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She blanched at the use of her proper name. “Sammi Jo’s grandmother dropped by for a surprise weeklong visit at dinnertime. I had to get out.”
I gave her a sympathetic little smile. “The one who tried to baptize you with bottled water?”
“Is that common practice now?” Cal asked quietly.
Gigi heaved a dramatic sigh and stretched across the couch. “Grandma McCuen says I’m a bad influence on Sammi Jo because we don’t go to church regularly.”
“Well, Grandma McCuen is a closet drinker who lost her car title at the bingo hall. I wouldn’t worry too much about her opinion.”
Gigi snickered and nudged me with her hip.
“This is Cal, by the way,” I said, pointing over my shoulder. “I’m not sure whether you were properly introduced last time.”
Cal nodded stiffly. “Teenager.”
Gigi gave him a mocking little salute. “Shirtless wonder.”
And there we went with the vampire nonblushing again. I would have corrected my sister, but frankly, if she was teasing Cal, she wasn’t teasing me. It was like having a human—well, vampire—shield against adolescent disdain.
“So, you’re a vampire. What’s that like?” Gigi asked, ignoring Cal’s indignant glare.
He parted his lips, his fangs dropping dramatically. “Like being a human, only better and for much longer.”
Gigi laughed, despite the dental display. And I couldn’t help but marvel at her ease with the walking national treasure of Greece. Why was it that my sister cowered when confronted by long division, but bared vampire teeth fazed her not one bit? I supposed that next to SATs, classroom queen bees, and constantly evolving body parts, the undead probably weren’t all that intimidating.
Apparently finished with risking suicide by sarcasm, Gigi turned on me. “I’m starved.”
“You’re always starved.”
“Dinner at Sammi Jo’s was sort of skimpy. Grandma McCuen believes that girls should be served half as much as boys at mealtimes because boys ‘work so hard.’ ” Gigi rolled her eyes.
“Don’t Sammi Jo’s older brothers stay home all day playing Xbox and smoking weed?”
“Apparently, it’s very hard work.” She made doe eyes at me and fluttered her lashes. “Elvis pancakes?”
I pursed my lips, surprised that Gigi was willing to bend her stance on sweets. It must have been a very stressful week at Sammi Jo’s. “I thought Elvis pancakes were verboten after the Great Carb Embargo.”
She put her arm around my shoulders, nudging my hip again as she jutted her chin toward Cal. “Well, I thought you didn’t bring work home with you. Rules were made to be broken.”
—
I didn’t know how Gigi did it, but somehow she managed to get Cal to (a) put a shirt on and (b) join us in the kitchen while I cooked a completely unhealthy late-night snack. He tried to leave several times. His feet were pointed out the door and in motion, but she was just so damn sweet, asking detailed questions about how to heat a packet of donor blood and offering to put it in a fancy wine glass for him, that he couldn’t find a way to back out of the room without feeling like he was kicking an adorable adolescent puppy. If he wasn’t careful, he’d wake up in the morning to find that she’d painted his toenails sparkly pink.
Scooting closer to me so that he could put distance between himself and my sister, Cal asked, “So, what separates Elvis pancakes from all other inferior pancakes?”
“Peanut butter and bananas,” I told him as I mixed Bisquick with milk.
He grimaced as I mashed two bananas and creamed them with the batter. “That doesn’t sound terribly healthy.”
“Hey, I used to prep the griddle with bacon grease until Gigi started counting calories.” I chuckled, stirring peanut butter ice-cream topping into the batter just before pouring three small pancakes onto the griddle. She frowned at me, reminding me that we’d agreed not to discuss her frantic “I can’t button my jeans!” episode.
I snickered and blew her a raspberry kiss as I flipped the pancakes. “She also makes me use light syrup.”
Cal took a sip of the blood. I plated the pancakes and slid them across the counter. He blanched at the sight of the dripping flapjacks. “How does one stumble onto this treasured family recipe?”
I watched as my sister dolloped knobs of butter onto each flapjack, then drizzled lacy loops of syrup over her handiwork. Sliced bananas and more ice-cream topping followed as a final touch. “Gigi’s school had a dessert fundraiser a few years ago. And Gigi insisted that we try to make banana pudding for two hundred people. It was hell—sticky, messy, banana-flavored hell. We ended up with half a mashed banana stuck to the ceiling and about ten bunches of leftover bananas. We made banana bread, banana pancakes, banana milkshakes. Anything to get rid of the bananas. I thought that adding peanut butter to the pancake batter would make it even better, because, well, I was flipping sick of banana. And thus, Elvis pancakes were born.”
“Hey, you were just starting off. You hadn’t grasped the concept of bake-sale-scale cooking yet.” Gigi chuckled, spearing a bite of pancake.
