I'm not the only one in my reflection.

Part one

— Do you think if I text Amber that you're waiting here, needy and naked, she'll come running in 5 seconds or 10? — Tara asked with a grin, burying nose in her phone, quickly tapping finger on the screen.

— Don't you dare write that to her! — Katherine exclaimed, then hesitated for a moment and added with a grin, fiddling with the pendant around her neck, given by her beloved girlfriend. — I bet she'll be at the door in 5 seconds. — The girl, continuing to finger the pendant with one hand, held her own phone in the other hand, chatting with friends in their group chat. She wrote that she and Tara would be offline for a while, as they were going to watch some movie while eating popcorn and not be distracted by smartphones.

The redhead shook her head at the message from Amber, «What's your favorite scary movie?». Her friends were funny, but sometimes they didn't feel her boundaries. Especially the boundaries regarding the injury inflicted on her by Jill Roberts.

It was also strange that Freeman, who had never liked to joke about her girlfriend in this way, wrote such a phrase in a comic form.

That's what Mindy used to joke about.

— Oh my God! — Carpenter looked up from her phone and jumped up to her friend, grabbing her by the shoulders, preventing her from completing the task set earlier: throwing a pack of popcorn into the microwave. — I was joking! You're with her already, you know... — Tara played with her eyebrows, then made a hip movement back and forth and an obscene gesture with her hands, depicting an explosion.

— I won't tell you the details, but let's just say there are few surfaces left in Amber's house that she and I, uh, didn't study together. — The girl tugged at the ends of her red hair, it was at this moment that she once again remembered why she decided to repaint herself in the first place.

Every dinner with her family followed the same scenario. An awkward, tense scenario. In most cases, Katherine tried to avoid this event by running away on a date with Amber, with whom she felt safe and calm. And if she wasn't around, the task of landing and calming her down was taken over by the pendant that Freeman had given her a few months ago, at the very beginning of their relationship.

But this time Amber had some business with her mother, and she canceled their date, so Murphy was already planning how she would beat off her brother's sarcastic comments and try not to look resentfully at her mother, who would diligently pretend that the two young men in front of her were not her children.

Her older brother would probably (again) make some disgusting comment about Amber, Katherine would (again) wring his hand and slam his face on the table, demanding to take back his words, and the mother just looked at her daughter's red-dyed hair with an empty expression.

Until Murphy changed her hair color from dark to red around the age of eleven, her mom couldn't even look at her for more than a few seconds without seeing her younger brother with his wide grin on his lips.

Being traumatized by your own family seems hard.

— Nymphomaniacs. — Carpenter teased and picked up the phone that she had so disdainfully thrown on the stone surface of the table, too intrigued by the possible discussion of her best friend's sex life with her girlfriend. — Oh, look at that, your girlfriend answered me.

— Is she already outside the door?

Tara's reply was interrupted by a call to the landline phone.

— I'll answer, and you take care of the popcorn in the meantime. — Katherine pointed, nodding at the lonely and forgotten package of popcorn lying on the table, and went to the phone before picking it up.