Total pages in book: 62
Estimated words: 58947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 196(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 58947 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 295(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 196(@300wpm)
I survey the dishes, pots, and pans of food splayed across every surface in our kitchen. In addition to the soup, we have curry crab and dumpling, pelau, salt fish, coconut bread, aloo choka, rice, and every other Trini dish Mama had time to make.
“Go upstairs and check on your brother,” Mama says, the faintest lilt of the islands languishing in her words even though she’s lived in America nearly twenty years. “He lolling off. His friends be here any minute, and he not even down here.”
I grumble under my breath but turn the soup off and cut through the living room to climb the stairs. My hand is on the handle to open the door, but I catch myself just in time. Growing up, Cliff and I were closer to each other than to my sister Janice, who is four years older than him and five years older than I am. Cliff and I are what some call Irish twins, born only 13 months apart.
Ain’t no child of mine Irish nothing, Mama always says. Instead we’re her “Trini twins.”
Still, the days when I could barge into Cliff’s room unannounced are long gone. You interrupt a boy’s quiet time with his bottle of lotion in one hand and his dick in the other, you learn to knock quick.
“What you want?” his newly deeper voice demands from the other side of the door.
“Um, I want to be watching Vampire Diaries, but I’m cooking dinner for your friends. Mama says come down. The team’ll be here soon.”
The door opens, and my own dark brown eyes stare back at me from more than half a foot above. Not only are we “Trini twins,” but we could be fraternal as much as we look alike, despite the dramatic height difference. We have the same high cheekbones, though mine are set in the rounded curves of my face and his are more pronounced. Identical clefts in our chins passed on from Daddy. Heavily lashed eyes under a thick, dark slash of brows. Well, mine were thick before I experimented with wax and tweezers last week. Right now they’re what’s left.
“Help me with this tie,” Cliff says, turning back into his room, leaving me to follow inside. He holds out a tie with the word “fabulous” stitched into the burgundy and gold pattern of his private school’s shield of arms.
“Isn’t this from your school uniform?” I frown at the altered tie.
“Yeah, but we had Kenneth’s mom sew the ‘fabulous’ on for the starters, kinda like Michigan’s Fab 5.”
“Won’t you get in trouble for changing it like this?”
“We’re about to give St. Catherine’s its first state championship,” he says, his smirk cocky, his tone assured. “We could stitch suck my dick on that tie, and the headmaster wouldn’t care. Long as we bring home them Ws and sponsor dollars.”
“I still don’t get how a high school has corporate sponsors.”
“It’s a private school cranking out top athletes. You wouldn’t understand with that basic public school education you getting,” he teases.
“You cried like a little bitch when St. Catherine’s recruited you and Mama said you had to leave all your friends and accept that scholarship. So watch who you call basic, bruh.”
“I did not—”
I cut him off with a who you trying to fool look, and he grins, showing off the straight, white smile my parents are still paying for.
“Okay, maybe I cried a little at first,” he concedes. “But that was sophomore year. It was worth it. Look at us now. ‘Bout to be champs.”
I snatch the tie from him and motion for him to bend. We were the same height—five nine—until his freshman year in high school. Over that summer, he shot up in a growth spurt of more than five inches. He grew a few more to reach his current height of six feet, six inches.
“Why you wearing a tie anyway?” I ask, looping it deftly. How I know how to do this and he still doesn’t is beyond me. “For dinner at the house?”
“We’re taking some pictures. Capturing the road to our championship.” He frowns down at me, his smile flattening into a line. “You wearing that?”
I double check the fitted Gap jeans and cropped T-shirt that Mama says must be from Baby Gap it’s so short.
“I mean, yeah.” I angle a defiant look up at him. “What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s slutty, and I don’t want my boys checking you out. We too close to the championship for me to be kicking a teammate’s ass.”
“It’s not slutty. Boys get on my nerves expecting us to dress like nuns because they get hard every time we wear clothes that show our shape. If your boys are disciplined enough to be in that weight room at the crack of dawn and practice every day, they should be able to see a little bit of ass fully covered by jeans without getting it up. And if they can’t? Not my problem.”