Just One Kiss

“I meant that we’ve had some rough times and will probably keep having them.” Angela held up her bottle, too. “Here’s to continuing to keep our sanity. Which in the last year I’m convinced would have been long gone without you guys.”

Jack hoisted his ale. “And then some.”

The four of them were sitting in the living room of the building’s vacant sixth apartment, which they’d agreed to use as a common area. Each of them had donated whatever leftover odds and ends of furniture and kitchen equipment they didn’t need in their own places, and regularly contributed toward keeping the refrigerator and cabinets stocked with wine, beer and snack foods for times when they needed to meet, or, as Seth pointed out they did all too rarely, get together and unwind.

Tonight Bonnie and Seth shared the hideous olive-green couch they’d scored from Seth’s parents’ basement, each sitting rather pointedly, Angela thought, at either end. Jack sprawled in an overstuffed, worn rust-colored easy chair from Bonnie’s grandmother, and Angela perched in the graceful wooden rocker she inherited from Aunt Dorcas, which hadn’t fit anywhere else in her apartment. Demi Anderson, Caroline’s friend, who’d taken over her massage therapy studio, and whom none of them knew well, had donated the black-and-white leather love seat that looked as if it belonged on the set of a futuristic movie. The four of them rarely sat on it. Silly, because it was in perfect condition and comfortable. Somehow they felt as if they were trespassing. Kind of how Demi seemed to feel around them.