Page 88 of Crave Me

“Old.”

I laughed softly and kissed his cheek. He always smelled the same, wearing the same cologne for as long as I could remember. Musky and spicy. I loved that when I came home to my parents’ house, nothing ever changed.

“Stop it.” I pulled back and put the beer I’d brought him on the table next to his chair. After a quick check of his already opened bottle and finding it empty, I cleared it off the table. “You’re not old, you’re well-seasoned and wise.”

“What do you want and how much is it going to cost me?”

“Nothing.” I kissed his cheek again and curled my hand around his shoulder. “I don’t like hearing talk of you getting old.”

“Then don’t go talk to your mom. She’s still on me about being too old to work.”

Mom’s voice echoed from the kitchen. “Because youaretoo darn old and stubborn to keep running into burning buildings.”

“Ah,” I said, walking back to the kitchen. “This conversation sounds familiar. Dad’s still refusing to retire?”

“I’m only fifty-seven! I got years left in me.”

Mom rolled out pie dough and barely spared me a glance to roll her eyes. “Fifty-seven. He’s been putting out fires for almost forty years and he still refuses to believe he might be getting too old to wear over sixty pounds of gear on a daily basis. It’s killing his knees and his back. Stubborn old fart.”

I’d been hearing similar conversations for the last two years. Dad would retire when he was ready and probably not even then. I figured someday the rest of the firefighters would be shoving him out of the firehouse, forcing him into retirement around the age of seventy. I dumped my dad’s empty beer bottle into the recycling bin and washed my hands.

“Where’s Cassie?”

“Upstairs. She arrived earlier but said she had some work to do.”

Typical. When Cassie decided to be the first woman to become partner at her firm, she became singularly focused on it.

“Will she come down to eat with us?”

“She said it would just be a couple hours.”

I tried to push down the irritation. I admired her career path and her intelligence. I even admired her goals. I just didn’t like how reaching them came at the expense of everything else, especially her family. What I hated even more was how distant we’d become over the last few years. I could be blamed for part of it. Carrying a torch for your sister’s boyfriend and then ex wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did, but I’d still at leasttriedto not let it affect my relationship with Cassie.

“Okay, then. What do you need me to do?”

She put me to work on the stuffing and mashed potatoes and we lost ourselves in the hustle of Thanksgiving dinner, our conversations peppered with the occasional shouts and cheers from Dad whenever the Detroit Lions made a play he either loved or hated.

* * *

“Dinner looks amazing, Mom,” Cassie said.

I’d been in the house for hours and she was finally coming downstairs to join us, right as Mom and I began placing food on the formal dining table where we always ate our holiday dinners. “Smells great, too. It’s been hard to focus upstairs.”

She pressed a brief kiss to my mom’s cheek and did the same to my dad. She walked around me like I didn’t exist.

What the hell? We weren’t close, but she’d never been outright dismissive to me.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Cassie,” I said. “How are you?”

“Busy. Work is insane and my current case is my most frustrating one yet.” She pulled out a chair and sat down at the table even though Mom and I were still bringing the food out. She whipped open a cloth napkin, settled it on her lap, and took a drink of her water.

My jaw dropped. She hadn’t even offered to help.

When the rest of the food was placed at the center of the table, and my mom and I took our seats, my dad offered up a quick prayer of thanks before we dug in.

Conversation was sprinkled throughout the dinner. Cassie talked more about her job. Mom talked about gossip from the neighborhood, including who was getting married and having kids and who was getting divorced. None of it interested me but I listened politely, sprinkling the conversation with the correct number of, “Oh reallys?” that a family conversation required.

Dad spent most of it with one eye on his fork filled with food and the other trying to catch a glimpse of the second football game he couldn’t even see from the room we were in.

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