Sweeten the Deal by Katie Shepard EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Katie Shepard
- Language: English
- Genre: Contemporary Women Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
CAROLINE NARROWED HER EYES, FOCUSED ON THE LAST RED CUP
on the opposite side of the Ping-Pong table, and exhaled to steady her hand.
She lofted the little plastic ball into the air and watched it land in the perfect
center of her opponent’s cup. She allowed herself only a tiny, fleeting smile
of victory when he sighed and chugged the final beer in front of him.
“Good game,” she told her business school classmate, hoping he’d
respond.
He didn’t.
Caroline had attempted to shake hands at the end of the first match, but
that was apparently not done in beer pong. She’d thought it was like a
tennis match or business deal, but her classmate had stared at her
outstretched hand until she pulled it back and pretended to have been
stretching.
“Are you still mad that I called your pants pink?” she asked him.
“They’re Nantucket reds,” he stiffly replied.
“I was trying to give you a compliment,” Caroline said, desperate to
salvage the single social interaction she’d enjoyed at the party. She’d liked
the color of his pants, not to mention how they fit him. She’d liked the idea
that he was a little different too, because everyone else was in jeans or
chinos. Caroline wore a sundress from an Old Navy outlet she’d passed on
the trip into Boston, but she felt overdressed.
“Oh, thanks,” he said, putting his hands on his hips and swiveling to
scan the yard behind her.
Maybe it wasn’t the pants. Maybe he was upset she’d beat him in
straight sets. That would usually do it.
It was her first time playing beer pong, but it seemed like she was good
at it. It was her third round, and she’d only lost a couple of throws. The
hardest part had been figuring out the rules; everyone else seemed to have
learned in undergrad, but Caroline’s tennis coach had forbidden his players
to attend parties where alcohol was served during tennis season. Not that
she’d been invited to many.
The rules of beer pong weren’t complex, but they were counterintuitive:
the person who lost a point had to drink the beer, even though everyone
seemed to be at this party just to drink beer. Maybe it was a penalty because
the beer had someone’s dirty Ping-Pong ball in it? But if that was the case,
why didn’t the winner get clean beer?
These questions remained unanswered, but the action was close enough
to tennis that Caroline had figured it out after watching a few matches from
the back patio.
“Can someone else take a turn now?” her opponent asked as he reracked
and refilled his cups, voice pitched in that fake-nice tone that usually meant
Caroline had annoyed someone. He’d given her his name when they met,
but she’d immediately forgotten it in her haze of anxiety, and now it seemed
awkward to ask.
“I didn’t realize anyone was waiting,” Caroline said.
The weather was pleasant in Boston’s September, and people were
sitting in lawn chairs under the string lights crisscrossing the packed-dirt
yard, but nobody was especially near the table. She’d thought the rule was
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