Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 126850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 126850 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 634(@200wpm)___ 507(@250wpm)___ 423(@300wpm)
“Noooo,” Vincent said, scanning the room in that shifty way teens did when they were looking for an escape. “I’m spending time with my favourite sister.”
“I’m your only sister, and no. The last time you did that willingly was when you were four and I had the TV remote.”
“Actually, it was last year when I bought you lunch.”
“That was a bribe to buy you alcohol,” I reminded him.
“If she won’t, I’ll do it,” Granny interjected. “I’ll take free food.”
I sighed. “I did it. Whose house do you think he drank it at?”
Vincent laughed. “I had to cut her grass for six months.”
“I warned you beforehand. If anyone threw up, you were on lawnmower duty.” I shrugged. “Why are you loitering? Do you not have anyone to speak to?”
“Not really,” he grumbled. “I only agreed to come because Dad was and I knew he’d let me leave early if I asked. Mum won’t.”
“Poor baby.” I reached up to pinch his cheek, but he avoided it by leaning away. “Want me to get you out of here? I’ll tell her you have a headache.”
“Nah, she’ll just keep on at me for the next week.”
“Think about it this way. Only six months and you’ll be at university.”
“Yeah, because going to Cambridge got you away from her.”
Touché.
“And you’re almost thirty and still go for dinner once a month. There’s no hope for me,” Vincent grumbled.
“Oh, the second you turn eighteen, you’re doing me a solid and telling them you don’t want to eat with me anymore,” I told him, sipping my wine. “Part of those dinners was sibling bonding time. Apparently, you peeing in my shoes when you were five didn’t bond us closely enough.”
He wrinkled his nose up. “That’s the weirdest sibling bonding time I’ve ever had.”
“You can say that again. Me blackmailing you into mowing my lawn was far more effective.”
Granny eyed me. “You blackmailed a teenager?”
“Yes. Don’t act like you never did it to me,” I shot back.
“Good to see you take after me after all.”
“Jesus Christ, don’t scare me like that.”
Vincent laughed. “Dad wants you to call him, by the way.”
I blinked at him. “You couldn’t lead with that?”
“No. If I had, I’d already be back spending my Saturday night with my mother, and I can’t think of anything worse.”
Ah, to be seventeen again.
“Fine,” I replied. “He couldn’t tell me himself?”
“Maybe. He said you didn’t answer when he called you earlier, and you haven’t text him back either.”
“Of course not. I’m at a wedding. What kind of rude little shit gets their phone out at a wedding?”
“He did,” Granny said.
Vincent bobbed his head. “I did. I was playing Candy Crush during dinner.”
Granny chuckled. “It’s like you’re trying to get your mother to send you away.”
“He is,” I said at the same time he said, “I am.”
“Sometimes I wonder how you’re related because you look nothing alike,” she said, looking at us both. “Then you do that, and your father comes out. It’s dreadful.”
I dipped my chin, pinching the bridge of my nose.
“I don’t like it either,” Vincent replied. “He wants you to call him tomorrow, Grace.”
“I’ll try,” I said vaguely. “If not, I’ll call him when I’m home on Monday.”
“I’ll tell him.” He looked around. “Is there anyone here I can talk to?”
I scanned the room. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you know all these people?”
“Not by choice,” I remarked. “You go to these things a lot more than I do.”
“Not by choice,” he parroted.
I rolled my eyes and turned around so he could look at the back of my head instead. A lot of people hadn’t been able to get here because of the weather, and from what I could see of those I knew, a lot of those people included anyone my brother would be interested in hanging out with.
I felt for him.
Weddings sucked when you were a teenager. They were fun as a kid when you could spend your time being a dancing hooligan or as an adult when, again, you could be a dancing hooligan, just a drunk dancing hooligan. But for teens?
Not really, especially at slightly fancier weddings like this.
He was going to have to suck it up.
“This looks like an enlightening conversation,” William said, slipping away from his Aunt Cecelia.
We’d been introduced. Right before she’d told me about the eighteen kidney stones she’d had removed from her body.
“Not half as interesting as yours,” I replied, raising my eyebrows.
His smile dropped. “I tried telling her I already knew about the time she had her appendix removed, but she told me this was a different one.”
Vincent’s eyes narrowed. “I thought we only had one appendix.”
“We do,” William told him. “I think she was talking about her gallbladder.”
“Does she have any organs left?” I asked.
“No, and thank goodness she’s ineligible for organ donation, or she’d come back and haunt us to tell us about all of those donations, too,” he said, making Granny laugh. “Are you all hiding in the corner? All you need is Carmen to make it a family affair.”