Read Online Bittersweet by Shewanda Pugh - Free Book Online

emotion. Around him, her dad became alive.
    “The whole of New England and The National Football League recognizes the excellence in my son,” Ali continued. “Who’s next? The world? The universe?” He turned a critical eye on his wife as if she might answer. “If a man can’t drink his fill to the legend of his son, what can he drink to?”
    Well.
    “Jeez,” Hassan said into Edy’s ear. “I better not screw up. Since he went and made me a Greek god and all.”
    Edy squeezed his hand. “Just a lesser god. So you should get over yourself. You haven’t been drafted, you know.”
    Oh, that smile. Could it really be all for her?
    “I haven’t been drafted yet,” he corrected.
    Edy grinned. “I bet optimism tastes delicious on your lips,” she whispered.
    “Stop that. I already wanted to kiss you.”
    Ugh. Like she hadn’t been thinking the same, thinking the same under Rani’s watchful gaze. Like she hadn’t been thinking of kisses and touches and his hair sweeping her skin. She’d been thinking all that with his mother right there.
    Why hadn’t Rani told on them?
    They were being watched though. It hit them collectively, belatedly, almost cartoonishly. They froze together, stiff as an ice sculpture in the snow, Edy with the realization that the front door had slammed behind their fathers and that Rani alone had remained. And so they stood close, Edy and Hassan, with the only other person who knew their secret mere steps away. Mirrored in Hassan’s eyes was her reluctance to look. But then he did. But then she did. And Edy saw Rani on the stoop, face curdled in fury. 
    Her silence made less sense to Edy than ever before. She should have screamed to the heavens that she’d caught Hassan and Edy kissing. Or at the very least, screamed it to her husband. What had closed her mouth in the interim? What could have made Rani feel as if silence were her only option for the mean time?
    The Patriots letter. Suddenly, it took on an entirely different meaning. Even if the Pradhans weren’t the sort of folks who thrived on prestige, the excitement that sort of news brought was enough to buy Rani’s silence and stay her hand.
    For now.

Twelve
    Edy returned from Kentucky to find her mother’s cavalry loaded up in the Phelps’ living room. Before her mom began running for a United States Senate seat, she wouldn’t have known that a campaign took years to complete. She also wouldn’t have known it required so many nights of sleeping in a house other than your own.
    Edy carted her luggage in and got tangled at the door. She pried her bags free with a grimace and worked on stacking them neat as a bellhop. Suits shifted, ignoring her, and Edy’s lips quirked up. Already she stood there, like an idiot, with her fuchsia sack over one shoulder as her mother stood droned on in the middle of an all important political meeting. Her mom stood at the center of a universe she’d fashioned, and no doubt, could stand there forevermore.
    “It’s undeniable that our shooting’s given us sympathetic traction in the polls,” Edy’s mother said. “Now’s the time to capitalize on the ire—”
    Edy’s bag thudded to the floor and her mother lifted her head.
    She lifted her head and stilled. Stilled at the menacing ‘V’ of Edy’s eyebrows, the total flare of her nostrils, and at the last moment, the tight flash of a smile.
    Edy curtsied for her mother. “Sympathetic traction in the polls? Glad I could be of service.”
    If there’d been a crinkle of alarm in her mother’s face, it ironed free in an instant.
    “Fabulous,” her mother said. “Did you think that up just now? How rare of you to get one in. Should I ask them to clap for you?”
    She surveyed her staff members. A few shifted uncomfortably in their chairs; one or two had important business on their phones.
    Edy looked and wondered. Was this really her mother? The woman she’d blown to epic, unfathomable proportions? Had she ever really thought her more