“Stop, don’t be silly,” I call out. “I need to head home anyway.” Lowering my voice, I promise Nix, “I’ll text you when I get home. Good luck.”
“Thanks,” he says, opening the door with a sigh.
I pat his chest as I step past him, then stride toward the elevator, refusing to look back. That was close. Too close.
We were lucky Beatrice showed up when she did.
Now is not the time to break the rules.
Now is the time to focus and execute.
Even if my entire body protests walking away from Nix on a cellular level.
Eleven
NIX
The butter foams and crackles in the pan, turning from pale yellow to that perfect golden brown that smells like Saturday mornings and being a kid again.
I’ve got a massive bowl of batter beside me—protein powder, mashed banana, and a splash of the good Mexican vanilla. Mexican vanilla is the Nix family secret ingredient, passed down from father to son since Gramps brought home a big bottle in 1971.
I’m currently on pancake number fourteen.
The stack on the plate beside the stove is getting ridiculous—the Leaning Tower of Pancake—but I keep going.
This smell is certified Bea and Baylor crack, the one thing that always got us up and out of bed on a Saturday, no matter how late we’d been out the night before or how determined we were to sleep our way through whatever “forced family fun” our parents were insisting on that weekend.
One whiff of banana pancake and we’d rise like zombies from our teenage beds to stumble downstairs for the feed.
I pour another circle of batter onto the griddle, watching it slowly begin to bubble in the center, proving I haven’t lost mytouch. I took over pancake duty my senior year of high school, when Dad broke his wrist in a beer league hockey game.
But before that…
Inhaling the banana-and-vanilla scent, I’m suddenly seventeen again, back in my childhood bedroom in Nashville, wrenched from the depths of a hard teenage sleep by the smell of browning butter and banana.
I’d roll out of bed with a groan, smacking my dry lips as I staggered to the bathroom to ditch my retainer before tugging on pajama pants and heading for the door. And I swear, the second I pulled it open, there was Bea, coming out of her room across the hall at the same time.
Bea, fourteen to my seventeen, all scrawny legs and a mouthful of braces, wearing one of the oversized “Zombie Unicorn Showdown” gaming shirts she collected from comic book conventions before the goth music scene got ahold of her. The moment our eyes met, she’d lift her clawed hands above her head, emit a screech like a pissed-off velociraptor, and take off for the stairs, running as fast as her stick legs could carry her.
Which was pretty fucking fast.
By the time Bea hit her teens, I had toworkto get ahead of her. No amount of extra conditioning after hockey practice could make me as naturally fast as the little maniac who lived to give me shit.
“No! Cheater!” she’d screech as I grabbed her around the waist, spinning her back into the hall behind me as I took the stairs two at a time.
“It’s not cheating when there aren’t any rules,” I’d say, swaying my backside wildly from side to side, blocking her attempts to squeeze past me.
“There are rules!” she’d screech. “Velociraptor gets a five-second head start, and the dinosaur hunter can’t use his big hairy butt as a weapon.”
“My butt isn’t hairy,” I’d say, laughing and wincing as she leapt onto my back, emitting another raptor screech directly into my ear.
By the time we made it to the kitchen, both of us were usually laughing so hard it hurt, and we’d knocked at least one picture off the wall.
But Mom had given up on glass in the frames years ago, back when we were still little kids who ran wild through the house, playing tag or a basketball-bowling-hide-and-seek hybrid game we invented ourselves. Mom grew up in a house that was more like a museum, where absolutely no fun was allowed indoors. As so often happens, she swung in the opposite direction, kid-proofing our house as best she could before turning us loose to be the wild hooligans that nature intended.
Without fail, she’d be beaming as we careened into the room, angling to be the first to touch the kitchen table—“base” for dinosaur hunt.
“You two are going to break your necks one of these days,” Dad would warn from the stove, but he was usually smiling, too. Assuming work hadn’t been too shitty that week.
