“Not what that was.” I reach Mai and shove her backpack into her arms as I grab mine.
“You can’t leave me without a partner. I got rid of Nathan for you.”
I roll my eyes. “You got rid of Nathan because he doesn’t know baseball.”
“Josie. I need you.” He widens those baby blues and curves his mouth into a flirty smile. A smile that I bet gets him a whole lot of yes.
“No,” I say. Before he can answer, I grab Mai’s arm and tug her toward the exit.
She follows, a dreamy smile on her red lips. “That was amazing.”
“No, that was a mistake. You were supposed to get over your crush.”
“But this could be my grand passion.”
“You don’t believe in grand passions.”
“I’m reconsidering.” Her brown eyes have gone melty. “You should, too.”
I stop at the edge of the parking lot. Heat from the asphalt rises in a wave that makes me dizzy. Or maybe it’s a delayed reaction. All that baseball and testosterone. Memories that cling to me like sweat. Itchy and uncomfortable.
“We are not changing our minds,” I tell Mai. “Crush on him from afar if you have to, but no more baseball.”
Not even my best friend is going to drag me back to another game.
Chapter Three
“Mom?” I call. “You home?” I set my pack on the table. The kitchen is usually bright with sunlight when I get home, but it’s in shadow now. She won’t care that I’m back late. But why I’m late…
I decided on the drive home not to mention the game. I never lie to my mom, but I can’t bring myself to say the word “baseball” in this house. It’s not that cold of a day in hell.
“Hi, honey.”
I jump, my hand flying to my chest. “You scared me.”
She’s carrying a small tub filled with tubes of hydrating serum. “I was in the back bedroom, counting.”
“Inventory? I thought you were going to do that this morning.”
Mom runs AromaTher, a one-woman company she created to sell beauty products with essential oils. Her focus is skin care, but along with moisturizers and toners, she carries a full line of essential oils for everything from insomnia to indigestion.
In another few months, it’s going to be our company.
“I was.” She clears her throat. “I got a little distracted.”
Now that I’m paying attention, her eye makeup is smudged and her hair is loose. She always complains about how hot her hair is on her neck when she’s working. She must have gotten more than a little distracted if she didn’t take the time to clip it up. “Everything okay?” I ask.
“Fine.” If anything, her skin turns even pinker. One of the reasons Mom does so well with AromaTher is that she’s beautiful. But it’s the girl-next-door kind of beautiful that ordinary people think they could have with just the right products. Her shoulder-length hair is thick and glossy, dark brown like her eyes, and her smile is apple-pie sweet. I’ve got the same coloring, but I’m more of the Amazon-next-door. Mom says she envies my athletic build. I tell her any time she wants to trade her size six shoes for my size nine, I’m in.
“I’m almost done,” she says. “I’ve got juniper berry, geranium, and palmarosa left.”
“I’ll help you finish.”
She starts toward the office, and I follow. I’m not sure what palmarosa is, but it’s good for skin tone. It doesn’t smell bad, either. That’s the AromaTher promise: Scents that make Sense. That was my line, and it’s now on the bottom of Mom’s business cards. Once I turn eighteen in May and become an official partner, I’ll have business cards of my own. I’m trying to come up with a new line for me.
Josie Walters. I want to make a healthy profit.
Yeah, probably not. I love the business and the fact that I’ll be a co-CEO at the age of eighteen. But to me, essential oils are a product, not a passion. Mom can heal the world. Me, I’m going to expand our client base and build the company.
I stop short at the door of the bedroom we’ve turned into our office-slash-warehouse.
“I know,” Mom says. “It’s a mess.”
It’s always a mess. This is more of a disaster.
She frowns at the tubs that are on the carpet instead of the shelves. “I got partway through and…” Her voice trails off, half finished like the inventory.
I draw in a breath, and that’s when I smell it. Smell her. I lean closer and sniff her neck. “Oh my God, it’s ylang-ylang.”
She bats me away with a hand. “Don’t be silly.” But her cheeks have gone from pink to cherry red.
I know very well what the essential oil of ylang-ylang means. “Were you having a nooner?”
“It’s much too late for a nooner.” Then she smiles.
“Mom. Eww.” James must be back. James is Mom’s gentleman friend (she won’t let me call him a boyfriend), and even though I love him, I don’t want to see evidence of that. “Did he just get home?”
“This morning.”
James sells computer equipment, so he travels a lot, but they’ve been dating for almost a year, so I know the signs. I sniff again. Yep, there’s driftwood and cinnamon bark. Mom is into essential oils for everything. Including sex. After the divorce was final and she started to date, I always knew there was a new guy because Mom would put together a special mix of fragrances to use in the diffuser for when they were doing it.
My mom, unlike me, has sex. Two years ago, she insisted we have The Talk. She asked if I was interested, and I told her no way would I ever do that with any of the guys I know. I couldn’t see letting any of them get that close to me.
That’s when she told me she might be a mother, but that didn’t mean she was sexually dead. I stopped her before she could say something from an eighties
