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I had a teenager’s breast size in my adult body.
That, and I could fit into youth underwear.
Finding anything at Victoria’s Secret was never going to happen for me, and I’d resigned myself to that fact a very long time ago.
My mother had definitely passed down all of her genes to me, and the only thing I’d gotten of my father was his voice.
Though, he was definitely a whole lot better than me—at least in my opinion.
His voice was all smoky and raspy. Like a better sounding Josh Turner.
When a person could pull off a song better than the original singer? That was when you knew that they were good.
And my dad was good like that.
Like, could’ve gone professional good if he’d only wanted to.
Which he hadn’t.
Singing was something he did in his spare time. He sang when he was cleaning the dishes or fixing a leaky toilet.
Singing wasn’t something he did for a living.
Which was how it was for me.
Well, mostly.
At the age of eighteen, I’d stupidly auditioned for a singing role in an animated film and gotten the part. After doing my singing, I was begged to do more…only, I’d quickly realized what my dad had told me.
Singing for a living wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be.
The sheer annoyance of having to do it over and over and over again, all day, for days? Well, that had completely turned me off of ever doing anything like that again.
Now, all I did was sing in the shower, and occasionally when I watered my plants. Or, you know, in the car at the top of my lungs when a really good song came on.
Though, while going through X-ray technician school, I’d sometimes sang my school notes to myself so that I could remember shit better.
“Are you even listening to me?” my father growled.
I looked up and sighed, leaning toward the table and snatching a cookie that had suddenly appeared in my line of sight.
I smiled warmly at my mother and said, “Thank you. I needed this.”
My mom, better known as Payton Tremaine, also a nurse at the hospital where I worked, offered me another hot cookie off the plate before placing the rest of them in the center of the table for all of us to snack on.
Before my father could ask, my mother held up her hand in warning. “I’m coming back with milk. Hold your horses.”
My dad snapped his mouth shut and picked up a cookie, shoving the entire thing inside before reaching for another one.
My dad was in his late fifties now, but when you looked at him, you saw muscle and fitness, not old.
The only real way you could tell that he was getting up there in years was that there was more gray than dirty blonde interspersed throughout his hair now.
Hell, his beard was nearly all gray at this point.
My mother was much the same, though she didn’t look old in the least.
If I could age half as well as her, I’d be happy.
“No,” I finally answered my father’s question. “What were you saying?”
My mother came back with glasses of milk, being sure to set the one with chocolate milk down in front of me.
“Thanks, Okaasan.” I smiled sweetly at my mother.
My mother rolled her eyes at my use of the Japanese word for mother. “You watch too much anime.”
I shrugged, uncaring.
It was true.
My life consisted of work and Japanese anime. So sue me.
I liked what I liked.
“Did you ever start that language course I sent you?” Janie interrupted, curious now.
I nodded. “I’ve got part one done. I’m thinking about part two. But learning another language is hard. And I’m lazy.”
Janie’s lips tipped up at the corner.
“You already know sign language and Gaelic,” she teased. “How hard could it be?”
I learned Gaelic because I’d liked the culture. And one day I really, really wanted to go visit Ireland and Scotland.
Japan was also on my list, but I wasn’t willing to go there by myself, and I hadn’t convinced any of my friends or family to come with me as of yet.
So for now, I was just learning languages and dreaming.
“How about we go back to the fact that you’re running a background check on your neighbor,” Dad suggested. “Why?”
“Because he turned the sprinklers on her,” Dre said as he strolled into the room. “And she’s mad.”
I pinched my lips together.
Then couldn’t hold it any longer, so I blurted it out.
“He was a dick!” I declared.
“He told her to move out of his hammock,” Dre continued as he leaned over the table, snatched a cookie, then placed a kiss onto my mother’s cheek before taking a seat next to Janie. “She refused. Told him it wasn’t his property. Then pretty much gave him shit for ten minutes. When she pretended to go back inside and went back to the hammock once he was gone, he turned the sprinklers on her.”
