by Pippa Grant
She heaves a mother-sigh and sips at her coffee. “When did you get smart enough to throw my words back at me?”
“Smart enough to repeat ‘em, not smart enough to know how to use them.”
“You want her in your future.”
“Doesn’t matter. I’m not good for her.”
Mom plunks her teacup down.
I hold up my hands before the lecture can start and tick my transgressions off on my fingers. “She got arrested at eighteen because of me. There was the elevator incident two weeks ago. The Kiss Cam. Don’t ask about the Irish bar.”
“The girl’s troubled.”
“She was never troubled, she was related to Zeus and Ares. She’s been squeaky-clean the past ten years. Good student, then a dedicated employee. She went from small-town Minnesota girl to making New York City her oyster. Lots of friends. Then I show up, push a few buttons—” or she pushes a few buttons, like she did in the elevator “—and one or both of us loses our minds.”
She sighs again. “I was like that with your father,” she murmurs.
First, didn’t need that visual, but I suppose I’ve given her a few she didn’t care to have lately too. Second— “Exactly. The world’s a better place if we’re not together.”
“You’re not your father.” She squeezes my hand. “Though she might be.”
“Mom…”
“Those Berger boys have really surprised me.” She’s not subtle in changing the subject, which is fine with me. “They’ve found a productive way to channel all their energy. It’s rather impressive.”
“So I can go play with them after school?” I deadpan.
She laughs. “Don’t let this give you any ideas, but I was glad you had them. Goodness knows what kind of criminal record you would’ve had if you’d run around with boys who weren’t from such a good family. But your obsession with their sister… You’ve never been able to think straight when she’s around.”
She’s not wrong.
“Oh, look, it’s my friend, Iris.” She leans up in her seat and waves. “Iris! Iris, come meet my son. He’s the one I was telling you about.”
She re-settles her floppy straw hat on her head as Iris turns to make her way toward us.
“Don’t let the cane fool you,” Mom says. “She’s only fifty-eight, and she doesn’t look a day over forty when she’s up close and sitting down with her makeup on. Her husband left her a fortune, and even though she’s through menopause, she’s open to the idea of adopting. Which is good, because I want grandchildren.”
I blink at the woman who gave birth to me. “You are not right.”
“She won’t break your heart. Or drive you to getting yourself arrested for indecent exposure on the Kiss Cam.”
“Next time I book you a cruise, I’m buying out the rest of the boat and donating all the rooms to sorority girls on spring break.”
“Oh, honey.” She pats my cheek. “You’ll have plenty of time for that after Iris is in a nursing home.”
I open my mouth, but for once, my mother has left me speechless. She almost sounds serious.
Until she cackles with undisguised glee, that is. “My goodness, no wonder you were always pulling pranks. This is quite the power trip.”
“Don’t get used to it,” I say. “Takes a lot to prank a prankster.”
“Honey, I’m your mother. I know all your tricks and more.” She ruins the straight face with another gleeful cackle.
I’m chuckling at the sheer joy in her laughter when my phone dings.
And nothing’s funny anymore.
I know where Bro went.
And it’s suddenly crystal clear just how much work I have to do if I want to win her back.
25
Ambrosia
I will never, for as long as I live, understand why people think gossip happens in New York. You want gossip? Come to Wishberry Lake. These ladies could write columns that would put those Post columnists to shame.
And they have been.
All week.
Except the most exciting thing that usually happens in Wishberry Lake is someone catching The Appendicitis, or someone else running over a mailbox with their boat trailer, or yet another someone else subscribing to Playboy, which the entire town will know about in less time than it takes Tisha (who used to be in accounting but is now apparently in an unemployment line) to stretch her fingers over her keyboard.
And Tisha has some fast-stretching fingers.
The one thing Wishberry Lake does even better than the gossip?
Maternal guilt.
“All I’m saying, sweetheart, is that you stayed away for ten years. It’s natural for people to be curious after such a long absence. Even if you weren’t trying to do unspeakable things with the town billionaire on camera at Yankee Stadium.”
I tie a blue gingham square around the lid of a mason jar engraved with Ketchup is the Spice of Life and briefly wonder if Hogzilla’s mother ever gave her guilt trips for her life choices.
I miss my upstairs neighbor.
And not just because she’d be the only thing more interesting than me in Wishberry Lake’s gossip train.
“Kristy Knutsy asked me if he used his billions for member enhancement. That’s not curiosity. That’s invasion of privacy.”
“But not your privacy,” she points out.
“I don’t want people thinking about penises that I have or haven’t touched, okay?” Yes, I know. I’m the girl who proposed sex rooms. But when I’m in Wishberry Lake, I get a touch of the prude.
No, I don’t touch the prude. I get inflicted with the native prudishness. Jeez, people. Can’t I make up a phrase without it getting as twisted as the Dick’s dick?
I pinch my lips and suck in a big breath. Again.
My time in Wishberry Lake has pretty much consisted of sucking in big breaths, going out for fresh air and then retreating when one too many people give me the She’s been sleeping with Chase Jett again looks, which are always accompanied by the swift belly glance of I wonder if she’s carrying the billionaire’s baby.
In case you’re wondering, no one is blaming Chase for banging me. They might be questioning his judgment in sticking it in me—I’m a common criminal, don’tcha know, while he’s the golden billionaire from Wishberry Falls, so who cares that he and those Berger boys who make millions playing hockey now once tried to use fishing line, hair spray, and a lighter to make a ring of fire around the lake and told people it was a ritualistic exorcism to rid me of PMS—but he’s a man, and men think with their penises, honey.
If I thought it would do any good, I’d have Parker ship me a strap-on and I’d wear it around and tell people it’s my new brain.
And as that thought strikes me, I pick up the next jar from Mom—this one engraved with Lake Fed and Minnesota Bread, and no, I don’t know if she meant to spell it that way—and bang it against my forehead.
Which is the other thing I’ve been doing a lot this last week.
If I smack myself hard enough, I might give myself amnesia, and then I can pretend they’re talking about some other Ambrosia when I go out in town. Being Drew Barrymore in Fifty First Dates doesn’t seem like a bad fate today.
Mom sets aside her engraving tools. “Ambrosia, you know you were an accident.”
“MOM!”
She shakes her head. “That came out wrong. We love you very much, sweetheart, and we’re glad we have you. I just mean you weren’t planned. By the time your brothers were six months old, we knew we had our hands full and that there was something not entirely normal about them. Frankly, your father and I were a bit concerned that our genes were incompatible, and we weren’t sure we should risk unleashing more of our random genetic combinations on the human race. But you were sweet and perfect, and you slept through the night and never smeared poop on the walls or peed on the cat or shook your weewee at the mailman. You were so responsible, we didn’t realize until too late that we might not have given you enough attention—god knows your
brothers needed most of it—and that you might one day act out too.”
I’m squeezing my eyes shut now, because I don’t know if I want to hear more.
“And I fear we’ve screwed up again,” she says. “If we’d pressed you harder to come home, this all would’ve blown over years ago. But we let you stay away. We let people think we were ashamed. We let this grow in everyone’s imagination until it’s bigger than it needed to be, and once again, you’re paying for our mistakes.”
I’m not sure if she just said I was paying for being an accident, or if she said they love me despite screwing me up, but I know I’m on emotional overload. I stand and hug her. “Love you, Mom.” And then I take myself out the back door and start walking.
Eventually I end up on a quiet bench on the far side of the lake that our town is named after. There’s nothing but farmland and giant mosquitoes behind me, the sparkling five-hundred-acre lake before me. There’s also probably the mutant motorized tricycle-motorcycle thing Zeus and Chase tried to build when they were in high school buried in the muck down there under the water. Ares got mad when he was too big for it, so he flung it out into the middle of the lake.
That thing had to have weighed at least a hundred pounds, and Ares threw it like it was a little stone. I’d watched from the woods on the west side of the lake, awestruck by just how cool my brothers were.
Dad told me a bunch of tourists came and tried to scuba dive for it last summer after Zeus told the story during an interview, but all they found was a wheel and the remnants of a blow horn.
I surround myself with a fog of bug spray, tuck my knees up to my chin, duck my head, and close my eyes against the sun glittering off the lake and the slight chill blowing in.
I’m still awestruck by my brothers when I watch them on the ice. They might’ve traumatized me as a child, but they also made life fascinating. Especially when Chase was around.
He added a certain brand of finesse to their pranks and adventures. A dark, subtle undertone that said Chase Jett was here, and you can suck his dick if you don’t like it.
I shiver. And not because my jacket is too light for the May wind, or because the non-organic bug spray is giving me seizures, or because my subconscious is trying to forever expel Chase’s name from my pores.
I’m shivering because I don’t want to forget.
I don’t want to remember, but I don’t want to forget.
Sometimes I wish I was Ares. I doubt he ever has conundrums. I know he can’t spell it. Eats, Screws, and Leaves. That’s Ares. With a little hockey and the occasional naptime thrown in.
Someone sits on the end of my bench, and all the little hairs on the back of my neck prickle to life.
There are three classes of people who would want to be publicly seen with me right now. There’s my family, but they know when I want space. There are the gossips, but they do their best work without going straight to the source.
And then there are the guys who want to screw me.
I think that classification includes a list of exactly one person, and my hoo-ha gives a throb to demonstrate for me that his odorless pheromones are present.
Either that, or this is some freakish sexual bug spray.
I’m contemplating whether sexual bug spray should be a thing when he speaks. “My mom almost died of a massive heart attack the night of the Bratwurst Wagon.”
A surprised gasp catches in my throat, but I don’t look up.
Not yet.
“I was a big enough shithead that I probably would’ve denied everything that happened with you even I hadn’t been sitting at her bedside in the hospital while she was recovering from an emergency quadruple bypass, but that’s why I didn’t know what happened with Vassar. And I’m sorry. For whatever that’s worth.”
He apologized, my hopeless vagina squeals. Let’s hump him.
She’s on probation, so I ignore her.
But I tilt my head toward Chase. Just a little. Barely enough to make out his chiseled profile. His hands hanging between his knees, shoulders hunched forward, a touch of glitter still sparkling on his cheek, eyes on the lake.
We all went skating on the lake once. Chase stole my favorite doll and taunted me with her all afternoon, skating just fast enough—backwards, the bastard—to keep her out of my reach.
I’d been too young to sneak over to his house and set fire to his underwear in retaliation, but I’d had a pretty intricate plan built up when my brothers did something else to distract me.
I’m almost smiling.
My childhood was freaking fun.
“Insurance didn’t come close to covering all the bills,” Chase continues. “Doctors told her to quit eating canned baloney, and that she’d need at least six months off work because she shouldn’t stand in the factory for eight to ten hours a day right after heart surgery. Disability barely covered the bills. I went head-down looking for a way to take care of her. Being a shithead and playing video games were all I had, so that’s where I went.”
Now my heart’s getting into it. He was twenty, Bro. Twenty years old and responsible for his mom’s hospital bills. He wasn’t there for you because he was doing something more noble.
“Yeah, well, prison sucked too,” I say.
He ducks his head, but I see him sucking in a smile. “Couldn’t have been too bad. That prison tattoo on your ass is almost spelled right.”
There’s no prison tattoo and he knows it. I give him a halfhearted backhand to the biceps, at which point my limbs jump on team Chase too. God, he’s hot. Can we touch him some more?
“I didn’t order the Bratwurst Wagon last week.” He’s staring me straight in the eye now, power and truth radiating from his focused gaze. “I wouldn’t do that to you. Even if I hated you like I hate canned baloney, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
I believe him.
And not just because everything from my vagina to my fingers to my heart wants me to, or because I’ve realized I might’ve made a few enemies at work who could’ve Googled me just as easily as my friends had, once they knew what to look for.
“Do you hate me like you hate canned baloney?” I whisper.
I think I’ve always known Chase Jett was a beautiful specimen of a man, and I’ve always taken a perverse pleasure in denying it. But watching him battle a smile at my expense is melting me, and not just in places that I want him to touch me with his mouth and his penis.
“No, Bro, I don’t hate you like I hate canned baloney.”
“Canned tuna?”
“Or canned tuna.”
“Canned mushrooms?”
He sucks in a thoughtful breath and peers out over the lake. “That might be getting closer. Canned mushrooms are an abomination. I might hate you like I hate canned mushrooms.”
He loves canned mushrooms. The disgusting fucker used to sit at my parents’ kitchen table and inhale them like Ares eats saltwater taffy. And then he’d drink the juice straight out of the can.
“Yeah, well, I hate you like I hate boy bands,” I grumble as I rock my hips sideways and angle closer to him.
He drapes an arm over the back of the bench. His fingers brush my neck, and a delicious shiver races down my spine. “I hate you like I hate skiing in the Alps.”
I haven’t fully explored his thighs yet. I give the closest one a firm squeeze. My center ignites like a blowtorch. “I hate you like I hate pineapple tater tot casserole.”
He arches a brow at me. “Usually I get turned on when you say disgusting things to me.”
“You have the taste of a hunchbacked mountain troll and your hand is so limp you can’t even jack yourself off.” I slap a hand over my mouth, because I’m in Wishberry Lake and Wishberry Lake Bro is hornified that I’d say such a thing out loud.
But Chase tips his head back and laughs deep and long, and I realize his laugh isn’t the only thing going long. Nor is it the only thing I want going deep.
“We’re really fucked up,” I whisper.
He cradles
my head into the crook of his neck. “I hate you like I hate pussy,” he murmurs.
My pussy roars to life and demands a ride on the pony, but public fornication hasn’t ever actually done anything good for me.
So I’m not sure why I’m leaping to straddle him, grabbing his cheeks in my palms while I center myself over that thick, hard, crooked, delicious rocket in his pants. “I hate you like I hate breathing,” I say. “And I hate myself for that.” I rock against him. The bench wobbles. “And for this too.” I rock once more, and suddenly I’m flying forward, Chase backwards, as the whole bench flips.
We land with a thud. My legs are trapped under the wood, and I mean the wood of the bench, and “Ow!”
“Fuck!” Chase hisses. He twists, but every time he moves, my legs get crushed a little more. “Shit.”
Unfortunately, every time he twists, he’s also rubbing his bulge against my hoo-ha. “You need to stop,” I gasp. “You need to stop right now.”
His eyes meet mine, and understanding dawns. A slow smile spreads over his perfect, bitable lips. “Ambrosia May Berger, are you turned on?” he murmurs.
“I’m fucking stuck under this bench,” I whisper.
He slips a finger into my pants, and I go cross-eyed. “We’re in public. Again.”
“I hate you like I hate doing you in public.”
“I hate you like I hate orgasms.”
He finds that perfect spot inside my panties, and thinking is suddenly overrated.
And that’s exactly how my mother finds us ten seconds later.
26
Chase
Other than never being able to look Dr. Berger in the eye again, today’s going pretty well. Bro’s talking to me. Her legs aren’t broken. Neither is my back. And we’re heading in to talk to the police chief.
“For the record, I am two seconds from texting Eloise and asking her to spread a picture of your diseased dick all over the internet,” she hisses as I drag her along.
“You don’t have any pictures of my dick,” I murmur.