By the time I finished telling the only parts of the story they needed to hear, my brother had his head tossed back and snorted. “You’re such a drama queen.”
If I’d had anything other than noodles left on my plate, I would have flicked them at him. “What?”
“You’re a drama queen,” the third biggest drama queen in the family after our mom and oldest sister, claimed. “You said he gave you hell, but none of that sounded like hell. He was messing with you,” he explained, shaking his head. “We give you more shit than that in an hour.”
I blinked because he had a point. But it was different because we were family. Giving each other shit was pretty much mandatory.
My friend’s brother, my rink mate, giving me hell… was not.
“Yeah, Grumpy. That doesn’t sound so bad,” my mom piped in.
Fucking traitors. “He told me once I needed to lose weight before my blades gave out on me!”
What did all three people sitting around the kitchen island do? They laughed. They laughed their asses off.
“You were chunky back then,” my fucking brother cackled, his face turning red.
I reached toward him again to try and pinch him, but he lunged away, practically falling into James’s lap.
“Why didn’t I ever think of telling you that?” Jonathan kept going, almost on the verge of crying-laughing from his body language as he draped himself over his husband, even further away from me. I’d seen him do it enough to recognize the signs.
“I can’t believe y’all,” I said, not sure why the hell they still managed to surprise me. “He told me once before a competition, ‘Break a leg. Literally.’”
Repeating another rude thing he’d said to me did nothing to convince my family Ivan had been a jerk; all it did was make them laugh harder. Even James, who was the nicest, lost the battle. I couldn’t believe it… but I probably should.
“He’s been calling me Meatball for years,” I said, almost feeling my eyelid start to twitch at that fucking nickname that drove me insane no matter how much I told myself to get over it. Sticks and stones could break your bones, but I didn’t let people’s words hurt me.
Usually.
They were all choking though. All three of them.
“Jasmine, honey,” James croaked out, his palm covering his eyes as he had his meltdown. “What I want to know is—what did you say back to him?”
I thought about slamming my mouth closed and not saying anything, but if anyone in the world knew me, it was these people—and my other brother and sisters. God, how the hell could I work with Ivan after ten years of this history we had? His own coach made him keep his mouth closed so that he wouldn’t be tempted to say something that might get me to deny their offer.
We’d probably throw down into a fistfight after a week. If we even made it that long. It was honestly only a matter of time. We’d been building up to it over the years.
I had a lot to think about.
“Stuff,” was all I went with, purposely not thinking about all the shit I’d said back to him.
“What kind of stuff?” James asked, his tan face turning red as he pinched the tip of his nose.
I looked at him out of the corner of my eye and gave him a little smile he didn’t see as I repeated myself. “Stuff.”
James laughed and barely managed to get out, “All right. I’ll let it go for now. You two don’t talk shit to each other anymore though?”
I blinked. “We still do. I called him Satan today.”
“Jasmine!” my mom hissed before she fell over onto the empty stool beside her, laughing.
I smiled so hard my cheeks hurt… at least until I remembered what I was keeping from them.
Was I willing to wake up before the sun was out to train for six or seven hours a day with the same man who had asked me if I’d been cast as Ugly Betty? With the intention to win a championship?
I wasn’t sure.
Chapter 4
I wasn’t that surprised that I slept like total shit that night.
I could have blamed the coffee I’d had after dinner—I didn’t usually drink caffeine in the afternoon or later because it made me crash, and I needed all the energy I had to get through the rest of my day—but it hadn’t been the coffee’s fault.
It had been my mom’s. And Coach Lee’s. But mostly my mom’s.
But that’s what would happen when she dropped a bomb on me I should have seen coming, but hadn’t. Since when the hell had I ever been able to pull something over on her, and why had I expected I was going to be able to do it now?
It was when she came to sit beside me on the couch after my brother and his husband had left, with her slinging her arm over my shoulder, that I knew without a doubt, I hadn’t hidden shit from her. We were pretty affectionate in my family… if you could call giving each other bruises, wedgies, and playing pranks affection… but we weren’t the type to constantly hug and kiss, unless someone needed it. The last time I’d randomly hugged my oldest brother, he’d asked if I was going to jail or dying.
So that night, when Mom hugged me to her side on the couch and squeezed my knee, I accepted that I made the same mistake most people made with her: I’d underestimated her. My brothers and sisters knew me really well, their significant others did too—I wasn’t that complicated—but no one knew me the way Mom did. My sister Ruby was close, but still not on her level. I doubted anyone would ever be.
“Tell me what’s wrong, Grumpy,” she said, calling me by the nickname she’d given me when I was four. “You’ve been so quiet tonight.”
“Mom, I talked half of dinner,” I said, eyes trained on the Unsolved Mysteries rerun on the television, and shook my head, not trusting myself to look her in the face and keep my dilemma to myself.
She rested her head against mine after setting down a normal-sized glass of red wine on the coffee table, pretty much falling on top of me, like she was expecting me to hold her up. “Yeah, to your brother and James. You barely said three words to me; you didn’t even tell me what happened at your meeting. You think I don’t know when something is off with you?” she accused, sounding insulted.
She had me there.
Mom squeezed my shoulder again. “Just because I didn’t say anything in front of Jojo and James doesn’t mean I didn’t notice.” She gave me one more squeeze before whispering like a total creep, “I know everything.”
That finally made me snort and glance at her out of the corner of my eye. I’d swear, she hadn’t aged a day in the last fifteen years. It was like time slowed for her. Preserving her. That, or she’d scored herself a wish with a genie a long time ago and was going to be immortal, or something pretty fucking close to it.
I stretched my legs out to rest my heels on the coffee table and wrinkled my nose, still looking away from her as I muttered, “Okay, 1-800-PSYCHIC.”
She snuggled herself closer into my side the same way she always did when she was being a pain, and I leaned away just a little to mess with her. “Tell me what’s wrong with you,” she insisted directly into my ear, her voice deceptively soft—and fake as fuck. Her breath, which smelled liked straight-up wine, wafted into my nostrils. “I’ll give you a milk chocolate covered cherry from my Valentine’s Day stash….”
Not even a chocolate covered cherry would get me to open my mouth. I leaned away from her even further, but she just followed me, hitting clinger level 100 as she threw a thigh over mine. “Good lord, lady, do you want me to just hook up a wine IV to your arm from now on? One of those wine connoisseurs could probably guess the years the wine was bottled from how strong your breath is.”
She ignored me and hugged me even closer. “The sooner you talk to me, the sooner I’ll leave you alone,” my mom tried to bribe me.