Page 10 of Never Kiss and Tell

“No. I think your diaper will hold you off for a little while.”

He throws the remainder of the cookie at me and it bounces off my cheek, making me laugh.

“I actually came to tell you I’m leaving for a while.”

Mason eyes me suspiciously. “They finally making you check in at the institution?”

I roll my eyes and throw a whole cookie at him, which he catches and finishes in two bites.

“No, asshole, I’m going to stay with Andi and help her get all her wedding plans figured out. She asked me for help.”

“You sure she’s just not trying to get you out of that house?”

Mom and Marcus’s . . . Again, Mason hates it. I don’t think he’s stopped by since Christmas and even then, he was only there long enough to give us our presents. Mine had been a journal with prompts at the top. I haven’t used it yet, because some of the prompts hit a little too close to home. Toughest day of your life? Not ready to cover that topic. I can barely make it through a session with Kenya without wanting to hurl myself into Lake Michigan.

“How’s Mom?” Mason asks, wiping the grease off his hands on an old shop towel that looks like it’s lived a thousand lives and all of them bad.

I shrug. “The last time I saw her, she was trying to marry me off to one of her friend’s sons while falling asleep at the dinner table.”

He shakes his head, rolling back under the car. Mason doesn’t agree with Mom’shabits.When she and Dad divorced,she’d started taking prescription sleeping pills and they had given her a weird form of narcolepsy. I think it has everything to do with the wine she washes them down with, rather than the pills themselves.

“And Savannah and Mila?”

I roll my eyes. “Savannah’s her usual dramatic self. She’s taken to wearing black lipstick and ripping all her clothes.”

Mason peeks his head out from under the car, eyeing me. “Another boy?”

I chuckle. “His name isSpike.”

He rumbles of a string of curses to himself under the car.

“Mila is just Mila. You know how she is. Hopeless romantic and all. I think she’s deeply in love with a boy from her chemistry class.”

“Is that all you girls think about?”

“Hey,” I scold. “That is thelastthing I’m thinking about right now.”

“That’s not what Christian told me.”

I scoff. Should have known Christian would be a little tattle-tale.

“It was a moment of desperation. I was drunk and lonely,” I wave, a flush crawling up my neck. “And since when did you become BFFs with Mom’s driver?”

He slides out, tossing his tools from the floor into the tool box. “Since he started hanging out around my sisters.”

I chuckle and shake my head. So damned protective . . . “He’s a nice guy.”

Mason raises an eyebrow at me.

“Not too nice, right?”

“No, Mason,” I snap, shoving at his arm. “He just does his job.”

Mason sinks into the old office chair by the door, grabbing a cold bottle beer out of the mini-fridge on the work bench and popping the metal top without any trouble.

“Where’re you going to be staying in New Orleans?”

“Andi’s dad owns a house in the French Quarter.”

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