Summer Breeze Kisses - Addison Moore Page 0,4

who wears coke-bottle glasses with a mouth full of braces. “College?” I swear I’ve inadvertently discovered how to fast forward time without meaning to. Sometimes it feels as though my whole life is riding on the tail of a shooting star—evaporating to nothing right before my eyes.

“Yup. Her move-in date is mid August. Bryson is still hanging around campus, so he can keep an extra eye on her.” Bryson is Holt’s fraternal twin. Their parents own a string of bars, and the Black Bear happens to be one of them.

“Hard to believe. Please tell her I said hi.”

He glances toward the door and breaks out into his million-dollar smile. Aside from his eyes, and that decidedly perfect body, his big toothy grin is almost always guaranteed to melt a girl’s panties. I should know. I speak from experience.

“Looks like you’ll get to tell her yourself. She just walked in.” He gives my shoulder a playful tweak and heads over to his sister who’s currently being accosted by Bryson’s other half, Baya.

“He touched you.” Jemma gives that knowing look which is alarmingly always wrong.

“That’s because he’s comfortable with me.”

“Oh, trust me, that boy is interested in making you real comfortable. Did you see the way he looked at you?” Her pale eyes pierce into mine with all kinds of inappropriate thoughts flickering through them. “He’s interested in touching all of your comfort zones.”

“Trust me, he’s not interested. And would you leave my comfort zones out of this? See all those girls drooling over the bar?” I nod at a gaggle of coeds transfixed by Holt and his mixer-inspired magic tricks. “He can have any one of them—and, newsflash, he probably has.”

“And what exactly is wrong with you?” Jemma kicks me under the table once again. “You’ve got ten times what those girls have.”

“Would you stop using your stilettos as a gavel to prove your point? And for your information”—I glance back at Holt manning the bar while whipping the girls into an ethanol frenzy—“I’m no coed.” I twist back and inspect Jemma for the first signs of crow’s feet. Jemma’s heavily drawn in eyes and disparaging choice of blue-red lip color really prove my point. “We’re not on the same playing field as those girls. My mom always says—”

She holds up a hand quick to stop me. “No offense but your momma should be taken out back and shot on site for the welfare and safety of others. And then I should probably come back in and pistol whip you for believing a thing that woman has ever said.”

Jemma isn’t my mother’s biggest fan. Although I doubt the working end of a rifle is in my mother’s future either. They have a hostile relationship and still seem to get along better then she and I ever could.

“How is it that you call my mother ‘momma’ and yet want to hogtie her and riddle her body with bullets?”

“That’s the beauty of who we are. Good old Bobbie and I understand each other because, deep down, inside we’re the exact same person. We refuse to tell anything but the truth.” My mother legally changed her name from Roberta to Bobbie when she was eighteen. Her father used to call her Bobbie, and she refused to answer to anything but. I guess we have that in common—our father’s giving us pet names we prefer over the ones they originally gifted us with. Although if I called myself Little Bit, I wouldn’t run the risk of being mistaken as a man like my mother so often is, I’d be mistaken for a less-than-amply-endowed pole dancer.

“The truth, huh?” I’m blinded momentarily by my mother and her stab-you-in-the-heart brand of candor. I love her to death, but she’s honest as an assault rifle all day long. “Yeah, well, sometimes the truth feels a lot like a two-by-four.”

Jemma slinks down in her seat, examining me with a slight look of pity. I know what she’s thinking. About a decade ago I made the mistake of letting her in on my darkest hour. Sometimes I think the memory of it eats at her as much as it does me. But that’s one truth Jemma will never espouse because I made it clear as the crystal meth her husband smokes that it’s not her place to do so—it’s mine. And I never will. Some things are best forgotten. And as soon as I can figure out how to forget it I’ll be golden.

Jem picks at her food. “Rumor has it