gel, clicked again. “Looks like about ten weeks,” she said.
Cordy peered at the screen, trying to make something out in the din of pebbled gray space. The image spread out like the cartoon beam of a flashlight, and in the center, she