Relying On Ben and Jerry (Waltham #1)

Chapter Sixteen: You Go, Glen Coco

“See, I’m starting to have quite the problem thinking when I’m around him,” I confessed. “It’s unnerving.”

“It’s love,” Kline sighed.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” I cautioned her after I gaped at her wordlessly for a minute and twenty-three seconds. “Sometimes I barely even think we’re in the friends category to tell you the truth.”

“That’s because,” she explained to me patiently, “you both are obviously so very beyond that in your adorable hearts.”

“It is becoming increasingly hard for me not to just punch you in the throat,” I told her honestly.

“No fighting in my car,” Norma declared sternly from the front seat, rubbing the steering wheel of the brand new Mercedes with her thumb soothingly. “I’ll make one of you get in the trunk if this gets out of hand.”

Kline and I shot each other an encouraging look, but I don’t think either of us quite felt up to getting thrown around like a rag doll while having the time of your life with possibilities of death involved. There would be plenty of trunks to ride in later.

The car went silent for one glorious moment.

“Are we there yet?” Peter demanded.

“No,” the entire car replied.

~*~

After a couple more threatening yells of being thrown in the trunk, making Peter walk, and Norma’s desire to beat another driver to death with one of my chandelier earrings, we eventually made it to a parking spot in front of a little boutique apparently only a short walk away from where the action was, close enough that it wasn’t too far to walk and it didn’t constitute us spending another handful of minutes stuffed into a small space with claustrophobic Peter.

I glanced around the sidewalk, frowning. “This is it?”

“Not yet,” Colonel cautioned me, patting the top of my head with his bear-paw sized hand. “Calm, Tomatoes. Good things are comin’ for those who wait.”

“But I’m impatient,” I whined.

“Oh my god, she just stomped her foot,” Peter exclaimed. “I didn’t know that girls actually did that in real life. Lena, do it again, it was mighty sassy of you.”

“You really are a moron,” Kline announced under her breath with a snort.

He glanced over at her but Norma pushed him aside as she stepped onto the sidewalk, laughing.

“Don’t make the girl with the legwarmers angry,” she scolded him.

“Yeah!” I chimed. “What she said!”

We started walking up the streets in a group, a giant bickering group of teenagers, making our way closer to the tourist attraction. The buildings looked a tad bit antiquated and there were people prowling all over the place, the scene back-dropped by gray clouds. It was a little windy and I was freezing, but it certainly wasn’t the coldest it had ever been while I was in residence, so I couldn’t really complain about it.

I maneuvered to walk beside Norma so she would block the wind.

“It’s been so long since I’ve last been here,” she told me as I fell into step beside her, her eyes excited and her clothes vintage. “We could go walk around the Harvard campus or go to Sweet—no, no, Pinkberry!”

“What in the world is a Pinkberry?” I flatly demanded, glancing over at her. “Sounds weird.”

“It’s an ice cream shop,” she told me.