Canon (Klein Brothers 2)

I loved my family. No, I wasn’t just announcing that, I was reminding myself that I loved my family so I didn’t hurt one of them.

It’d been two days since I’d had the damned piercing done. I swear it felt like my clit was ten times the size it was meant to be and like it had an electric charge going through it.

I’d struggled to find clothes to wear to work the last two mornings, and I may as well have been wearing my pajamas with how baggy my pants were right now. I couldn’t even wear a skirt anymore because, with my luck, a gust of wind would blow it over my head, and I’d end up flashing a group of pensioners because I still couldn’t put panties on. It’d almost happened yesterday, so I wasn’t just being paranoid.

When Mom had texted us on the family chat this morning to say Dad had something special for us to try and we would be at dinner tonight, I’d been tempted to put the red hair dye I’d been putting on a customer’s hair at the time in splodges all over my arms. Unfortunately, she’d raised enough kids to know what hives and allergic reactions looked like, though, so I didn’t. I’d also considered gargling with vinegar and then calling her to say I had a sore throat, but then she’d foiled that by dropping by on her way home—during which I’d sounded fan dabby dosey.

So, I’d given myself a traumatic brain injury driving my bunny hopping—a-fucking-gain—car to my parents’ house. I’d also done my level best to walk up the driveway like I didn’t have a taser shocking me between my legs with each step.

All of that effort only to sit through an hour of my sisters peppering me with questions about Canon, teamed with comments about how stiffly I was walking just now.

“I’m glad he finally gave you the dirty—” Asia began but was interrupted by Aariyah.

“I wouldn’t call it the dirty. With the way she’s walking, it was more like the ‘sinful.’”

“Regardless,” Asia swept her hand through the air, “sissy pants got done. When are you bringing him to meet the rest of us?”

Before I could reply, Dariah, whose girlfriend Giselle elbowed her and gave me a sympathetic smile, added, “Are you ashamed of us? Is that why you haven’t brought him home yet?”

Grinding my teeth together, I reached for one of the breadsticks Mom had dropped off before she’d disappeared and took a savage and unnecessarily loud bite of it.

Dad had been fishing tuna since he was seventeen, and after we’d all moved out, we’d realized we couldn’t have a set date for our family meals because he never knew when he’d be back. Because of this, they were all spur-of-the-moment ones. But regardless of the shit I was getting from my sisters, I loved every second of them, and missed having immediate access to my family like I’d had when we’d all lived under the same roof.

Tonight was the exception to that, though.

“Here we go,” Dad said as he carried through a large glass bowl with ice in it and a tin of something on top of it.

Coming up beside him, Mom put down a platter with some sort of creamy chive thing in a bowl and small pancakes on it.

All of us leaned in at the same time and inspected the tin.

“What is it?” Tara asked, wrinkling her nose. “It looks like the chia seeds in my overnight oats.”

My stomach turned at the thought. How she could eat that shit was beyond me. It didn’t matter if I added honey or peanut butter, nothing made it taste better for me.

I bet Canon loved overnight oats.

“One of the crab boats that docks from time to time gave it to me. We gave them our spare anchor a couple of weeks ago, and when they handed it back, this was their thank you gift.”

Looking from the tin to Dad and then back again, Dariah pressed, “That’s nice and all, but what is it?”

Mom placed a bowl of lemon wedges down next to the platter, then took her seat and waited for Dad to explain. It had to be said, her strained smile didn’t make me feel much better about it all.

“It’s caviar, expensive Russian caviar. This one tin costs almost a thousand dollars.”

“Holy shit. All that for an anchor?” I breathed, tilting my head to the side to see if it was deeper than it looked. When that turned out not to be the case, I glanced back up at him. “But why? There’s hardly anything in it, and as Tara said, it looks like overnight oat chia seeds.”

Rolling his eyes, Dad glared at Mom. “They get this uncouth behavior from your side of the family.”

“They’re hardly uncouth, darling. More like smart women who recognize when something’s over-priced for what it is and who’ve made a very astute comparison.”