Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 139147 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 696(@200wpm)___ 557(@250wpm)___ 464(@300wpm)
“What’s your poison?” she inquired.
“Americano, double shot, room for cream.” He turned his head. “Liam?”
“Latte, iced, full fat,” Liam ordered. He finished with, “Thanks,” and a bright, white smile.
“Coming up,” Luna said, after she recovered from witnessing Liam’s bright, white smile, though she turned to the espresso machine still a little hazy.
“Can we—?” I started to say to Cap.
I got no further, because Dream trundled in, a baby strapped to her front, a toddler bouncing on her back, a brightly colored hippie tote dripping heavily from her shoulder, her face makeup free, her hair a wild arrangement of Luna’s bouncy curls, except longer and redder, her frame willowy-thin, due to the fact she was chasing after kids all day, or, like now, toting them around. She was wearing the stressed expression she adopted when she was about to unload on her sister, or if I was in the vicinity, me.
“Oh my goddess, thank the divine you two are here,” she exclaimed, even though she knew our schedules, which were seven o’clock to four, Monday through Friday (in other words, not hard to memorize), so she knew we would be.
She walked right behind the bar while pulling her daughter out of the pouch at her front and shoving her in Luna’s busy hands in a way Luna had to quickly drop the portafilter she was packing in order to catch her.
She then expertly swung her son out of the carrier at her back, and in mid-swing, landed him smack in my torso so I had no choice but to grab hold.
Yes, she did this, even though she held no discernible employment, and both her sister and I were at our place of work…working.
And yes, you can read from this, I wasn’t a tremendous fan of Dream’s. It wasn’t that she was trippy or lived her life in a way I’d never live mine.
It was because she was often a mooch, could be a user, could also be a manipulator, and unless she was dealing with her children, almost always acted selfishly, with massive doses of thoughtless attached to that.
Luckily, how I felt about her sister caused no problems between Luna and me, because Luna felt the same way, and then some.
“Momster and Dadman are at work,” Dream announced. “My normal babysitter is sick.” Like she had a normal babysitter…not, unless you counted Luna, and sometimes me. “And I have a reading I have to get to. Ambrosia said I can’t bring the kids anymore. She says they mess with her chi and block her third eye chakra, which skews the readings. Last time she told me I was in for a windfall, and the next day, I found out I’d forgotten to pay my APS bill.”
Not-so-newsflash: Dream “forgot” to pay her bills a lot.
“Is Ambrosia ever right?” Luna asked while bouncing her niece, who was named Feather (by the by, the kid I was holding was called Dusk, and yes, Luna and I had already discussed, when the time was right, how to teach both of them how to deal with bullies when they hit school, and further by the by, our strategies had nothing to do with leaving it to karma or turning the other cheek).
“It isn’t an exact science,” Dream retorted. “Even science isn’t exact science.”
“That’s because science is a never-ending quest for answers to all of life’s questions,” Luna shot back. “The dudes in the lab coats didn’t discover penicillin then say, ‘Right. We cracked that. Time for an eternal cocktail,’ whereupon they hung up their white coats and left their lab to get covered in dust and cobwebs. They moved on to the next thing that might help us understand and better our world, our lives and the universe.”
While Luna said this, Dusk struggled to get out of my arms, so I set him down, but only because Dream was not a stranger to The Surf Club, thus neither were Dusk and Feather, and I knew what he’d do.
He did it instantly, toddling precariously from behind the bar in a direct trajectory to Tito.
Once he got there, wordlessly, Tito picked him up, put him in his lap and handed him his iPad, whereupon Dusk started bashing it violently against the table.
Tito didn’t stop this.
He looked out the window and…well, that was it.
“Jujubees!” Dream cried, taking my attention back to her only to see she was forming the sign of the cross with her fingers and directing this at Cap. “Toxic masculinity in da howwwwse.”
Cap simply smiled at her.
At the smile, my body parts started tingling and rippling again.
But my mind had other ideas.
Before I even knew what I was doing, I snapped, “Bitch, uncool.”
Dream’s upper body swayed back in affront as her eyes swerved to me. “My sister, did you just call me a bitch?”
“You said something bitchy, so I called you a bitch,” I replied.