Mercury in Retrograde Read Free Page A

excited about Nelly Hooper’s beach barbecue later that evening where she was hoping to see Thad Newton III, whom she’d spent the previous weekend flirting with.
    â€œHe’s already called twice to make sure I’m coming!” Lipstick said gleefully, not paying particular attention to the road. “But I think Bitsy may have gotten her claws into him first.”
    â€œNow, who is he again?” Neal asked, buckling his seat belt as Lipstick veered onto the shoulder of the Long Island Expressway for a moment before correcting the wheel. “Didn’t he come from Rhode Island?”
    â€œHe’s perfect,” Lipstick said, taking Exit 70 to get to Montauk Highway. “He’s a banker at J.P. Morgan, lives on the Upper East Side—west of Park Avenue—went to Dartmouth, his family owns the biggest house in Newport and a cottage in Provence, and he’s texting me! Can you believe it?”
    â€œHe almost sounds like your father. I’m sure your mother is excited,” Neal said, smirking.
    â€œExcited? Why do you think she let me drive her car out? I told her all about him and said the only way we’d make it toNelly’s in time was to drive—otherwise we’d be on the Jitney with the rest of the serfs.” Lipstick licked her lips. They were dry. “Neal honey, will you pass me my lipstick? I need to refresh.”
    Neal reached back behind the driver’s seat and grabbed Lipstick’s Gucci tote. Rummaging through it he found her Revlon Super Lustrous Lipstick and quipped, “Slumming it with Revlon, huh? What happened to the MAC Viva Glam I gave you?”
    Ignoring him, Lipstick grabbed the makeup and, disregarding traffic, artfully reapplied the color to her lips while looking in the rearview mirror. All would have been fine had that damn curve in Route 27—which Lipstick swore she knew by heart—not appeared out of nowhere. As she was putting on her final touches to her bottom lip, the BMW ran off the road into the guardrail, and Lipstick’s lipstick smeared across her face, a graphic war wound. It was truly a Lipstick Carcrash—a name Neal had lovingly called her ever since, but which Lipstick had forbade him to tell anyone else the provenance of.
    Neal, laughing hysterically, had pulled some facial cleansing cloths from her purse and cleaned Lipstick up enough that she looked almost normal. Meanwhile, the damage to the car was fairly superficial and Lipstick still made it to Nelly’s just in time to see Thad whisper sweet nothings in Bitsy’s ear.
    Lipstick hadn’t seen Thad for several years after that incident until she ran into him at the American Museum of Natural History’s winter gala. By then Bitsy was out of the picture and Lipstick was back in for the next two years.
    â€œI should have paid more attention,” Lipstick later grumbled to Neal. “The universe was trying to warn me off him the first time around.”
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    Lipstick opened her laptop, and the screen immediately went from the hazy blue of sleep mode to Socialstatus.com, which she’d been reading prior to falling asleep. The main page was ascroll of photos and captions—the one she’d been obsessed with the night before was a picture of Bitsy with Thad at the Newton family’s New Year’s Eve gala in Rhode Island. Lipstick clicked on the photo (caption: “Cutest Power Couple Ever???”) to read the comments, from the supportive (“Bitsy is the new Aerin Lauder. All class and beauty”) to the snide (“If she wants a ring so badly, she should have taken note of Mrs. Newton’s dress code for the evening: Rhode Island preppy, not New York formal”) to the outright nasty (“Someone should tell Bitsy Thad likes bank accounts, not women. Rhode Island is scruffy old money—but it hasn’t appreciated well. He’s only with her because LL dumped him. And LL’s daddy is worth