Fast Fiction

Karen flicked a glance at Lily noting that Maria’s lackey still had her usual smirk on.

“It’s a simple question,” Maria said, the purr in her voice belying the malice in her eyes.Â “Did you fuck Jeff or didn’t you?”

Karen stopped herself from gnawing on her lower lip, a bad habit she’d been trying all year to break.Â As tests went, this one was a doozy.Â Karen knew that if she said yes she’d lose favor for sleeping with another Ranger’s boyfriend.Â If she said no, she would have failed the initial test that tasked her with finding out if Jeff was loyal to Lily.Â Karen met Maria’s eyes.

“What did Jeff say when you asked him?”

Karen startled when Maria threw back her head and laughed.

“I told you this pledge was smarter than she looked,” Maria said, turning her sharp eyed gaze on the now frowning Lily.

…about clouds

Mandy looked away from the increasingly shrouded horizon and back up the beach to where Dan was constructing the shelter. She didn’t want to tell him about the caves she’d found while he was asleep, drunk on the last of the rum that had washed up from the broken boat that lay speared by the far edge of the reff.

Everything she’d said and done in the past two days had been designed to uss Dan out, to figure out if he was going to take this opportunity to assert himself in their barely birthed relationship or if he was going to accept her as an equal partner.

The wind picked up throwing microscopic granules of salt against Mandy’s face. She checked the horizon again. The height of the cloud bank had doubled and advanced, blotting out the tall peak from the island to their west.

…about a test

…about clouds

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