Zari Davis flees Dallas after witnessing her fiancee cheating, with no clear plan on where she's going. After flipping her Volkswagon Beetle, she wakes up convinced that the cute guy that's been reading raunchy novels aloud while she slept is actual...
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P L A Y L I S T
The Only Hope For Me Is You - My Chemical Romance
Each time Gabriel visited the house he grew up in, it smelled of strange but interesting aromas. It had not always been that way. Only since Silbie's dad died and their mother had gone full force into baking. He figured it was her way of grieving. Everybody handled loss differently.
He chose not to talk about it. Silbie was just the opposite. She wanted to keep her dad's memory alive and thought the way to do it was to constantly sing his praises, which he deserved. He'd only been around for a few, short years after Sil was born before he passed, but that didn't stop Silbie. He'd been a good father and faithful to Dawn – unlike Gabriel's father - and in Gabriel's eyes, there was no greater accomplishment or legacy.
Today, a mixture of banana, lemon and something he couldn't identify hung heavy in the air. No need to guess, he'd know soon enough. Not only what the ingredients were, but he'd be forced to taste them. During the last two years of his mother's quest for baking stardom, he'd learned not to mince words. Lying about something that tasted awful didn't help her improve, and she'd learned to take the constructive criticism.
The island was a mess of pots and pans, all covered in different colored bits of goo. Red, brown, yellow, even green. Between Dawn and Silbie's disastrous ability in the kitchen, he'd come to expect the place looking like a hurricane had swept through. It would be more surprising to see it clean. It seemed he was the only Luna capable of splicing ingredients for something edible.
He leaned over to kiss his mom on the cheek. "Hey good lookin', whatcha got cooking?"
She turned to face him and snorted. No matter how hard she tried to hide it, he knew she got lonely, and he hated that, but thinking about her with possibly another asshole made Gabriel uneasy.
He leaned low over the counter and inhaled one of the pies cooling there.
"Let me guess. Bananas and beer?"
"That's right!" She pushed a bowl toward him. "Rake some of this out and give it a taste."
He ran his finger around the rim, licked it clean, then took a few seconds to let his taste buds adjust. "Not bad."
Reaching for another bowl, she tilted it in his direction. "Now this one."
Once again, he ringed the edge, but instead of putting it in his mouth, brought it to his nose. "Okay, this has lemon in it, right?"
"Correct."
He studied the texture and color. Her reputation for weird concoctions gave him pause. It looked innocent enough, but with her, he couldn't always tell. "What else?"
