I’m a fucking dead man, and my chances with Waverly are over.
Don’t do it to her, I silently telegraph to him.She’s innocent. Torture me, but she’s fucking innocent.
His lips curve up, and that is not a pretty smile.
It’s not comforting. It’s not reassuring.
It says I will never, ever, ever have a good night’s rest again.
“TJ,” he says to my sister, “I ever tell you about the time Cooper ordered an ice sculpture and jacked off all over it in his hotel room to try to break a curse?”
Fuck. Me.
I didnotdo that, but any denial will be met with embellishments and lies.
Why?
Because I fucking deserve it.
Grady’s eyes flare wide, but then he looks at my feet again, and he starts grinning too. “You didn’t tell me. But I remember a time in high school when he got caught whacking off to some documentary on roller skating.”
“They can leave now,” I tell Waverly’s guy.
He smirks at me and makes thego ongesture at my family.
“There was that time he was on the float with me for the Pirate Festival parade back when he was three, and he was sitting on the back of it playing with his willy for all of Blackbeard Avenue to see,” Pop offers.
That one’s unfortunately true.
My mother was horrified.
“Can we stop talking about Cooper’s penis?” Tillie Jean pulls a face. “I’d rather talk about the time he got caught flirting with his student teacher in English class to try to get all the answers to the test.”
“Which English class?” Grady asks.
“The one where every test was an essay.”
Also unfortunately true. Turns out there’s no answer key to essay tests. Dammit. “I took a ball to the head in a game the night before that happened.” I gesture around the room. “Anyone else?”
Sue the goat bleats.
“Good one, Sue,” Grady says. “What he did to your brother wastotallyunacceptable.” He lifts his walkie-talkie. “I repeat, code shit. We’ll rendezvous at the rendezvous point.”
“Is that Grady’s bakery?” Nana asks over a walkie-talkie. “I can ninja a bodyguard, but I can’t remember shit these days.”
“She didn’t ninja me,” Kiva’s voice says over the security guy’s walkie-talkie. “But she did tell me a fascinating story about Cooper and a donut that I can’t decide if I want to repeat or remove from my brain permanently.”
“Rendezvous without us,” my dad says, his voice echoing over the multiple walkie-talkies used by my family in my house now. “Libby and I suddenly have other plans.”
“Aww, I hope we’re as frisky when we hit our fifties as they are,” Tillie Jean says to Max.
“Annika and I will be,” Grady says. “But you know, if two of us are, that’s gonna leave no frisky for Cooper. It’s like a rule. One of the siblings has to have a sexual dysfunction. Sorry, Coop. Probably a good thing you’re getting in all those memories now.”
“I got a secret for you,” Pop whispers. “Your grandma thinks it’s a little blue pill, but it’s actually a regular ritual of select movies and magazines with an herbal mixture that’s a classified pirate recipe passed down from Thorny Rock himself.”
I scrub a hand over my face.
Max is snickering.
