“Stop it.”
“There are movies about this, you know.”
“I hate you.”
“Like, alotof movies. If the internet’s taught me one thing, it’s that banging your stepsister is very normal.”
“She’s not,” I start, but that’s a pointless sentence, so I give up and try something else. “She’s cute, okay? It’s not weird that I think an unrelated, adult woman is attractive, and I figured that you two already knew each other. That’s all.”
“I say you go for it. The wedding’s not until February, so you’ve got, like, six months to bang her before it’s incest.”
“Bastien,” I say through my teeth, even though twenty-three years of experience with this asshole have taught me that nothing I say is going to help. “There’s no banging and no incest, and it wouldn’t be incest even if—” Unhelpful. “I think a woman is cute. Can I fucking live? And can you please not mention this to?—”
“Hey,” says Gerald’s voice behind me, and I jump. He’s leaning around the doorway, peering in. Please, God, let him not have heard any of our conversation. “We’re about to get a game of Apples to Apples going. You guys in? Leave the rest—you’ve already done too much.”
“I love Apples to Apples!” Bastien says, pushing himself off the counter. “Yeah, for sure.”
“Great,” Gerald says and gives us one of his goofy smiles before disappearing.Now, of course, I can see the echo of it in Madeline’s face, and my stomach lurches.
“We’re not done here,” Bastien says and points at me on the way to the door.
“We’re absolutely done here,” I tell him.
“We’re not.”
“Weare.”
He very quietly singsongs something that sounds like “You want to bang our stepsister,” so I flick him in the back of the ear, and he smacks my hand, and that’s why two grown men are slap fighting as we enter the living room.
CHAPTER SEVEN
MADELINE
Before tonight,I knew three things about Paloma’s older son, Javier:
One, he did a stint in the Marines;
Two, he went to rehab a couple times for Oxy (and heroin, maybe—that part is unclear); and
Three, he lives in some tiny town west of here, in the mountains.
After tonight, I know several more, including what he looks like naked, that he’s a lying liar, and that he’s very bad at Apples to Apples. My aunt Susan has to explain the rules to him, like, three times, and he still puts downDriving Off a Cliffwhen the prompt isSqueaky Clean. That doesn’t even begin to make sense.
Javier gets zero points, but his mom wipes the floor with the rest of us.
“Who wants dessert?” my dad asks after we put it away, slapping both hands on his khaki-clad knees. “I made a special run to Tidewater Creamery and got their world-famous butter pecan.”
Technically, he says this to everyone, but he’s directing it at Paloma.
“You didn’t. That’s an hour out of your way,” she says.
My dad shrugs, his hands still on his knees. Besides the khakis, he’s wearing his most tasteful Hawaiian shirt. He’ssolucky that Paloma likes his personality.
“I wanted to go for a drive,” he says. “I just got the remasteredAutomatic for the Peopleand the car’s the best place to listen, so I figured I’d take a ride out there. Plus, they pack it in dry ice for the ride home.”
It would be gross if it weren’t so cute, and I go put the game back in the closet before I can hear the rest of the conversation about how my dad made a two-hour round trip to get Paloma her favorite ice cream and is now trying to act like it’s nothing. Of course, it’s not nothing. He’s got a lot going on between work (naval engineer) and hobbies (tennis and record collecting) and volunteering (he tutors math for free every Wednesday at our library), and if I know him, he used historic traffic data to find the most efficient time to make the drive to the Tidewater Creamery. All because Paloma really likes this ice cream place—which is very romantic, and I’m not in the mood.
Particularly since I had sex with her liar of a son under somewhat false pretenses. Which he invented so he’d never have to see me again. Which is the opposite of romantic. I’m not even mad that he didn’t want to call the next day. I’m mad that, somehow, I come off as so clingy and needy that he had to lie to get rid of me.
