Iris Kelly Doesn't Date (Bright Falls, #3)(3)

“Yeah, Iris, what do you think?” Aiden said with a smirk, popping a square of pepper jack into his mouth.

Iris glared at him. Growing up, she and Aiden had been pretty close. He was only two years older than she was, and he worked as a designer at Google. He and Iris were both creative, both prone to dreaming, but ever since he married Addison and became a dad, they hardly ever talked except at family events like this one.

Not that Iris didn’t understand—he was busy. He had a family, kids to feed and mold into responsible human beings, a spouse. He was needed, while Iris spent most of her time lately staring up at her dust-covered ceiling fan wondering why the hell she ever thought writing was the correct career choice after she closed her paper shop last summer.

“What do I think about what?” Iris said, playing ignorant.

“I think he’s cute,” Emma said, swaying while Christopher dozed in her arms. He squirmed a little, wrinkled eyes closed, mouth a tiny adorable rosebud.

“You would,” Iris said to Emma. Emma was . . . well, she had her shit together. Always had. Three years younger than Iris, she’d married the perfect man at twenty-four, already worked her way to junior executive at a lucrative advertising agency in Portland by twenty-six, and popped out a kid at twenty-seven. Incidentally, this timetable had always been her plan, from age sixteen when she skipped her sophomore year and made a perfect 1600 on her SATs.

“There’s nothing wrong with being health conscious,” Emma said. “I think someone like that would be good for you.”

“I can feed myself, Em,” Iris said.

“Barely,” she said. “What did you have for dinner last night? Potato chips? A Lean Cuisine?”

Needless to say, Emma and Addison were BFFs and co-chairs of the Perfect-Women-Who-Have-It-All club. Iris imagined it as an elite group that probably met in an opulent, password-guarded penthouse apartment, where all the members brushed each other’s gleaming hair and called one another names like Bunny and Miffy and Bitsy.

“Actually,” Iris said, popping a green olive into her mouth, “I fed on the repressed tears of uptight women who need to get laid, thanks very much.” She eyed Charlie. “No offense.”

He just laughed, cutting cubes of butter into the potatoes, while Emma’s mouth puckered up in distaste. Iris felt a twinge of guilt. Unlike Aiden, she and Emma had never been close at all. As a kid, Iris had relished the idea of being a big sister, and there were myriad pictures of the precious Emma—the youngest, the surprise blessing, the completing jewel in the Kelly family crown—cuddled in Iris’s arms. As the years passed, their roles shifted, the line between older and younger sister blurring, as Emma always seemed to know the answer, the right behavior, the correct choice, a split second before Iris did.

If Iris figured it out at all.

“Iris, really,” her mother said, taking Christopher from Emma and patting his back. “Your father and I worry about you,” Maeve went on. “All alone in your apartment, no roommate, no steady job, no boyfriend—”

“Partner.”

Her mother winced. Maeve and Liam Kelly, both survivors of Irish Catholic upbringings, had always accepted Iris’s bisexuality with open arms and hearts—even going so far as to set her up with Maeve’s queer, guinea pig–loving hairstylist—but they still got trapped in heteronormative language sometimes, particularly when all of Iris’s siblings were straight as fucking arrows.

“Sorry, honey,” Maeve said. “Partner.”

“And I have a job,” Iris said.

“Writing those SEAs or whatever you call them that you don’t even experience?” Maeve said.

Iris gritted her teeth. No one in her family had read her first novel yet. It wasn’t out until the fall, and Iris’s family members weren’t exactly the romance-reading types. Fantasy, her mom called the genre back when Iris first fell in love with the books as a teenager. “Real romance takes work,” Maeve had said, then promptly stuck her tongue down Liam’s throat.

“HEAs, Mom,” Iris said. “Happily Ever After.”

Maeve waved a hand.

“Shittily Ever After,” Aiden said, getting a couple of beers out of the fridge and handing one over to Charlie.

“Daddy said shit!” Ava said.

Aiden winced while Addison glared.

“Syphilis-ly Ever After,” Charlie said, popping his beer open.

“What’s syphilis?” Avery asked.

Aiden guffawed. “Septically Ever After.”

“Aiden,” Addison said.

“Fuck you both very much,” Iris said.

“Iris!” Addison said, her tone like a middle school teacher, then promptly ushered her daughters out of the kitchen.

“Barn animals, all of you,” Maeve said, covering one of Christopher’s tiny ears. “Iris, all we’re saying is that we worry about you being all alone.”

“I’m fine,” Iris said. Her voice shook a little, belying her words, but that’s what a family ambush will do to a person. She was fine. Sure, she’d had to close her paper shop last year—she still designed and sold her digital planners out of her Etsy shop, but no one bought paper enough these days. Once Iris started offering digital planners, the brick-and-mortar aspect of her business suffered. It was a difficult call, but it was also exciting. After a few months of feeling a bit adrift, Iris decided to try her hand at writing romance. She’d always loved reading and had long dreamed of penning a book of her own. Turns out, she was a pretty decent writer. She banged out a story about a down-on-her-luck queer woman who had a life-changing encounter with a stranger on a New York subway, then kept running into the same woman all over the city in the unlikeliest of places. She got several offers from agents and went with Fiona, who was the perfect blend of ruthless and nurturing, and sold Until We Meet Again to a major romance publisher in a two-book deal. Granted, she didn’t sell it for a killing or anything, but Iris had enough money in savings to keep her afloat, and her Etsy sales brought in a steady stream of cash.