I chuckle on my way to the shower. When I come out, they’re watching TV in comfy clothes.
“I’m going to get revenge on both of you for those water balloons.” I sit on the other side of the sectional.
“Bring it on.” Lil grins. “Anytime, anywhere, buddy.”
“Except for tonight.” Ariana is sprawled on the couch and looks half asleep. She yawns and closes her eyes.
“Poor baby’s tired,” Lil teases.
“Callie made me race her like forty-seven times. That kid has way too much fucking energy.”
Lil chuckles. “Don’t I know it? I’m glad we only do this shitonce a year. I couldn’t handle doing it for birthdays. Hey, Luca, when’s your birthday?”
“December.”
Ariana looks over at me, a curious expression on her face. “When in December?”
Crap. “Uh, the twenty-fifth.”
Her pretty gray eyes sparkle. “You’re a Christmas baby? You’re a Christmas baby, and you don’t like Secret Santa?” She pins me with a glare. “Luca.”
I shift uncomfortably, trying to make words come out of my mouth, but they don’t, and I finally shrug.
She crosses her arms over her chest and huffs. “I love everything about Valentine’s Day.”
“You were born on Valentine’s Day?”
“No, I wasn’t born on Valentine’s Day, I picked it for my birthday.”
“What?” Sometimes, I feel like my brain shorts out when Ariana speaks. Which sounds worse than I mean it to. I just don’t always follow her line of thinking.
“I didn’t know my birthday when I came to live here. And sure, Dad was able to find it pretty easily like he did my middle name, but what was the point in keeping either of those things when Mom and Dad adopted me? We were changing my last name anyway, so we changed those, too.”
“You can’t just change birthdays,” I say. A new identity, yeah, that would have a new birthday. And fake IDs. But not adoptions.
“DeVilles can do anything, Luca,” she says with a laugh, sharing a grin with Lil.
“But you kept your first name?” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them because the grin falls away and her eyes dim.Nice job, bonehead.“Shit, I’m sorry. It’s pretty, like you. I just mean… fuck. It fits you, you know?” As I yammer on, the light starts to come back in her eyes.
“You’re an idiot,” Lil says, laughing loudly.
I grab one of the stupid pillows they have on the couch and throw it at her. It has Nicholas Cage’s face on it. Who the fuck buys a pillow with Nicholas Cage’s face on it? She catches it and puts it behind her head.
“No one ever called me Ariana back at that house, and I liked when Lil did. But nothing else was worth keeping.” There’s a hint of pain in Ari’s voice that hurts my heart.
Lil hums. “Just think, you had a one in six chance of sharing a birthday.”
Tilting my head to one side, I ask, “How so?”
Ariana’s lips turn up again, and I realize how much her smile means to me. I will do anything to see that smile.
“I put all my favorite days in a bowl and picked one out. Well, Mom wrote them down for me. Even though I never got to celebrate Christmas before coming here, I’ve always loved the lights.”
My hatred for her birth parents grows. “What else? What were your other four favorite days? Halloween? International Pizza Day?”
“Shut up, you’re gonna make me want candy corn and pizza,” she laughs, that bright smile even bigger. “Everything except Christmas was someone’s birthday. Lil’s, Dad’s, Mom’s, Becca’s, and Uncle Ford’s.”
This girl. She’s always surprising me. “You didn’t want your own day? Or like a random day that isn’t something big?” I don’t say I hate my birthday being basically the biggest holiday of the year, but I think she hears it anyway.
