Shark Bait (The Grab Your Pole Series) (53 page)

“Dude! You’re toast!”

Jeff started laughing at Tristan again as my dad looked back at the closed door of the kitchen, contemplating what the big deal was. Only this time, Tristan didn’t ignore Jeff. His facial expression as the catastrophic possibilities dawned on him was to-die-for funny.

“Hi everyone! Who’s toast?” “Lonely Pete” asked upon entering our family room, having just let himself in as well.

I call him that because even though he’s a really close friend of Tristan’s and Jeff’s, therefore mine as well, he’s always kind of like the third or sometimes even seventh wheel. Basically, he doesn’t have a girlfriend.

“I think I might be…do you think she’ll be willing to barter now or is this something she might blackmail me with at such a time as it suits her purposes?” Tristan asked the room at large.

“Right now you have nothing I want, but thank you for being so amenable in helping me try out my new video camera. I think the picture quality is tremendous.”

Apparently tonight, Jill is both the criminal and the spy. Mind you she didn’t come from the kitchen. No, she came from upstairs...and we
never
saw her go up.

“Oh, hi Jillian,” Pete said.

She ignored him. “Can we eat now? I’m hungry.”

“What do you want on your pizza?” I couldn’t help it.

“I don’t want pizza, I want the meatloaf.”

Out of all of us present, you’d think my sister would’ve already placed her order at the Bottle Shop for the best pizza in town after having borne witness to my dad’s and Tristan’s attempt to cook something edible. I say that with the utmost love and affection for both of them of course.

“Um…don’t you think that’s living dangerously?”

“Camie, I like living on the edge. Besides, it should be good.”

“They put oatmeal in it though,” I whispered.

I was teasing them before but I’m still thinking pizza. I’m also hearing Aerosmith’s “Livin’ On the Edge” in my head now instead of Sister Sledge, which is kind of a relief.

“O ye of little faith…”

Huh. If she’s willing to give it a go, then I guess I should too. I’m just not excited about the idea of what my stomach will do to me…maybe I can get away with just a small piece if I fill my plate with vegetables. I should also make sure I have a couple napkins in case I can’t get any of it down. Of course I had to hide a little giggle as an episode of
Seinfeld
involving mutton, napkins and Elaine being molested by dogs popped into my head.

O ye of little faith indeed.

At one point during dinner, which surprisingly wasn’t bad—go figure...oatmeal in meatloaf—I was hard pressed not to climb on the table and do the Snoopy happy dance. I was, however, doing it in my head and quite vigorously at that.

“So what does everyone have planned for their Thanksgiving break?” My mom asked the four teenagers at the table who aren’t related to her by blood.

“Sadly, I’m going to New Jersey with my parents to see my dad’s family,” Kate said, sounding utterly disgruntled.

“Which means I’m stuck having dinner at my dad’s girlfriend’s parents’ house…thanks Katy.” Kate threw a roll at Jeff in her defense. He really hates being away from her for more than even a few hours. Not that she enjoys time away from him, but still; he’s a pouter.

“It’s not like I wanna go, you know…I’m gonna be miserable.”

“My family is spending Thanksgiving in Palm Springs this year,” Pete said, ignoring the minor bickering that’s going on between Jeff and Kate over their mandated holiday separation.

“What about you, Boy?”

This is when I started to get a little disgruntled myself and started to empathize with Jeff and Kate. Being what you might call desert-rats, my family—including some extended family—goes to the desert every year for Thanksgiving. It’s a
ton
of fun. We all go in our motor homes and ride various pieces of desert vehicles like quads, dirt bikes, dune buggies, etc…but for some reason, I don’t think riding around the dunes with my cousins and Jillian is going to be as much fun as it usually is as I will be sans hot boyfriend.

“I got nothin’. My parents were asked to take a flight to Tuscany (Yeah, Italy.) so they’ll be gone most of the week,” Tristan answered, sounding irritated. He also kind of threw a piece of his roll onto his plate to emphasize that irritation.

My mom frowned. “Can’t you go with them?”

“Not this time. My passport expired last month and I sorta had other things on my mind so I forgot to get it renewed,” he explained without saying that the “other things” on his mind last month were me.

Of course he made sure
I
knew what he was talking about by covertly pinching my butt under the table. It was totally unnecessary, like I didn’t already know. Hell, most of the people sitting at the table played some kind of role in how we got together, including my little sister. Well actually, especially my little sister, seeing as how she operated as a double agent. And even if they didn’t play a part, they all knew what Tristan was talking about but I didn’t see him pinch any of
them
. I think he’s just trying to get me to retaliate so he has an excuse to mess with me later on.

I was considering what form my retaliation would take when my dad said, “Well then, why don’t you just come to the desert with us?”

I was stunned. I almost asked him to repeat himself because I thought there was no way my dad had just asked Tristan to spend four nights and four days with us in the middle of nowhere. I didn’t have to ask him to repeat himself though.

“Kevin, I think that is a simply marvelous idea. Really Tristan, you shouldn’t spend Thanksgiving alone and we won’t take no for an answer.”

I took one look at Tristan’s face and although the expression he was wearing was something like innocent surprise, I knew from the way his eyes were sparkling that he’d just played my parents.

Then he pinched me again.

So now you can understand why I’m trying really hard not to table dance.

“Is there room on the trailer for my bike?” Huh. I didn’t know he has a dirt bike. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised…bikes
do
have wheels.

“Aw, that sucks! This means I’m not gonna have my girlfriend
or
my best friend around for like five days…and Pete’s gonna be gone…I bet Mike’s goin’ out of town too,” Jeff muttered to himself while Tristan and my dad talked dirt toys.

After dinner was over and the dishes were done entirely by Kate, who’d placed a bet that dinner would suck and lost, my parents retired to the family room to watch a movie that none of us was interested in seeing, so we all played a card game called Bullshit. It’s a game I’ve been playing since I was little and it’s really fun.

The object of the game is to get rid of all your cards as they’re played in order from smallest to biggest. However, if you don’t have the right card on your turn then you have to pick up the pile, so what you’re supposed to do is bluff. So say you’re on threes and you don’t have one, you would choose a random card from your hand and say “one three” and place it face down on the pile. Now, if someone calls you on it by saying “bullshit,” you have to pick up the pile. But let’s say you did actually play the right card and someone calls you on it incorrectly, well then
they
have to pick up the pile. There are all kinds of other ways to cheat, but you get the gist.

Jillian, Kate, and Tristan rock at this game. Kate does because she’s gifted at being able to read people, and Tristan is because he’s exceedingly sharp and he can
almost
always school his facial expression to look however he wants it to look, which is typically along the lines of being cocky, arrogant, or smug—I know the three are sort of like synonyms for each other, but there is actually difference between them, and he’s very well versed in demonstrating that fact. Now, he doesn’t know this, but I can usually pick up on his real mood by what his eyes are doing. Not always, but most of the time. And then there’s Jillian who generally appears to be bored all the time. Well, she’s good at it only because you can never trust her, so people tend to not call her on anything unless they have all four cards of the number she’s on in their own hand. Also, she has an odd strategy. She’ll play straight in the very beginning and then, whether she thinks someone’s bluffing or not, she’ll start calling everyone out so she ends up with a bunch of cards, which means there’s a good chance she’s never bluffing after that.

Anyway, the six of us were sitting around the kitchen table playing a game that encourages lying and cheating when Jeff cocked his head to the side like he was listening intently.

“Hey, what’s this song called?”

“Lips of an angel,” Tristan and I answered together. His eyes got just the slightest shade darker before he winked at me and went back to his cards. I got goose bumps and went back to mine.

“It’s based on fact,” Jillian and Pete commented in unison.

That had me looking up again.

Jillian’s eyes slowly lifted from her cards to look at Pete—whose eyes never left his cards once—like she could’ve been mildly impressed…
or
mildly irritated. I’m not sure which but because he flew into her radar, if I were Pete, I’d think twice before doing a lot of bluffing tonight.

“Why?” Kate asked.

“Oh, well I swear to God my dad was singing it to someone the other night on the phone…not literally, but he might as well have.”

“
What?
To
who?
” Tristan asked, sounding pretty surprised.

Like me, Tristan knows his music and that particular song is about what you might call a long lost love and the ramifications of when that person suddenly calls out of the blue and Tristan’s surprise, come to find out, is more than justified.

“That’s just it, I have no idea. I was studyin’ for that chem test we had on Friday...” Yeah, I know. I have a hard time picturing Jeff studying too. “...and Denise was asleep in the living room when my dad’s cell rang and when he answered it, he asked ‘honey’ why she was crying. No shit, he called whoever it was honey… Anyway, then he started to whisper about how it was really good to hear her voice but he had to be quiet because Denise was sleeping right there. It was bizarre so when he got up to go out back, I followed him into the kitchen so I could eavesdrop through the open wind—”

“Atta boy.” I inwardly rolled my eyes at the pride in my sister’s tone.

“What else did you hear?” Kate asked with a look of confusion on her face.

You see, we’re all kind of surprised and/or confused by this because Jeff’s dad, Grey, has never been married. Not even to Jeff’s mom, whom I recently found out died shortly after Jeff was born. However, Grey has been with his girlfriend for something like two years and from what I’ve been told, he really seems happy with her. So happy in fact, Jeff was actually thinking he might marry her.

“Well, that’s when it got even weirder…it was hard to follow because I could only hear his side of the call and he was still talking low, but when he stopped pacing in front of the window I heard this part really clearly, he said, ‘Well I didn’t move on, why do you think I never got married?’ Then he started pacing again but I think he told her that he didn’t want her talking to him to cause problems for her or something like that, and then all of sudden he got kinda excited or agitated I guess and asked loud enough for me to hear him ‘Wait, what are you telling me?’ so then after another minute he said something about how he’d never stopped loving her and for her to call him when they could both talk freely.”

“Holy shit, man, you’re right…he may as well have just played that song into the fuckin’ phone,” Tristan declared.

“I know, right?” Jeff agreed and looked at the rest of us for confirmation.

“Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?”

“Honestly Katy, I totally forgot about the whole thing until it came on the radio just now.”

“I just can’t picture it…he actually said he loved her?” Kate asked, sounding not just confused anymore, but baffled.

“Yeah. That he never
stopped
loving her.”

“Wow. Do you think he’s cheating on Denise?” Pete asked.

“No, I don’t think so. It sounded like he hadn’t talked to whoever she is in a while.”

I’m thinking that if what Jeff said of that conversation is true, I’m inclined to agree with him. I don’t think his dad is cheating.

Not yet anyway...

About the Author

Jenn Cooksey is a Southern California girl born and bred, and proudly boasts being a member of Grossmont High School’s alumni. She currently resides in the 7th Ring of Hell (aka; Arizona) with her husband, their three daughters, and more pets than she has the patience to count. Aside from her husband and one cat, everyone living under the Cooksey’s roof is female. She’s sure her husband will be not only be awarded sainthood when he kicks the bucket, but that Jesus will welcome him into heaven with a beer and a congratulatory high-five. She also believes that Bacon should be capitalized. Always.

You can learn more about Jenn and her books at: www.jenncooksey.blogspot.com Or follow her on Facebook: Jenn Cooksey Novels and on Twitter: @Jenn_Cooksey