Backstage Romance: An Austen-Inspired Romantic Comedy Box Set by Gigi Blume (ebook reader with highlighter txt) 📕

knew what happened last time, and I wasn’t in the mood to get fired again. But I didn’t have to do any of those things. Colin stood, sipped the last of his drink, and reached for his man purse. But what happened next almost did give me pink eye—if one could get eye diseases from seeing things that shouldn’t be seen. Like your best friend kissing the guy who only recently declared his unwavering love to you. They weren’t making out, so that was a relief. In fact, the kiss was so brief, I thought I might have imagined it. But Colin had the most stupid grin as he parted from her. I think he whispered something to the effect of, “I’ll see you on the morrow, my lamb.” He made for the exit with a bounce in his step, pausing briefly to bid me a good evening, and rode off into the sunset—or at least to Sunset Blvd.

My day had officially reached level one million on the crazy meter. Charlotte and Colin? No, no, no, no, no. Where were the hidden cameras? If this was some sort of messed up reality show, I wanted to be voted off yesterday.

“Pizza!”

I closed the distance, sliding behind the bar so there would be no barrier between us. She wrinkled her nose and narrowed her eyes.

“We only have pizza on Fridays,” she said innocently.

“Our code word, remember? When one of us is making a horrible dating mistake, the other is supposed to say pizza. Colin? Really? You can’t be serious.”

I was mentally face palming. What’s the point in a code word if you have to explain it every time?

She blushed. “Actually, he’s kind of nice.”

“Kind of nice? Kittens are kind of nice. Hot tea on a rainy day is kind of nice. Colin is ridiculous.”

She shrugged and smiled within herself while mindlessly wiping the bar with a towel.

“Fries before guys, Charlotte. Remember when we were going to get that on a tattoo?”

She laughed. “I’m glad we chickened out.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. “But it’s still our girl pact.”

She paused her busy nothings to look at me squarely in the eye.

“You know what, Beth? I’m not like you. I don’t need to go out with the hottest guys in the world. I’m practical. Like Jessica Rabbit. I want somebody who makes me laugh.”

I snorted. The kind of snort that would spew milk from my nose if I were drinking milk.

“He’s laughable. That’s for sure.”

Charlotte’s daydreamy grin turned into a fiery scowl.

“I suppose nobody else has a valid opinion on that because you’ve stamped your authority on it?”

“It doesn’t bother you how he jumps from one woman to the other in the bat of an eye?” (A heavily mascara-caked eye.) “He was just in here last week making a scene.”

“If I recall, you were the one making the scene. Or was it Colin spilling yams all over the customers?”

“Okay. I own that. I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

“No. Don’t give me that. You just can’t stand the fact every man you turn down isn’t wallowing in sorrow. You can’t wrap your head around the idea of someone else liking him just because you don’t, that he could find a date even though he wasn’t successful with you, or that he’s not crying into a bottle of gin just because Elizabeth Bennet turned him down.”

I had no idea where this was coming from. She painted me to like some sort of maneater.

She threw her towel down and stormed off somewhere in the back of the restaurant. What was going on? I didn’t even recognize her. I didn’t recognize any of my friends anymore. Jane was, thank goodness, past the grief stage but was now in a scary denial phase. She wore a perpetual plastic smile and was always too busy with Pinterest-worthy tasks like an overachiever Barbie. Whenever I would ask how she was doing, her eyes would glaze over, and she’d say something like, “I’m great. Couldn’t be better.” Then she’d go off and organize her Kanban board and throw out most of her possessions.

Newsflash: I was a minimalist’s second-worst roommate. First prize was reserved for Lydia. I would find things under the couch and in the bathroom, I wish I could unsee. I’d never met anyone quite as messy as Lydia. She perfected a particular kind of messy. She was the Jackson Pollock of messy. That in itself didn’t surprise me in her behavior. As long as I’d known her, she’d washed her car a total of two times. One of those times because the rain water ran in muddy streaks across her windshield, rendering it unsafe to drive. She actually got a ticket for it. The other time was because she was submitting her car so she could drive for Uber. That didn't work out so well.

But lately, Lydia had been uncharacteristically distant from me. Her nightly partying was nothing new, and I really didn’t want to be invited to go out with her and the girls to pick up random idiots in bars. But she would usually chat my ear off about what they drank and who got asked to dance and who got so plastered they had to be carried home. Sound familiar? Now when I asked how her night was, she’d give me the old one-word blow off. “Fine.” Then I’d be ignored in favor of baby goats in sweaters on YouTube.

My life had suddenly turned into a demented Lifetime movie. I was at that point in the story where the protagonist was in a series of montages set to inspirational music and discovered something profound about herself by the end of the song. The best I could do to recreate that was take a drive after work with the radio blasting. My old Volvo didn’t even have a CD player. I had to plug my phone into a cassette tape auxiliary adapter to listen to my playlist. It made a strange squeaking sound—like a dying chipmunk. The buzzing