She swayed her head from side to side, like, touché. Then she picked up her drink and slid over the stools between us to sit next to me, with a languorous and long-limbed grace like some kind of sexy tai chi. From this close, I could smell her perfume, creamy sweetness with hints of sandalwood and cocoa. It was surprisingly decadent for someone with so much edge, and only gave me further notions.

“Deflection glamours are, admittedly, a bit rude,” she said, sounding not even a little sorry. “But I wasn’t in the mood for making nice with anyone tonight. And even I would have felt like a monster for shooting down the saddest bachelorette in all the world when she went looking for a shoulder to cry on.”

I glanced over my own shoulder, to find that the bachelorette in question had abandoned her melted green mess of a cocktail, leaving behind only a wad of crumpled dollar bills pinned by a coaster.

“Ugh, do you think she left with the Blackmoores?” I asked with a shudder. “Because, wow, talk about choosing the wrong pool in which to drown your woes. I bet whichever one she winds up with doesn’t even bother to buy her brunch tomorrow.”

“In theory, I would agree. In practice?” Shrugging, she took a sip from the curly straw bobbing in her suspiciously tropical-looking drink, complete with an umbrella topper. “Haven’t we all been there?”

I stared at her, my mouth dropping open. “And when you say ‘we,’ you would be referring to . . . ?”

“Myself,” she said, lips rounding enticingly around her straw. “And, unless my emotional-carnage radar has gone totally awry, also you.”

I watched as she took another serene sip of her unlikely drink, my mind whirling. Talia and Gareth? This . . . did not compute.

In high school, while I dated in equal opportunity fashion, Talia had almost exclusively pursued girls. And the prettiest ones at that, lithe cheerleaders and ruddy-cheeked soccer players and the pert vice president of the student council. All of them hopelessly smitten with her, and invariably crushed when she eventually lost interest and wandered away to her next pursuit. It wasn’t that she was cruel so much as easily bored, and completely frank about her disinterest in inhabiting any relationship beyond a month or two. Getting your heart broken by Talia Avramov, one way or another, was basically a Thistle High queer girl rite of passage, one for which you could really blame only yourself. The fact that she’d never seemed to notice I even existed had been my particular bane.

And of the few guys I remembered among her conquests, none had been of Gareth’s dick-swinging ilk.

“Trust me, I’m aware of the cognitive dissonance,” she said dryly, as if she’d read my mind. But though divination was among the Avramovs’ skills, they were much more into communing with the spirit world than prying into living people’s thoughts. “It was not my finest hour. But I was coming out of a pretty terrible breakup, and he was around, and he can be, you know. Oddly charming when he’s not too far up his own ass to make an effort.”