Check, Please (Book #2)

Twenty-Four.

I'd been staring at the clock for so long that the image of its face had seared into my mind.

Twenty-three.

I stood up and stretched my arms overhead, even doing a few jumping jacks to rid myself of the nervous energy that I felt building in my core.

Twenty-four.

Frowning, I checked the calendar on my phone to make sure that it really was Thursday.

It was.

Twenty-five.

Nervousness was beginning to give way to worry as I twirled a pen between my fingers. In all the months I'd known her, she'd never been late to anything--not once.

Nearly half an hour passed before I unlocked my phone again and tapped out a message to Melanie: Hey, are we still meeting today?

Another three minutes went by before my screen lit up with her response: Yes! I'm so sorry, be there soon.

So I waited.

I'd been sitting in our usual study room for thirty-five minutes by the time Melanie came through the door. I opened my mouth to crack a joke about where'd she'd been, but one look at her face made the words die on my lips. She looked like she'd either been crying or was on the verge of bursting into tears -- maybe both. Despite keeping her head down, I managed to catch a long enough glimpse of her eyes to realize that the whites were tinged an angry red.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled while avoiding my gaze. I stared wordlessly as she hurriedly pulled binders and books from her bag, only slowing when she set the last textbook on the table and saw that the title read, Advanced Concepts in Organic Chemistry.

"Oh, my God." She buried her face in her hands for a moment before letting out a long groan. "I'm so sorry," came her muffled voice. "I forgot to swap out the tutoring materials in my bag after my session with someone on Monday."

I frowned. Always punctual and almost freakishly organized, it wasn't like Melanie to seem so frazzled. "Don't worry about it," I said. "Is everything alright?"

Rather than answering, she dropped her arms to the side so I could see the worry lines marring her forehead. She gnawed on her bottom lip for a few seconds before pulling a chair out from the table and sinking into it. "There was an accident on the 405."

She pronounced the name of the freeway the same way that everyone from California seemed to: "four-oh-five." But even those of us who weren't native to the region understood that getting onto the 405 at any point in the day was a gamble. Notorious for traffic jams and rubberneckers, I'd quickly come up with the rule that if I had to take the 405 to get somewhere, I probably wasn't going to go.

"My niece's birthday was on Tuesday, so I went down to San Diego again," she continued, her fingers moving from the corner of the textbook that lay in front of her to her hair. She repeated the motion a few times before pausing to stare at her half-painted finger nails. Melanie frowned, her attention captured by the haphazardly drawn lines of lilac gloss. "Wow, that's embarrassing. I forgot that I let her practice painting my nails."

Using the thumb nail of her right hand, Melanie began to chip at the paint so that purple flakes fluttered down onto the desktop. "That kid is so spoiled, you know. My brother and his wife give her everything she wants leading up to a deployment. Everything." She brushed the crumbs of polish onto the floor and then began working on her other hand. "I guess I understand why, but she's turning into a total nightmare."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because she's smart. Laney figured out that if she gets in trouble, her mom will probably call Kev, and my brother will want to talk to her on the phone."