Semi-Psychic Life (Glimmer Lake #2) - Elizabeth Hunter Page 0,79

at his phone and avoiding Val’s eyes.

Uh-oh.

“What’s up?” she asked. It was finals week, which meant he’d only had one class that day and he’d had the rest of the day free. “Did your final go okay?”

Jackson looked up as if he’d just registered where he was. “Oh. Hey, Mom. Yeah, it went fine.”

Val leaned on the counter. “What’s up?”

Val didn’t need to be psychic to see his internal debate.

Should I tell her?

She won’t let up until I do.

She won’t get it.

Parents are such a pain in the ass.

“Just tell me what’s going on,” Val said. “And I’ll make you a macchiato.”

Andy’s head swung around. “How come he gets coffee?”

“Because he’s seventeen now and much taller than me, so I’m actively trying to stunt his growth.” Val scanned her son. He was being cagey. He was fidgeting with his left wrist. He was…

Val’s eyes went wide when she spotted the familiar bandage.

Her baby was tattooed.

Tattooed.

She snapped her fingers. “Come here.”

Jackson groaned. “Mom, it’s not a big deal.”

“Nah-uh.” She slapped her hand on the counter. “Come. Here.”

He sighed. “It’s not like you don’t have a ton of them! You just got two more—”

“I am forty-six!” She pointed to her chest. “You are seventeen! How did you get this? Did you go to someone unlicensed? Jack, so help me—”

“We drove to Nevada, okay!” Jackson sighed. “After the final. We just barely got back, okay? I drove to a place on the state line and got it. It was a regular tattoo parlor, okay? It had a bunch of reviews online. It was clean and I watched them unwrap the needles and it was totally safe, okay?”

Val wasn’t happy. Even though she’d done literally the same thing when she was sixteen. “Give me your wrist.”

Andy and JoJo were watching from the side in horror as Jackson approached his irate mother.

So help her, if her oldest child had marred the perfect skin she had created in her own womb with a cartoon character, girl’s name, or any of the stupid shit that teenage boys—

“See?” Jackson pulled up his sleeve and unpeeled the bandage. “It’s not a big deal.”

Val looked at the honeycomb-looking structures inked in fine lines on her son’s skin. “What is it?”

“It’s the chemical structure of dopamine and serotonin,” Jackson said. “Mood-regulating hormones.”

She looked up. “That’s… cool? Why?”

Jackson stared at the tattoo. “To remind me that moods are really just chemicals that come and go. Happy. Sad. Angry. They’re just chemicals in my brain. They don’t get to decide my life or make my decisions.” He looked up. “Think. Don’t just feel.”

Oh, her proud, determined kid. Val lifted his wrist and kissed just to the side of the healing skin. “You need both, kid. Head and heart.”

He smiled. “That’ll be my next one then.”

Val groaned. “He’s already an addict.”

“Hey.” He pointed at her. “Takes one to know one.”

The bell over the door rang again, and Val re-covered Jackson’s healing tattoo with the bandage. “Talk to me tonight about how to take care of it, okay? Do not use Neosporin.”

“Okay.” He bounced on his heels. “Do I get my macchiato?”

“No.”

“Mom!”

“Fine.” She nodded to the side. “Now shoo.”

Val smiled at Robin and Monica, who were walking toward the counter. “You guys know we’re closed, right?”

JoJo laughed as they pulled another shot of espresso. “Right.”

Val looked at them. “You know, we flip that sign over every afternoon and no one ever pays attention to it.”

“To be fair”—JoJo scrunched up their nose—“we keep making coffee for all the stragglers.”

“It’s like feeding bears,” Val whispered.

“I heard that!” Monica dropped her purse on a table and took out a folder. “We are here for business reasons, Ms. Costa.”

“Do you have the contract for Russell House?”

“Yep!” Monica grinned. “You ready to sign?”

“Is it the same as what Phil looked over last week?” Val was going out on a limb and setting up a coffee stand at Russell House like Monica and Robin had been pestering her to do, but she wasn’t doing it without someone smarter going over the contract.

“Yep,” Robin said. “We had our guy look at it, and Phil gave it his stamp of approval too. We’re both covered, and you’ll technically be renting space from us, so the insurance stuff will be taken care of like we’d already detailed in the previous contract.”

“Cool.” She reached for a pen.

It had taken a good amount of legal finagling to make sure everything lined up and both Russell House and Misfit Mountain Coffee Company were covered and insured and