Cabin Fever Read Free

she added with a mischievous lift of her eyebrow.
    “Yeah, well that’s good. I could use a sugar daddy right now. Do you know anyone?” Sarah replied sardonically.
    Ellie’s expression shifted as she became aware that something was up. “Why, what happened?”
    “I trusted the wrong man and he screwed me,” Sarah said into her latte. “Well, he screwed me metaphorically, but he may as well have screwed me literally as well. That wouldn’t have been any more humiliating.”
    “Sarah, look at me and tell me what happened. From the beginning.” Ellie spoke in a tone of command that might have seemed comical if it wasn’t so effective.  
    She’d recently picked up that skill in the lecture hall. Sarah still had a hard time believing that her little sister was an assistant professor at UC San Francisco. Ellie had never really been all that interested in classes when she was growing up. She was very interested in boys, though, and later her interest shifted to men, and as it turned out the man who interested her the most was a professor of English literature.  
    Under his guidance, Ellie had gone to graduate school, first for her master’s and then, to everyone’s open-mouthed astonishment, she had continued on to study for a Ph.D. Sarah had long suspected that the professor had been Ellie’s lover as well as her mentor, but she couldn’t deny that he had been a force for good in her sister’s life. Now Ellie was on the faculty at a major university, was beloved by her students, and the university was talking about granting her tenure. Even after having been there every step along the way, Sarah could hardly believe what a charmed life Ellie seemed to lead.
    “I don’t know where to start,” Sarah grumbled before they were mercifully interrupted by Ben the barista. As far as Sarah could tell, no one got table service at this coffee shop except for Ellie. Ben made no secret of the fact that he had a crush on her little sister, and Ellie had no problem with sweetly taking full advantage of that situation. “Hi, Ben,” she said in a lilting voice, and gave him a smile that Sarah knew he would be drafting off of for days to come. “Could you get me a tall Americano? That would be just the thing.”  
    “Of course,” Ben said, jotting down the order, and stood with the hope of talking a little further with her. He was not a bad-looking man, tall and with strong biceps that bulged out of his short-sleeved shirt, but Sarah knew that he had no shot with Ellie. First, because he worked in a coffee shop, and second, because in some sort of hipster attempt at ironic fashion he wore dress shoes with a brown tee shirt. Ellie didn’t always have the highest standards with the men in her life, but she had very strong opinions about shoes, and running afoul of those rules was the sort of thing that she had trouble forgiving. The number of men who were always clamoring for her attention gave her little incentive to forgive.
    After an awkward pause by which Ellie communicated, in effect, “The coffee order is all you’re getting from me today,” Ben drifted away, leaving the two of them to get back to their conversation. By then Sarah had collected her thoughts. “Dennis – do you remember Dennis? Short, paunchy, hair thinning on top? Dennis cheated me. I thought he was filing for patents on behalf of the business, but instead he was filing them on behalf of himself, and today I got thrown out of my own company.”
    Ellie stared at her. “What? That’s not possible. How is that possible?”
    “I don’t know, but that’s what happened. I woke up, brushed my teeth, came into work, and got thrown out of the business that I founded. That was my day. How was yours?”
    “That bastard!” Ellie spat. “I never liked him. He was creepy. He was like some sort of nasty little insect in a bad suit. I could never even tell if he was gay or straight.”
    Sarah shrugged. “I always thought of him as mostly sexless. He