Total pages in book: 97
Estimated words: 95008 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95008 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 475(@200wpm)___ 380(@250wpm)___ 317(@300wpm)
“Then you better learn how to make them,” she replied dryly. “I won’t be around forever, you know.”
“Yes, you will,” I shot back. “Quiet.”
“Are you talking about dying again? Stop it,” my gram Farrah said as she strode into the kitchen. She looked at me. “I see you picked Kara up.”
“She was still at the apartments,” I replied.
“And she needed you to save her,” Gram said, reaching into the fridge. When she stood, she was holding an orange soda in her hand. She slid it across the counter to me. “Our boy’s quite the hero,” she said to Nan, bumping her gently with her hip.
“Ah, they always want to be the hero,” Nan replied, winking at me. “He comes from a long line of ’em.”
“On both sides,” Gram said, nodding.
“If I wanted to get picked on by two out of three grandmothers, I would have—”
“Three out of three,” my grandma Brenna said as she came into the kitchen. “Why are we picking on Draco?”
“He wants to be a hero,” Gram Farrah said with a small laugh.
“Ah, the plight of every man.”
“You three are the worst, you know that?” I asked.
“Oh, you haven’t seen anything yet, boyo,” Nan replied, her accent thickening to imitate Poet.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
“We’re just teasing you,” Grandma Brenna said, sitting down on the bar stool next to me. “It was good of you to go pick up Kara. Mack was wearing a path in Callie’s backyard trying to call her.”
“Why didn’t he just go pick her up?” I asked, opening my soda.
“Because you can get away with being heavy handed with Kara,” Gram said. “Her dad can’t.”
“Bullshit,” I replied.
“It’s true,” Nan said, still rolling and cutting out biscuits. “Throw that pan in the oven for me, would you, sweetheart?” she asked Gram. Then she glanced at me. “Kara doesn’t put up with much from Mack. Hasn’t in years. There’s never been any kind of blow up or anything of that nature—but if she thinks he’s crossed the line, she just shuts down.”
“And he doesn’t see her for weeks,” Grandma added.
“No drama and gets her point across,” Gram said with a sigh.
“Still terrible for Mack, though,” Nan said.
“How did I not know this?” I asked, looking around at the old women.
“How could you?” Nan asked. “It’s not as if Kara talks about it.”
“She won’t even talk to Charlie about it,” Gram said, shaking her head.
I sat there as the conversation moved on, drinking my soda and letting their familiar voices wash over me. I even added to the conversation once in a while—but my head was somewhere else. Because, if Kara was giving her dad the cold shoulder whenever he pissed her off, that meant it was a habit of hers. Kara loved her dad. She put him on a fucking pedestal. So instead of fighting with him, she ghosted him. It was what she’d done to me.
So, what in the hell had I done that pissed Kara off so much that she’d spent years avoiding me?
Chapter 5
Kara
“I was fine,” I said, letting my dad pull me in for a hug. “God, why are you standing out here?”
“You get used to it after a while,” Grandpa Grease’s gravelly voice replied in amusement.
“That’s because you smoke like a chimney,” I said through my mask as my dad let me go. “Those of us with healthy lungs don’t enjoy breathing this shit in.”
“You’re wearin’ a mask, ya big baby,” Grandpa Grease joked.
“I can still smell it!”
“You get everything you need from the apartment?” my dad asked, cutting in to our argument. “I coulda helped ya pack up.”
“Yeah, I did,” I said, sitting down in an empty lawn chair. “I had way too much time to think about it, so I packed half the apartment.”
The men laughed.
“Everythin’ starts feelin’ important, huh?” Dragon said from a couple chairs away. “You get caught in some shit and you grab the kids and the wife and fuck everythin’ else. You actually have to think on it? Hell, you’ve had that damn cookie jar for thirty-five years and the ear is broken off from that time your son threw a ball in the house… gotta take that with ya.”
I laughed along with everyone else. That was exactly how it had felt.
“We grabbed all the kids’ keepsake boxes,” Charlie’s dad Casper said. “And Farrah packed up the entire fuckin’ bathroom.”
“Now that doesn’t surprise me,” I said, nodding.
“Kara!” my brother Brody yelled as he came running out of the house. “When did you get here?”
“Just a few minutes ago,” I said with a grunt as his body hit me with full force. My chair would’ve tipped over backward if my dad hadn’t caught it in time. “What are you doing outside, dude?”
“Mom said she could see your car.”
“I don’t know how,” I complained. “We had to park down the street.”