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“He’s just after Mom’s cooking,” Sabrina, one of my sixteen-year-old sisters, sasses.
“Yeah, the rest of us may as well be salted slug slime,” Sasha, Sabrina’s twin, adds.
“Is someone learning alliteration in school?” I tease, hugging them both quickly before making a dash for the kitchen. They aren’t wrong. Iama sucker for my mom’s cooking.
We spend time catching up and making plans for the week. My older sister won’t be joining us until Wednesday. As she likes to remind us, she’s a real adult with a real job. We’re doing the whole Thanksgiving shebang with my grandparents, and a few aunts, uncles, and cousins are coming in this year for the holiday. I sulk a bit when I learn I’ll have to bunk with Mason since my room is being commandeered for guests, but at least it isn’t as bad as Cabe’s family. With six parents and five siblings, space is always at a premium in his house. Once you add in his older brothers’ packmates, things become outright pandemonium over there. I won’t be surprised if Cabe ends up crashing my family’s Thanksgiving dinner. He probably has a better chance of being fed.
It’s surreal sometimes, knowing that that chaos is in my future. It was a given that Mason would join a pack, being an alpha and all, but the same can’t be said for me. It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment I realized I was going over to the pack side.Ha. I guess at some point all that trailing after Mason and Cabe just got hardwired into my brain. And now we’ve met Espy, the possibility of claiming an omega and officially bonding with my packmates feels more and more real.
Speaking of Espy ...
“Who’re you talking to?” Sasha asks, bounding over and grabbing my phone out of my hands.
“Is it his girlfriend?” Sabrina questions, joining her sister as the two little monsters gleefully scroll through my phone.
“Give it back,” I demand, trying to corner them as they run around me passing my phone back and forth. I swear I was never this annoying as a younger sibling.
“Girlfriend?” my mom asks, appearing out of nowhere.
“He’s texting a girl!” Sabrina singsongs.
Mason, who was busy typing away on his laptop, looks up to see what all the commotion is about when my dad comes up out of the basement to ask, “Is this that same girl you’ve been working with on your comics?”
How’d he even hear us down there?
“Oh! The one who did that lovely drawing of Casper that you gave me?” My mom turns to Mason.
“She’s just a friend,” my brother mumbles, clearly embarrassed.
“For now,” I add helpfully.
“Wait, Mason is the one dating her?”
I take advantage of Sabrina’s confusion and momentary distraction to grab my phone back.
“They’re a pack, idiot.” Sasha smacks her twin’s arm.
“You’re the idiot!”
“Am not!”
“Are too!”
“Hey now, none of my children are idiots,” my mom butts in, breaking up the squabble.
“Ha!” my dad scoffs loudly.
We all laugh.
I think we’re off the hook when the twins disappear upstairs, but my parents stay to continue the grilling. There isn’t much to say, other than our pack has a collective crush on an omega who doesn’t seem quite ready to court. When Mason gives an abridged overview of Espy’s background, both my parents look upset.
“I’ve been reading about some of that in the news,” my dad says, shaking his head. “Really scary stuff. I didn’t realize that shit was happening here too. What is the school doing about it?”
Mason and I run through the new protocols, mostly around enhanced security and a campus alert system. We mention Cabe joined the military base’s reserve unit to help out, and it feels good to see the pride in my dad’s eyes when he hears this.
All this talk makes me even more anxious to be away from Espy this week. I grab my phone to continue my text conversation with her and look over to see Mason doing the same thing.
Five more days and we’ll be back on campus. Five more days, and then I’m determined to up our game and get some results.
