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Mom’s nose wrinkles. “His room is pretty smelly.”
“There you have it. The reason I will not live with my parents.” I bow to my audience having proved my point.
“I’ll clean his room. It’ll be fine. Or you can sleep in the basement.”
She thinks she’s won. She has not. “And do you promise to never do naked yoga again?”
“I wasn’t naked,” Mom huffs.
“You weren’t wearing a top either.”
“Topless is not naked.”
Weston raises his hand. “I agree. Topless is not naked.”
I lift my eyebrows. “You’d be happy to walk in on Mom doing the downward dog without a shirt on?”
His face pales. “Um, no.”
I smirk. “And there you have it, folks. The reason why I’m living—”
“Temporarily.” He interrupts.
“Temporarily.” I amend. “With my big brother.”
“Okay, I’ll allow this,” Mom concedes.
“I’m thirty, not some rebellious teenager, this is happening whether you allow it or not,” I grumble.
“But,” she continues as if I hadn’t spoken, “you are required to attend our family poker game every month.”
“Do you still play drunk poker?” I ask, although I doubt my parents would ever do anything as boring as play regular poker. There’s nothing regular about my parents.
I used to wish my parents were ‘normal’ in high school, but my girlfriends adored them. I had to beg them to leave on school nights. They never wanted to go back home. Considering their home lives at the time, I couldn’t blame them.
“Of course. Is there any other way to play poker?”
“Strip poker,” Dad suggests.
“No!” I hold up my hand. “I don’t need a reminder of the time I found the two of you spread out on top of the poker table.”
Mom shivers. “It was a very good time.”
“Yuck.” I feign barfing. “Enough.”
“Speaking of strip poker.” Dad winks at Mom. “I think we should leave the kids to settle in.”
“Don’t forget about poker next week,” Mom hollers as Dad drags her out of Weston’s house.
I shut the door behind them and lean against it. “I’d go to a therapist to deal with the damage having those two weirdos for parents has done but any therapist on the island would tattletale to them.”
“Come on, sis. They’re not so bad. At least they stuck around.”
I sigh. I know exactly who Weston is referring to – Flynn’s dad. He took off after his mom died. Left without any parental supervision, Flynn went wild. Shoplifting, drag racing, pickpocketing – name a petty crime and he probably did it.
But then Mom and Dad took him in. Their rules weren’t strict, but they didn’t abide crime. It took a while, but Flynn straightened up.
“You good here?” Weston asks and brings me out of memories of watching Flynn turn into a man my heart desires. “I’m off toBootlegger.It’s Mermaid Karaoke Week.”
