Kat hugged the bath robe around her a little more tightly. The whole health spa thing had sounded like a great idea in principle. After all, the people on the daytime TV shows she'd wound up watching so frequently in Tom's apartment were always raving about how great they were, how great it felt, how relaxing, how therapeutic. All great. Great, great, great.

What they didn't mention was the fact that you were expected to wander around practically naked underneath a fluffy white dressing gown, while getting stared at judgementally by the jaw-dropping combination of stunningly beautiful and confident business women, and employees who were far too attractive for it to be permissible. Because seriously: if the point of a spa like this was to make you feel good about yourself, there should be a rule forbidding good-looking people from entering the building, just so you didn't have to feel self conscious about the fact that your body had squidgy bits and flabby bits that didn't bulge or curve in the right sort of ways.

Like, take the gorgeous redhead across the way, being talked at by one of the staff people about the phone she'd neglected to part with. For starters, the fact that her head was genetically coded to sprout flowing copper curls like that was just plain unfair, especially when you compared it to the dirty blonde wavy locks tucked awkwardly into a bun on the top of Kat's head. Then there was the fact that with looks like that, she was probably a model or an up-and-coming movie star, or married to some rich and handsome billionaire with a luxury mansion in Malibu, and -

"Am I pretty?" Kat blurted out, her voice a little uneasy as her tentative steps kept her as close to Alice and familiarity as personal space would allow.

"I mean, like -" Her eyebrows fidgeted into a frown. "- guys used to hit on me back home, but British guys will pretty much hit on anything if it stays still long enough. But no one has ever, like, looked at me the way I catch Tom looking at you, and I just..."

She trailed off, her ears suddenly beginning to feel profoundly warm.

"I'm sorry," she said with a nervous twitch of an apologetic smile. "You probably don't want to talk about Tom stuff, especially not with his sister."