“You showed,” I say to McClain when he walks over.
“Yeah, well, someone has to keep an eye on you douchebags.”
Torres jogs past then, pulling his shirt off. He yells, “Keep an eye on this, McClain!” Then he dives onto the Slip ’N Slide right after a curvy brunette, and the two of them end up a tangled mess of slick skin at the other end.
Neither of them looks like they mind.
Dallas checks her watch and says, “Hey. Torres is improving. He was here a whole fifteen minutes before he took his shirt off. That’s got to be a new record.”
He must hear us laughing because he lets go of the brunette and says, “Moore! Get your ass out here!”
When I don’t move, Stella gives me a shove. “Go on. You heard the man.”
“You’re just trying to get me to take my clothes off, aren’t you?”
“Been there. Done that. So many girls have seen it, you probably should make a T-shirt.”
I shake my head and start toward the stairs. “The rest of you might as well go ahead and come. He’s going to want to play—”
I don’t finish my sentence before Torres yells at the top of his lungs, “SLIP CUP!!!”
“What the hell is slip cup?” McClain asks.
Begrudgingly, the whole group comes with me, and we crowd with the rest of the partygoers around Torres as he explains his Slip ’N Slide/flip cup relay game. Basically, you take off down the slide where you get wet and soapy, and then at the end, you have to chug a plastic cup of beer, and flip it over with one finger. When the cup lands perfectly facedown (not easy when you’re all soapy or all drunk), the next person on your team can take off down the slide.
By some miracle, Torres persuades our entire group (and about twenty other people) to play. I watch in amusement as Stella strips down to her swimsuit, locking eyes with Ryan as he does the same. I shake my head and pull off my shirt. I’m not wearing swim trunks, but the athletic shorts I have on will work just fine.
Torres splits us all into teams, and gets another punch to the arm from McClain when he lingers too long near a bikini-clad Dallas.
By the time the game starts, people are cheering, and there’s enough booze and boobs to make me completely forget that I’d ever been in a shitty mood. I’m waiting on the already tipsy girl in front of me to flip her cup before I can go. I start to lose patience somewhere between her seventh and eighth try, and I glance to the side just as a beat-up old town car pulls up next to the curb.
A girl climbs out of the driver’s side, and I don’t see her face, but she’s got white blonde hair falling down her back and tan skin, and some dude I don’t know behind me says, “Damn.”
I’m so busy looking at her that I don’t even notice when drunk and ditzy manages to finally flip her cup.
The woman rounds the back of the car, and lifts a pair of dark sunglasses off her face. The guy behind me pushes at my back, telling me it’s my turn to run, but I can’t stop staring.
Not because she’s pretty or wearing skimpy clothes or smiling right at me.
But because she’s my mother.
Chapter 2
Silas
She wears ridiculously high heels that sink into the grass when she steps up on my lawn. She raises a hand and waves at me. And I’m not sure why, but that f**king wave is what does me in.
I ignore my team yelling at me as I stalk across the lawn. She looks just like I remember her. God, what has it been? Eight f**king years? She still dresses like someone half her age and wears too much makeup, but even so she’s pretty. Beautiful maybe. The kind of face that always drew attention. Her whole life always revolved around her looks, so my brother’s and mine did, too. When Mom looked good, when she had a guy, we had a place to sleep. If she didn’t, we didn’t.
But that shit is over. No part of my life revolves around her, and I’m not about to let her pull me back in.
“Get the f**k in your car and go,” I say when I’m standing in front of her.
She doesn’t reply. Just blinks her long lashes and studies my face for a few seconds that stretch into lifetimes. When I open my mouth to tell her to leave again, she reaches up and touches my face.
I grab her wrist and shove her hand away.
“Get in your f**king car.”
“Baby . . .” she says.
“I haven’t been your baby in a long time. And that’s not changing, so you can leave.”
Her lips pucker on a frown. “You’ll always be my baby.”
She tries to touch me again, and I step back.
“I was yours through all your shitty boyfriends. Through the first time you left, and the second. Hell, I was even yours for all those years you weren’t around, while Sean and I lived with Grams or whatever family would take us. But I stopped being yours sometime around the time Sean went to prison, and you didn’t even bother picking up a phone, let alone showing your face. So, Megan, I suggest you do what you do best. Get in your car and leave before I call the cops and make you.”
She sucks her bottom lip between her teeth, and gives me these big, innocent eyes, and God I want to hit something. My past and my present are supposed to remain separate. But now she’s set it all on a goddamn collision course, and that feeling of inevitability I’ve always felt? The pull of it is so heavy right now, it makes gravity feel like a joke.
When she doesn’t move fast enough, I pull out my cell phone, and she holds up her manicured hands. “Fine! Okay. I’m leaving.”