Izzy sticks her tongue out at me. “I don’t have a golfer boyfriend.”
“Cool flex, Iz,” Bryn says, nudging Izzy with her shoulder.
Izzy rolls her eyes. “Can we not just be calling because we’re your sisters, and we miss you?”
“It seems unlikely.”
“Well, in addition to calling because we miss you, we also are calling because Mom has asked each of us about five times in the last three days if we’ve talked to you, and I think she’s about to jump on an airplane and fly to Japan herself if you don’t answer one of her calls or show some proof of life.”
Crap. I’ve been meaning to call my mom back, but she calls at literally the worst possible times. It’s like she doesn’t understand the time difference. She called twice during the concert last night, but she left a message saying she was just calling to talk, so I didn’t feel the need to return her call at two in the morning when I finally made it back to the hotel.
“I liked that picture of her coffee that she sent Friday,” I say. “Does that not count as proof of life?”
“Honestly, it made us all wonder if someone stole your phone. I searched how to tell if someone was abducted,” Izzy says, scrunching up her nose. “You’re not a big liker of Mom’s coffee photos.”
“She sends the same one every Friday. It barely changes. It’s a latte she makes at home with foamed milk on top.”
“I like it,” Izzy says. “They make me happy.”
“I told her to take me off the text chain,” Bryn replies.
“It’s our family text chain!” Izzy exclaims.
“I said what I said.”
“Fine,” I say. “I’ll call Mom.”
“Wait!” Izzy yells. “Tell us who it was. It’s Carter, isn’t it? Oh my God,pleasetell me you’re sleeping with Carter Mitchell. That man is the definition of brooding heartthrob.”
“No comment,” I say, and tap the button to hang up the call.
I call my mom back, making sure to show her the view out my window and tell her all about the drama between Mikayla and Nash. The surest way into the heart of Jen Harper is to tell her the elaborate backstory of two people she’s never met before. She’s immediately invested and will never forget their names or a detail about them. She’ll probably inappropriately ask Nash about his crush on his colleague when she randomly runs into him in Denver, and suddenly she’ll be his best friend, sending him care packages any time he’s away on assignment.
My mom is annoyingly the best.
As I’m finishing up my call with her, Carter slips back into the room, juggling the two travel coffee cups he has so he can silently shut the door.
“Was that your mom?” he asks when I finally tell my mom goodbye.
“The woman herself.”
“How are Jen and Ken?” he asks with a chuckle.
Everyone loves the fact that their names rhyme.
“They’re good. My sisters are too. Though they’re far more annoying than my parents.”
He raises an eyebrow, taking a drink of my coffee. It’s apparently our new thing. He was appalled our first morning in Japan to find out I never drink a whole cup of coffee, so now he just drinks half of mine in addition to his own. Bryn would undoubtedly be disgusted by the germ-sharing portion of it, but it doesn’t bother me.
“They heard you this morning.”
“Ah. And that’s a bad thing, right?”
“Right…because we agreed we weren’t dating.”
“True. Though that was when we thought we’d get in trouble with Jaxon or his team.”
I nod. “It’s still probably best if we don’t tell people. I mean, this is still really…new.”
