Read Online Kiss Crush Collide by Christina Meredith - Free Book Online

examine each piece of chicken on the platter before reaching over and dropping a severely burned one on Freddie’s plate and a less burned one on her own.
    “You know,” she continues, licking her fingers, “before Freddie leaves for France.”
    She hands the platter to me. All the good burned ones are gone.
    “Freddie is my maid of honor after all,” Yorke says. “So she needs to be there.”
    “Do I need to be there?” I ask, stabbing at a piece of chicken.
    Feeling my mother’s eyes boring into me, I realize my blunder and recover quickly.
    “I mean, for the shopping,” I say, and add clearly, “not the wedding.”
    “Of course you need to be there,” my mother says.
    Yorke drops her fork onto her plate with a loud clink and flops back into her chair dramatically.
    “When you get engaged,” my mother continues, “Yorke and Freddie will be more than happy to shop with you.”
    Whoa, I think, one sister at a time, please.
    I bet she has little cake toppers already made for all of us. She probably ordered them in bulk. A little porcelain me in a pink dress and a little porcelain man in a white suit and pink bow tie are waiting for the big day, wrapped in tissue paper and stowed away in the hope chest at the foot of her bed.
    “It’s just that I have to work,” I say, looking over at Yorke’s unsympathetic face.
    “Can’t you just take the day off or switch with somebody or something?” she asks, circling her fork in the air. For her, it’s as easy as pie. Believe it or not, Yorke has never had a job. Go figure.
    “That job,” my mother huffs as she pours more chardonnay into her half-full glass, “is more trouble than it is worth.”
    It’s only one short week into summer, and she is already bitching about my job.
    Setting the bottle down a little too hard, she asks me, though I know it is meant for my dad, too, “I thought we agreed that you would work early in the day at the pool so that we could still enjoy our summers as a family?”
    Next to me, Freddie is sawing away at her black chicken with a thick wooden-handled steak knife. If I didn’t know her, I would think she wasn’t paying attention at all. But I know Freddie. She is always listening.
    “What time are you shopping?” my dad asks, sliding the chardonnay bottle out of my mother’s reach.
    “Four,” Yorke says. She leans back and crosses her arms, ready for a confrontation.
    “And what time do you have to be at the pool?” my dad asks me, his eyes saying, Help me out here, Leah.
    “Six-thirty.”
    “Well, there you go,” my dad says with a smile, proud of his ability to take a situation and simplify it. Such a dude. He picks up his fork. “Plenty of time,” he says. “Problem solved.”
    But nothing is that simple for my mother. You would think my dad, of all people, would know that by now.
    She purses her lips and adjusts the placement of her wineglass before she complicates things by saying, “Except that Leah will have to leave early to walk to the pool.” She lifts her glass and drains the chardonnay in one golden gulp.
    “Or,” she continues, “one of us will have to leave early to drive her there. Either way,” she says with a shake of her head, “it hardly seems worth it.”
    “Maybe she could drive herself?” Freddie says, breaking her vow of silence with a most useless contribution.
    I give her a woeful stare.
    “For once.” Yorke agrees emphatically. “I don’t know why you bought her that car anyway.”
    “You got a car,” my mother says.
    “Yeah, that I
drive
,” says Yorke.
    My dad holds up his hands.
    “Leah will drive her car when she wants to,” he says calmly.
    Doubtful, but I do appreciate his support. My mother reaches past Yorke for the bottle of wine and refills her glass. Afraid she is just adding more fuel to the fire, I raise my hands and admit defeat.
    “I’ll get Shane,” I say, looking around the table to be sure everyone understands the terms of my surrender. “Shane