homework to do, plus I have to Snap Kristan.” Paisley slung her backpack over her shoulder; grabbed her soda; and, with a bag of chips between her teeth, said, “Hi, Annie. Bye, Annie.”
Annie waited until she heard the bedroom door shut before she said, “A sleepover?”
He shrugged. “This morning at drop-off, one of the moms warned me of a rumor going around about a party at the Cliffs the weekend after the dance. It’s a three-day weekend, and it’s a ‘go all-out’ party. I know what those parties are like, so I figured that if I offered to have a party here, P and her friends will have a legit reason to be no-shows.”
Annie rested against the counter next to him, their hips an inch apart. “That was very proactive of you. Your right eye didn’t even start twitching when she brought up Gray paying for it.”
“I get to be the hero and he picks up the tab?” He shrugged. “Fine with me. I’m more interested in you noticing I wasn’t twitching.” They were still a friendly distance apart, but his tone ate up any space between them. “Does that mean you were gazing into my eyes, Anh?”
She loved it when he said her name like that. “You have pretty eyes.” Eyes that were fixed on her mouth as if she was the most erotic thing he’d ever seen. They were filled with promises of what was to come. “And they didn’t burn with the flames of hell when she brought up Sam. You really asked him to be on the decorating committee?”
“Sam was already on the committee. I just convinced Gray that if they are properly supervised, it’ll be okay for them to hang out.”
She hip-checked him, but it wasn’t playful like it had been the other night at the bar. Oh, there was a playful element to it, but there was also a whole lot of heat sparking between them. “Wow, I’m very impressed.”
“Before you go getting all sweet on me, you should know that I moved the decoration committee meetings to Gray’s house. So he’ll get to play the enforcer and I get to be the hero. Even if for just a minute.”
Chapter 18
Annie should have stayed home, and that was the truth of it.
She hadn’t even said her hellos and already she was dreaming up a list of excusable reasons for why she had to dish-and-dash.
It was Friday, and the monthly Pho Shizzle potluck was in full swing. When Lynn had invited her, Annie had imagined a dozen or so women in various stages of life sitting around the room sipping wine and talking about food.
Pho Shizzle was an ethnic cooking group that focused on homestyle Vietnamese dishes, so it was not unexpected to find a lot of dark-haired petites there. But looking around the room,
Annie realized they were all dark-haired petite women. In fact, they were all Vietnamese.
A warm and unfamiliar emotion spread through her that she couldn’t quite explain or describe, other than to say it’s what she’d always imagined it felt like to belong.
It was ridiculous that Annie had been on the planet nearly thirty years and this was her first time being in a large group where everyone looked like her—and where she wasn’t in the minority. For many, it wouldn’t seem like a big deal, but to someone who had always been the odd girl out, it was huge.
Annie watched the women flutter back and forth in the kitchen, putting the final touches on their dishes, chattering away all at once. She could hear the conversations overlapping, people talking over others to be heard—mainly the older women.
But as the night drew on, and women paused to look at all the dishes, that feeling began to chill, because Annie was beginning to see that, while no two dumpling soups were alike, hers was suffering from a serious case of “one of these things is not like the others.”
Par for the course, she thought, watching the hustle and bustle around her.
Annie had managed to whip up a darn good replica of her mom’s soup, fueling false hopes for the outcome of the night.
Her goal had never been to come into Nurse Tran’s home and show her up, although she’d dreamed last night that Hoan was so taken by Annie’s soup she’d asked Annie to host the next get-together. Now her goal was simply to make it through the night without crying.
Not sure how to slip seamlessly into the well-oiled machine that was Pho