by K L Hughes
Table Of Contents
Other Books by KL Hughes
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
About KL Hughes
Other Books from Ylva Publishing
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www.ylva-publishing.com
Other Books by KL Hughes
The Art of Us
Popcorn Love
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my wife for supporting and loving me, for encouraging me every day to keep pursuing my dreams and to be brave enough to always wear my heart on my sleeve. No love story has ever moved me as ours has. I know we will continue writing it even long after we run out of ink and words.
Thank you to my editor, Michelle Aguilar, for your dedication to making each story I tell as effective as it can be. I so appreciate your advice and guidance every step of the way, even when you ask me to slaughter my darlings.
Thank you to the Ylva team for continuing to champion queer writers and our stories, and for your hard work and dedication in making sure those stories are available to anyone seeking them (there are so many of us).
Finally, thank you to all my readers, those of you who’ve been with me for years and those of you who are picking up the work for the first time. Your enduring support, your enthusiasm for the work, and your continued return to the page to relive old stories or dive into new, inspires and motivates me and allows me to keep doing what I love.
Dedication
For my family – the giant, boisterous mess of laughter, banter, love, and tradition that largely informed and inspired the McElroy family. I love and miss you all, even when you annoy me.
Chapter 1
“I can’t believe I’m doing this.” Fiona Ng watched her reflection in the passenger-side window. Her face glowed bright against the shadowy background of the car’s interior. She could just make out Michael’s smile as he resituated himself in the driver’s seat. “I really can’t believe I’m doing this.”
“What’s so hard to believe? You’re doing it because you’re my best friend.”
“I’m seriously rethinking that job position.”
“Oh, so now being my friend is a job?” Michael reached over the console and yanked on a handful of her long black hair.
Fiona faced him. His dark orange curls frizzed out above his ears and appeared brown in the low light, but his freckles were still visible. They splashed across his face in varying sizes, eating up the bridge of his nose and dotting down the length of his neck. “It is when you make me be your beard for your family’s four-day Christmas weekend.”
“Only because I get tired of my mom and grandma nagging me about when I’m going to settle down. I’m twenty-nine, but they act like I’m halfway to the grave and should already have a two-story house and four kids and, like, a 401K or something.”
“I’m not having kids with you,” Fiona said. “That’s taking it way too far.”
“Our kids would be cute, like little ginger Mulans.”
“Mulan was Chinese.”
“I know, but I don’t know any Chinese-Malaysian-Singaporean Disney princesses. Do you?”
“Mulan wasn’t a princess.” Fiona took a sip of her Starbucks iced coffee and smiled around the straw. “You realize your old Southern grandma’s going to have a heart attack, right? Like, I’m going to say my last name, and her brain’s probably going to short-circuit.”
“Probably,” Michael said, “but she at least has enough decency to keep her short-circuiting on the inside.”
“Sure she does,” Fiona said. “I give it twenty minutes, max, before she asks me if I know the man who runs the Chinese restaurant down the street.”
“Nah. There isn’t a Chinese restaurant down the street.”
Fiona leveled him with a glare.
“I’m kidding,” he said. “Look, it’ll be fine. Just relax.”
“When have you ever known me to relax?”
“True. You’ve got the anxiety bug.”
“Incurable, unfortunately.”
“Well, I still love you.”
Fiona snorted. “How generous of you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said with a shit-eating grin. “But seriously. I know you’re kind of sensitive about your heritage and culture and stuff—”
“Aren’t most people sensitive about their identities?”
“You know what I mean,” he said. “Just that, you know, it took a long time for you to love yourself as you are and want to learn about your family and stuff.”
“This pep talk is giving me a rash, Michael.”
“Shut up.” He laughed and poked her knee. “I’m just saying that if my grandma—or anyone, for that matter—says anything shitty, I’ll put a stop to it. I’ve got your back.”
Fiona lay back in her seat and huffed out a sigh. “You promise?”
“Promise,” he said. “That is, if Lizzie doesn’t beat me to it. She hasn’t attended a single family function in the last five years that hasn’t resulted in her lecturing someone about equality or racism or the benefits of flushing the Republican party down the toilet.”
“Yeah, well, some people need lectures.”
“No argument there.” He grabbed Fiona’s coffee and took a drink.
“Is Lizzie the youngest? The one who just graduated high school?”
“No, that’s Jessie.” He passed her coffee back. “Lizzie’s the one who lives in Los Angeles.”
“Oh, right, the med student.”
“No, that’s Grace. She lives in Seattle. Lizzie’s the film student, though ‘student’ might be stretching it a bit far. She’s taking, like, one online workshop thing.”
“You have way too many siblings.”
“It’s true.”
“I mean, your mom really should have banished your dad to the garage or something after the first three.”
“After the first four. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been born, and you would be miserable without me.”
“That’s debatable.”
“Ouch, woman. Break my heart, why don’t you?”
Fiona flashed a smile and pulled her feet up under her. She reclined her seat and stretched her arms above her head. “It feels like we’ve been driving for hours.”
“We have.”
“Oh, well, that would explain it, then.”
“Only about an hour left now, though, so you’ll get to stretch your tiny legs soon.”
“My legs are glorious.”
“And tiny.”
“So is your—”
“Don’t you dare.”
Fiona let out a wild burst of laughter, then sighed. “How the hell am I going to remember everyone’s names? A girlfriend would know your family’s names ahead of time, right? Aren’t straight girls always trying to win over their boyfriends’ moms or something?”
“Lesbians don’t try to win over their girlfriends’ moms?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve only had two relationships serious enough to warrant meeting the parents, and with one of them there were no parents. With the other, the parents lived in a different country, so potential disaster avoided.”<
br />
“Well, how did they act around your parents?”
Fiona cut him a look. “Really?”
“Yeah. I don’t even know why I asked that. There’s no way you’d take a girl home to meet your parents.”
“They’re still convinced that if I spend enough time with you, I’ll change my mind about being a lesbian.”
“They seriously overestimate my swag.”
“They overestimate the entire male population,” Fiona said. “Also, don’t say ‘swag.’”
Michael snorted and shoved her shoulder. “All right. Get the pic.”
“Where is it?”
“On my phone.” He motioned toward the console. “It’s in the family album.”
Fiona scrolled through the image gallery until she found it, the same photo from his apartment back in St. Louis. Staring at her from the screen were all thirteen members of the McElroy family. Orange-red hair blazed from left to right, and freckles surrounded bright, toothy smiles. Michael, his four sisters, three brothers, mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, and, of course, the family cat, Otis, also a ginger, sat against a fake snowy backdrop in bulky Christmas sweaters that appeared itchier than they did festive. “Jesus, this is worse than the family photo my mom made us get when I was six and we all had matching bowl cuts.”
“I’ve seen that picture, and there’s no way this one is worse than that.”
“Your cat is wearing an ugly Christmas sweater. Your cat, Michael.”
“Even your grandma had a bowl cut in that picture, though.”
“God, I know. You’re right. Mine’s worse.” Fiona shook her head and used her thumbs to zoom in on the picture. “You know my grandmother has a massive print of it hanging in her house, right? Like, why, Gran? Why? She’s proud of it.”
“Honestly, I kind of want a massive print of it hanging in my apartment, too.”
“I will die before I allow you to display my forced bowl cut on your corkboard.”
“Might be worth it.”
“Rude.”
Michael laughed. “All right, so McElroy Family rundown. You ready?”
She zoomed back out with a quick tap of her thumb. “Ready.”
“Okay, so, left to right, starting in the back. You’ve got my grandpa, Charlie. He died four years ago, so on to my grandma, Sophia. She’s my dad’s mom. My mom’s parents both died when she was a teenager.”
“I think you’ve told me that before. Car crash, right?”
“Yeah, so then it goes down to my dad, also named Charlie, and my mom, Rose, but everyone calls her Rosie.”
“I’m already lost.”
“No, you’re not. If you can remember seven billion drugs and their side effects in your Pharmacology class, you can remember these names.”
“I mean, seven billion is a bit of a stretch. More like 150, maybe 175.”
“I saw your study guide. It was definitely seven billion.”
“Your mom is cute.”
“Please, no.”
“She’s got those sweet little wrinkles around her eyes.”
“Stop.”
“And let’s just say she’s not lacking in the curves department, either. I mean, were your sisters blessed with the same—”
“I swear to God, Fiona.” He reached across the car, trying to cover Fiona’s mouth with his hand without taking his eyes off the road. Fiona dodged, laughing, and refreshed the phone screen.
“All right, fine. I’m stopping. So, your siblings?” She pointed to the first in line, a guy who looked nearly identical to Michael, though older around the eyes and with an abundance of gray sprinkled about his otherwise orange hair. “That’s Charlie, right?”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look at the photo, focusing instead on the road, but Fiona knew he didn’t need to. He knew where every person sat and who wore which ridiculous sweater.
“He’s the one with kids?”
“Two girls, Lucy and Madison. They’re still pretty little. His wife’s name is Paige, but they’re kind of on the rocks right now, so I don’t even think she’s coming.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, no one really knows what’s going on there, just that they’re separated and she hasn’t come to any family functions in a while now. Mom thinks she might be seeing someone else, which of course makes her want to throttle her, but Charlie keeps telling her to stay out of it and mind her own, which is ridiculous, because I don’t think she’s minded her own business a day in her life.”
“It’s a Mom thing.”
“It’s a Rosie McElroy thing for sure,” he said. “Anyway, Charlie was the first boy in the family, so named after Dad and Grandpa. Next to him is Sophie, named after Grandma, and they’re thirty-five.”
“Both of them?”
“Yeah, they’re twins.”
“Oh yeah, I remember now.”
“They act like twins too. Finishing each other’s sentences, reading each other’s minds. The whole nine yards. It’s really annoying.”
“I can read your mind sometimes.”
“No, you can’t.”
“I always know what you want to eat.”
“Okay, fine. I’ll give you that.”
“Though, admittedly, it’s pretty easy when you only ever want pizza or sushi.”
“And yet you always know exactly which one.”
“Skills,” Fiona said. “Okay, so, what about the rest of them?” She looked down at the picture and followed along as Michael spoke, matching each face to its given name, and trying to burn the information into her mind so she wouldn’t mess up when she finally met them all. If she was going to do this whole fake-girlfriend thing, she was determined to do it right. She hadn’t majored in musical theater for one semester freshman year for nothing.
“After Sophie is Jack. He’s thirty-two.”
“He’s the one in the Marines?”
“Right. He’s stationed in Bahrain right now, though, so he won’t be there. And then there’s me, of course, the handsome one right there in the middle.”
“Right. Yeah. The smug one there. I see him. Next.”
“Then Brian and Grace, who are also twins, but they don’t really act like it. I mean, they’re close but not—”
“Not psychically in tune?”
“Right.”
“How old are they?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“So, your mom must have had them pretty soon after you.”
“Yeah, they were almost two months premature, too, so we’re actually only ten months apart,” Michael said. “Brian likes to joke that me, him, and Grace are actually triplets.”
“Damn. Two sets of twins. Your mom’s poor vagina.”
“Ew. Stop.”
“I’m just saying.”
Michael shuddered.
“Oh, grow up. It’s a body part, not the creature from The Black Lagoon.”
“Says you.”
“Well, if it wasn’t for that creature, you wouldn’t exist.”
“So, anyway,” Michael said, “after Brian and Grace is Lizzie. She’s twenty-six, then last is Jessie, and you know she’s eighteen. Just graduated high school in May.”
Fiona laughed and pointed at Jessie’s face. “She’s the only one in this picture that looks more annoyed than happy to be there.”
“Yeah, Jessie’s never been great at swallowing her feelings. Well, feelings of hatred, at least.”
Fiona slid her finger back to the woman right before Jessie, who was sporting a cheesy, wide grin and long hair that was a dark shade of orange like Michael’s. She had two different-colored eyes, one blue and the other green. “Lizzie has heterochromia?”
“Heterochromia? Seriously?”
“That’s what it’s called.”
“Weird-ass eyes is fine,”
he said. “No need to get all technical about it.”
“Right, because being an ass is better than being technical.”
“Sometimes.” He shrugged. “Anyway, makes her easy to spot, so that should help you out. Plus, Lizzie’s always the loudest, which means she’s also always the one Mom is yelling at. Charlie’s easy, too, because his hair is more gray than red now, and Grace is the one with the nose ring, so no trouble there either.”
“Sure.”
“I’m serious. It’s going to be fine.”
Fiona clicked off the screen and put Michael’s phone back in the console. “You know you’re paying for every pizza we eat for the next year.”
“Well, I—”
“That wasn’t a question.”
He laughed. “Fine.”
Fiona lay her head back and closed her eyes. “Sophia, Charlie, Rosie, Charlie, Sophie, Jack, Brian, Grace, Lizzie, Jessie.”
“Otis,” Michael added, and Fiona let out a long groan.
The McElroy family home was more of a country mansion than anything, which didn’t surprise Fiona. She knew Michael’s parents were well off. His mom was a caterer, and his dad, though now retired, had owned a hugely successful chain of farm-supply stores that spanned three states. And well, they definitely would have needed the space. Raising eight kids and a cat required ample square footage. Still, standing in the snow ten feet from the McElroy’s massive wrap-around porch and staring up at the towering columns intimidated her.
“I feel microscopic next to this house,” Fiona said as Michael grabbed their bags from the trunk. “I mean, am I suddenly the size of an ant, or is that just my imagination?”
Michael slammed the trunk closed and handed her one of the suitcases. “What do you mean ‘suddenly?’”
“Please don’t make me hit you with my suitcase. It’s heavy, and I don’t want to have to lift it that high.”
“You wouldn’t even if you could.”
“Your parents are going to be really sad when they discover your body in the snow tomorrow morning, frozen like a popsicle, while I sleep soundly and warmly in your childhood bed.”
“Good luck,” Michael said. “I don’t think anyone ever died from blunt force trauma to the knees.”
