John raised his eyebrows at Annie, and she saw she had made a mistake.

“Rebecca, I’m serious. Come look! I swear this thing is pointing at your sister.

Chloe, are you the referee here?”

“John, it’s pointing at Lynn, not Annie,” Chloe called. “Come on, let’s keep the game going.”

“It is not,” John insisted. “You aren’t even over here! Come look!”

“Oh fuck this,” Annie muttered, struggling to stand without flashing the entire group a shot of her panties. For a moment, she thought she had succeeded, but from the look on a few of the guys’ faces, she realized they had seen something. Raising her voice, she said, “You know what, John? You kiss the fat girl here, and I’ll just step out of this juvenile little game that I never in a million years thought I’d be playing at the age of twenty-seven, okay? What do you say?”

Annie nudged him hard in the side with her shin as she passed. She heard him grunt. She turned back when she got to the kitchen door and saw the redhead standing, wobbly, making her way in the opposite direction. Annie felt a stab of guilt and shoved open the swinging door to her sister’s pristine kitchen.

The light was off, and she left it, knowing her way even in the dark. She plopped onto one of the stainless steel kitchen chairs and unzipped her boots with a sigh, then toed them off.

Annie could hear her sister busily trying to save the day. “Let’s play the kissing game!”

She heard someone-possibly John-say, “I thought we were?” Annie sighed in relief when that awful, stunned silence turned back to party chatter. She wished she drank or still smoked-or did anything dangerous and bad for her. Anything that could make her feel good-or just alive-even for a moment. Her sisters seemed to think the answer to Annie’s attitude was a man and had set about finding her one-with a vengeance! When she looked at Chloe and Rebecca’s lives though, she didn’t find much to envy. If that’s what having a man was about, she didn’t want to have any part of it.