At Your Most Beautiful by Harper Bliss (best free ereader .TXT) 📗

“Guess who just slid into my DM?” Griff asked as she walked into the living room of the two-bedroom apartment Quinn shared with her.

“Your question’s too vague for me to properly answer.” Quinn was lying on the couch, scrolling through her phone.

“Mrs. Morgan Graham.”

“Oh god.” Quinn sat up a little straighter. “What does she want?”

“I think she wants you back. Look at this.” Griff showed Quinn her phone screen.

Quinn’s freezing me out. Is she okay? Can you ask her to get it in touch, please?

“Oh, please.” Quinn rolled her eyes, remembering the message Morgan had sent her earlier, which she had pretty successfully erased from her conscious mind. “She’s probably bored again. Do feel free to block her at once.”

“Have you blocked her?” Griff asked.

“No,” Quinn had to admit. “It’s hard. I don’t know why I can’t bring myself to do it.”

“How about you give me your phone and I give you mine and we block her on each other’s phone at the same time.”

Quinn laughed, although it was more out of some strange feeling of guilt than anything else. “It seems needlessly harsh.”

“What she did to you for almost four years is harsh, Quinn. You no longer giving her the time of day is the only logical consequence of how Morgan treated you.”

Quinn nodded. “I know. You’re totally right. But… aargh. It drives me nuts that I can’t just do it. Get it over with. Be done with her.”

“You loved her for a long time.” Griff held out her hand for Quinn’s phone. “Maybe you need to get back in the saddle and go on the rebound. Spend some sexy time with another woman and put some distance between yourself and all the memories you have of Morgan.”

“I haven’t come across anyone sexier than Morgan to help me with that,” Quinn said.

“You haven’t exactly been looking.”

“Maybe not.” Griff was right. Quinn hadn’t been looking. And yet. Instead of handing over her phone, Quinn scrolled to the images she had downloaded from her camera earlier. “Or maybe I have.” She showed Griff the screen.

“Uh-huh,” Griff hummed. “Looks right up your alley, girl. Who is she? A client?”

Quinn nodded. “Not just any client. I know her from before. She was my next-door neighbor in Milbury.”

“Aha. Red flag alert.” Griff peered at the screen again. “As red as that dress this woman is wearing.”

“Why a red flag?” Quinn mostly asked because she needed to be told out loud by someone she respected.

“Well, I don’t know, Quinn. If she was your neighbor, I suspect she was your family’s neighbor too. What would Brooke have to say about that? Remember how she railed against Morgan?”

“Mom would have a stroke on the spot, that’s for sure. But you just said I needed to go on the rebound…”

“Are you serious? Are you really interested in your old neighbor in that way? Is she even gay or will you make her gay-for-Quinn?” Griff sat there batting her lashes ostentatiously.

Quinn put her phone to the side. “What if I told you that, a long time ago, this woman and I had quite the night together?” Apart from the first few months, when she’d been dying to share the mind-blowing encounter she’d had with Maya with someone else, it hadn’t been that hard to stay silent. It had turned into a precious little secret she kept buried deep inside her, something entirely her own that only one other person in the world knew about. Seeing Maya again had changed everything.

“What do you mean?” Griff, who was a reporter, slipped into journalist mode.

“We slept together about ten years ago when I was home for the summer. My parents were away for the weekend. It felt like Maya and I were the only people left on earth. It was pretty magical, actually.”

“Hold on.” Griff set her jaw. “What happened? How old were you, for starters?”

“I was twenty-four. She was forty-five at the time.”

Griff shook her head. “Of course,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

“Oh my god, Griff. It was so amazing. Like the most heavenly dream you’ve ever had, but for real. Afterward, she made me promise not to tell anyone and I didn’t. I kept my promise. Then this afternoon, I find out she’s the new Acton Academy teacher whose portrait I’m doing.”

“No shit.” Griff blew some air out from between her teeth. “And that’s her.” Griff looked at Maya’s picture again. “Fuck, Quinn. You must be quite beside yourself right now.”

“You could say that.”

“And still you can’t bring yourself to block Morgan.”

“I should just do it now, but I’m not sure I’m in my right mind after seeing Maya again.”

“What happened when you saw her?”

“It was… lovely but also weird. She’s still as hot as she was back then and—” Quinn wasn’t sure she was allowed to share this information with someone else, but telling Griff would have no bearing whatsoever on Maya’s life. “One of the reasons she moved to New York is because she wants to date women.”

“No. Fucking. Way!”

“I know.” Quinn hadn’t really allowed herself to give the whole thing too much thought—perhaps for exactly this reason. If she did start thinking about it in earnest, she was afraid of where her mind would go next. “We went for coffee and had a really great talk. Nothing flirty or anything like that. More like catching up. Her son’s married to Beth Robbins, by the way. They just had a child.”

“The Beth Robbins of CNN?” Unlike Quinn, Griff could be glued to the TV news for hours on end. “Quite the good-looking family then.”

“At least the women are,” Quinn joked.

“What else do we need?” Griff gave a hearty chuckle. “So, your possible rebound lady is a granny?”

“A very young grandmother,” Quinn corrected her friend. “Tommy’s not even thirty yet. Who has children at that age these days?”

“Beth Robbins must have felt her clock ticking. If I’m not mistaken, she’s in her early thirties.” Griff rarely got it wrong. “If they want more than one bambino, it