Damn Your Kiss

Chapter 3

"Suck it, bitch!" I yelled at the top of my lungs, my hands raised in the air in victory.

"Ev, calm down. It's just a game of Uno," Nora said, rolling her eyes.

"You're just a sore loser," I teased, bending over to pick up the Uno cards that I'd knocked over in my over-zealous celebration of winning.

"You know, technically, you didn't yell Uno, so the game is still going," she said matter-of-factly, and I stuck my tongue out at her. My inner child was apparently making a guest appearance today.

Nora just rolled her eyes and gathered the few remaining cards up so that we could put them away inside the box. She handed them to me and I haphazardly stuffed them back into the box. Nora sighed and eyed the box.

"If you're not going to do it right-" she began, but I stuffed the box and the cards into her hands before she could finish. "Thank you."

Nora was the most organized and anal person I had ever met in my entire life. She always had to have everything just so. I was the exact opposite. I was messy, and scatterbrained, and it drove Nora insane sometimes. Especially when she would come over to my apartment. She'd wrinkle her nose in disgust at the clutter and random papers strewn about, but she'd learned early on in our friendship not to a) clean up anything or b) make any comments about my messiness. As I told her a million times before, I knew that I was messy. But it helped my creative process.

She called bullshit every time.

"Well, I'm starved," Nora said, flopping back onto the couch and throwing the Uno cards down on my coffee table.

"We can get some pizza or something? Or I have leftovers from the take out we had the other night," I offered.

"You mean the takeout we had over a week ago?" Nora asked, her eyebrow raised and her face completely and utterly disgusted.

"Has it been a week?" I pondered, and I watched Nora shudder at the thought of what my refridgerator must look like.

"Let's just order pizza," she said, pulling out her phone and dialling our favorite pizza place. Her disgust never left her face, though, and I almost laughed at her expression.

"Yes, hi, I need a medium cheese, pork sausage and mushroom pizza for delivery. Yes that's correct. I'll pay cash. Thanks. Bye," she said into her pretty rose gold iPhone.

She took her wallet from her purse and began to look through it for cash. She looked frustrated over something, what I couldn't fathom, as she had already pulled out a $20 bill. It wasn't like the pizza would be more than that.

"God dammit," she muttered under her breath.

"What?" I asked her, and she heaved a sigh before throwing her wallet down next to her.

"I had sixty bucks in here last night, and somehow forty of it disappeared," she said sullenly.

"I told you that you shouldn't take your wallet in with you to the party. But you insisted. God forbid Nora Abrams actually listens to anyone about anything," I teased.

She rolled her eyes and placed the $20 on the coffee table. "At least I got you out of the house. Even if it was like pulling teeth to get you to actually do anything while you were there."

"I told you, I wasn't in the mood for a party. Certainly not that party, anyway," I replied.

"By the way," she said, turning to me with a curious look on her face. "Where did you disappear to for half the night?"

"I went outside," I told her, looking guiltily down at my lap.

"With who?" she asked accusingly.