Total pages in book: 73
Estimated words: 67465 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 67465 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 337(@200wpm)___ 270(@250wpm)___ 225(@300wpm)
I would, but my throat is currently clogged shut, and I also hate chocolate anything. I know that makes me a total anomaly, but what can I say? “No. No, I’m not.”
“Great! I’ll have it!”
The exchange goes so much more smoothly. Nanny takes the shake and ambles off, and I’m left standing alone. I find Kimmy easily because she’s still mixing shakes as she sways her hips and dances in place to the old-school country music someone put on.
“Hey! How did it go?” She’s so hopeful that I start to sweat. I can literally feel it beading on my brow.
“Uhh, he basically told me to piss off without pissing off. I said ‘hi’ and ‘welcome back’ or…or something like that, and then I gave him the shake.”
Kimmy doesn’t look angry about the fact that I got a whole lot of nothing and how my first reintroduction to her brother was an epic disaster. I’m still racked with nerves. I think they’re going to plague me all night. My body is literally trembling. “Did he drink it?”
“What?”
She frowns. “The shake?” The blender lid is currently dripping a variety of colors of ice cream dots all over the floor by her feet. She isn’t paying attention at all. All her attention is fixed on me, and it’s so potent that it feels…wrong. Strange.
“I think so. I mean, he asked for the vanilla, which surprised me, but—”
“Who got the other one?” Kimmy drops the blender lid and grabs me with both hands locked around my shoulders. She looks like she’s going to shake me, and it scares the crap out of me.
“N—n—anny,” I stammer. “Why?”
“Shit!” Kimmy pulls me in close, slamming our chests together, but it’s so that I can hear what she’s saying without mistaking it. “We have to find her. I spiked that milkshake with enough laxative to take down an elephant.”
CHAPTER 3
Van
I knew it. Fuck the peace gesture. My sister is up to no good. I knew it the second she went streaking through the kitchen past the patio doors, dodging bodies and tugging Remi along behind her like the blender just opened up a portal to hell on the other side of the house, and she’s in a rush to get back.
Alright, that’s a little bit dramatic.
But I know she spiked that milkshake with something.
Which begs the question, why the hell didn’t I tell Remi to dump the damn thing?
Because she turned into such a beautiful woman that you nearly fell over when you saw her again, your mouth shriveled up to the size of a moldy peach pit, and your throat closed up as if you’d choked on it.
I did choke. I did panic. She’d found me in the backyard, where I was hiding from most of my family, including my mother, because there was no way in hell I’d been expecting to be ambushed with a hellacious—I mean surprise—party. I don’t know what’s actually more surprising. Seeing my grandmother in vibrant shades of tight-fitting spandex, the fact that she now has a dog who is as boisterous as she is, or that she somehow got my family and a heck of a lot more people together under this roof as a welcome home gesture to me.
Or the fact that Remi doesn’t look like Remi anymore. She’s blossomed into a goddess.
I had this plan that involved me coming back home and eventually trying to establish lines of communication with the people I love. I wasn’t expecting an ambush of well-wishers to bombard me in Nanny’s house. I don’t know who I was expecting to run into first, but it wasn’t Remi. Seeing her out in the backyard in that little sundress with the setting sun a mirror to her beauty, a backdrop that set her features to fiery gold…I had to turn around and give her my back to hide the enormous problem making its presence known in my jeans.
When I turned back after a minute, more composed and ready to have an actual conversation, she was gone. Logically, I knew it was Remi the minute I saw her holding those two milkshakes like picking the right one had the power to change the future, but my brain just refused to compute it. She went from being a slightly gawky, gangly teenage kid who was all limbs and braces and uncertainty to becoming this…this…this blossom. The only blossom in an entire flower garden. She’s lovely. She’s still so petite, but she’s grown into her limbs, and her teeth are so perfectly straight, so those braces obviously paid off. Her huge blue eyes are the same too, but the rest of her face…god. Let’s just say twenty-seven years on this planet have been kind to her in every single way.
I know she wasn’t in on any plot. My sister has always been the evil—I mean the brains—behind any operation. Remi has always just been the one forced to go along for the ride. She was far too innocent. She’s always had this baby deer in the headlights look about her, but now that she’s older, it just makes her look so innocent and sweet, and fuck me, no one looks like that. The thing about Remi, though? She’s probably still the real deal. She always was. She always said exactly what was on her mind, and she always kept her word. You could trust Remi with a secret, and even if it cost her a lot, she’d take it to her grave.