“Oh, wait—!” she said, and hurried after her. But she was too late. She bumped into Barb at the door with a pouch of sugar in one hand and a bundle of lacy blue fabric in the other.
“Olivia, sweetheart, I think you may have misplaced something personal in here,” she said quietly, and pressed Olivia’s wadded-up underwear into her palm.
Olivia wanted to die. Melt through the floor. Hide in a box of pasta. Bury herself under bags of beans. Luckily, they were still halfway in the pantry and off camera.
“Oh, thank you, Barb. I must have dropped them when I was, um, doing laundry.” The lie burned her face. The laundry room was clear on the other side of the house and nowhere near the pantry. The only reason her panties would have been in the pantry was because Barb’s very own son had peeled them off her trembling legs not twenty minutes before and she’d been too distracted by their sudden arrival to put them back on.
Barb gave her a sweet, innocent smile and swept back around her to continue making dessert.
Olivia almost opted to lock herself in the pantry for the rest of eternity. She couldn’t bear the thought of turning around to face anyone. Her face was positively aflame.
She wadded her underwear in her fist and attempted a mad dash across the kitchen. Chuck had risen to wash his peachy hands at the sink and turned to stop her.
“Where are you going?” he asked with a curious tilt of his head.
Olivia glanced at the cameras, which had focused on Barb and Sam’s conversation on the other side of the island. She leaned in close and hissed through her teeth. “To drown myself in the pool becauseyour motherjust found myunderwearin the pantry where we werehaving sexright before they got here!”
Chuck’s eyes popped wide. He flushed and looked like he was trying not to laugh.
“Shut up,” she said with a mortified glare, and stepped around him. She hurried off to the bedroom, thankfully with no camera crew in tow, and headed to the closet for a fresh pair of underwear. Once she had it on, she stole into the bathroom to fix her hair and apply a little bit of makeup since before the surprise arrival, Chuck had tousled her hair into tangles, and before that, she’d been asleep.
What a whirlwind thirty minutes it had been.
When she returned to the kitchen, she caught Barb midsentence.
“—two of you should come visit this summer. I know you’re busy with work, but we’d love to see you both at home.”
Olivia stopped short, suddenly breathless and poised on the edge of both lies in the same sentence. She glanced at Chuck, who was now destemming kale, but he didn’t give her any clue which way to turn. In fact, he completely pivoted.
“How’s Chelsea doing at art camp?”
And then Barb was happily off in another direction. “Oh, she’s doing great. She has a real knack for teaching, you know.”
“Gets that from her mother,” Sam said with a doting grin as he lifted his sparkling water in a toast.
“Olivia, sweetheart, can you please find me a roasting pan?” Barb asked, elbow deep in the sink with an entire raw chicken in her hands.
“Sure,” she said as she went to search cabinets. As she passed Chuck at the island, she snared his gaze, silently asking him in which direction she was supposed to follow his lead, but he only shook his head. She quietly huffed in frustration. An unpleasant prickling of nerves had begun to sting her stomach. She passed the oven and smelled the peach cobbler already baking inside. Barb had commandeered the kitchen and begun conducting her own culinary orchestra in no time flat.
She found the pan deep in a low cabinet, and when she stood back up, she saw a bottle of wine sitting on the counter. “Here you go, Barb,” she said, and set the pan on the island. “Chuck, will you help me open this, please?” she asked, and held up the bottle.
He looked up at her and knew from the stern tilt of her head that she wanted more than just his help. “Sure,” he said like he was in trouble. He wiped his hands on a towel and circled the island to the corner where she stood.
Barb had started talking to Sam again, and Olivia noticed one of the cameras zoom in on her and Chuck. She fished a corkscrew out of a drawer and shoved it at Chuck.
He flinched when he took it along with the bottle.
She leaned in and hissed, “I don’t like this.”
“You think I do?” he whispered back, and hooked thecorkscrew into the cork. The corded muscles in his forearm flexed as he began to twist.
“Obviously not, but you need topick one! This is making me so nervous. I feel like we’re walking in a minefield.”
He worked the cork out with a rubberypopand reached for a glass. “I know. I’m sorry. Here. You just need to drink one point five glasses of this, and you’ll relax.”
“Donotbe cute right now.”
“I’m not being cute! I’m trying to help.”