Welcome to Corbet's Inlet, North Carolina, where the teenagers act like adults and the adults act like teenagers. It's Griffin Connolly's favorite place in the world. And while she may not be good at making decisions when it comes to her own life, s...
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Griffin almost wrecked her parents' golf cart twice on the way to the Armstrongs' house.
What the hell was going on? Was Lauren that obsessed with her shiny new college life she couldn't spare a moment to text Griffin back? Was she mad about something? Was her phone broken so only texts to Griffin wouldn't go through?
Griffin was about to find out. She zipped past the neighborhood's car gate without waving at the security guard.
She could already tell no one was home before she pulled into Lauren's driveway. The screened and front doors were both closed (Ms. Armstrong liked the front door open when she was there—she said the smell of the ocean helped her concentrate on shitty manuscripts). Griffin rang the doorbell and stood there for a minute, anyway. No answer. Ms. Armstrong was probably at her office in Wilmington and Lauren was probably working at the Club. Griffin headed there next.
When she walked through the open french doors of the Club's main ballroom, she was confronted with hundreds of bouquets of lilies. People were running around setting vases and white linens out. A woman in a headset had a phone clutched to her other ear as she barked orders out. A guy in all white and a chef's hat was standing by a buffet table with a hand clamped over his eyes.
Pretty much, it looked like chaos. Griffin was suddenly hyperaware of intruding.
Just as she was about to bail, she spotted a tall blonde among the disarray directing a swarm of people carrying AV equipment toward the stage in the back corner. Griffin started toward her, ignoring the tiny voice in the back of her mind saying this probably wasn't the best time to handle this. Whatever. Lauren was just an intern. It wasn't like Griffin was about to get her fired or anything.
Griffin crossed the ballroom, dodging a few more people in chef's hats. Whatever event was going on looked expensive as hell and a little disorganized, but Lauren could not have been more in her element. She was thriving on it, actually, and it was kind of impressive...
"Lauren?" Griffin called out when she was within earshot. She was pretty sure Lauren heard her, too, but just didn't turn around to acknowledge it. Awesome. "Lauren."
Lauren turned, finally, and it took a beat too long for her smile to teeter toward genuine.
"Griff! What're you doing here?" she said brightly. She passed off a large vase of flowers to one of the servers helping set up; then she crossed her arms over her chest, forgoing a hug—or anything cordial, really. Griffin hadn't seen Lauren use this kind of body language since they randomly ran into one of her ex-boyfriends on the beach two years ago. That put her on her heels a bit.
"Uh—" Griffin started. She liked to pretend she was more confrontational than she actually was. Had she anticipated this kind of greeting, though, maybe she would've come more prepared. "Hey. Where have you been?"
