Carry Me Home Read Online Free Page A

home, but he was in a frat, so it wasn’t possible. And her roommate was usually around during the week, of course.
    As the days went by and nothing else happened—nothing but the vague sense of eyes on her—she started to doubt what she’d seen herself, what she still felt. Maybe she really had overreacted, had gotten an idea in her head from watching too many slasher movies, had spooked herself. She’d probably made a whole big deal out of something that wasn’t anything at all. Nothing like this had ever happened to anyone she knew, or even anyone she knew of, because it only really happened in those movies, or in the big city. It didn’t happen in Idaho. It sure didn’t happen in Paradise.

LADIES’ NIGHT
    Zoe made an unsuccessful attempt to tug the yellow lace dress a little farther down her legs. “You sure this outfit works?” she asked her friend.
    “I’m damn-straight positive it does. And quit messing up my dress. Here.” Rochelle took Zoe by the shoulders, spun her toward her, and attacked her with the eyeliner.
    “I’m going to look like a raccoon,” Zoe complained.
    “Will you stop? You’re going to look like a girl who just might want to get laid in this decade, instead of somebody who’s spent her Friday nights for the past two years working on her dissertation.”
    “Five years,” Zoe muttered, careful not to move her face too much. “Counting the coursework. And I was getting laid. Sometimes. I had a boyfriend.” Until she hadn’t, because she wasn’t that good with men. She didn’t flatter them enough, or concentrate on them enough, or something. Whatever.
    “Oh, yeah, honey, and I can tell he was a pistol. Under the covers, right? After you both got ready for bed? Every Wednesday and Saturday night?”
    “As opposed to what? On the kitchen table?”
    The eyeliner wand stilled in midapplication. “Oh, man,” Rochelle sighed. “It’s been way too long.”
    “Are you overdoing me?” Zoe asked, feeling the applicator moving beyond her upper eyelid. “Wings are stupid. At least on me.”
    “Wings are hot, but I’m not doing them on you. Just smudging you up a bunch,” Rochelle said, flipping the applicator in her hand and putting the soft end to work. “You’ve got these fantastic big eyes, and it’ll be dark in the bar. You want a guy to keep his own eyes up there on yours, right? Give him a reason to look. I’ve got little squinty eyes, so no hope for it.”
    “You do not have squinty eyes,” Zoe said. “You have really pretty blue eyes, and you’re tall and blonde, too. All the good things.”
    “Doing your lips. Open up a little.”
    Zoe obeyed, feeling like a Barbie being dressed by a particularly obsessive seven-year-old, and Rochelle went on. “Yeah, I do. Squinty as hell. Of course, no guy in this town has looked past my neck since the seventh grade, so it’s pretty much a hopeless case, but I’m still giving it a shot. That’s why the hair.”
    She finished Zoe’s mouth off with a coating of gloss, and Zoe spoke at last. “So the hair isn’t real, but . . . ?”
    “The hair’s fake, the boobs are real. Go with the one that counts. Every single woman around here knows I started life as a muddy ol’ brunette, and no man gives a damn that the blonde’s from a bottle, because they know I grew the parts they care about most all by myself.” She bent from the waist, scrunched her fingers into the long blonde tresses, then stood up and shook it into disheveled order. “Just out of bed,” she said, looking in the mirror. “Perfect. Do it.”
    “Because I want to be messy?”
    “Oh, yeah. You want to look like you just tumbled out of bed after some extra-good lovin’ from a man who knows how.” She put a hand on the back of Zoe’s head and gave it a little push. “Over you go.”
    Zoe bent over, scrunched, stood up, shook, and looked at her reflection in front of the full-length mirror in Rochelle’s North Main apartment. “Just out of bed