Page 7 of Center of Gravity

“Aw, come on. You haven’t beaten my record of landing a hookup, yet.” I tried to appeal to his competitive side. In spite of his ace physique, the only sport Tom currently excelled at was amassing an impressive collection of tit pics on his phone.

“I can get a hookupwithout even leaving my apartment.”

“Tindr’s such a cheat, dude. No interaction, no sweating it out on the dance floor, no failed pick-up lines, drinks to the face. Where’s the fun in that?” I teased.

“The fun is in my pants. Getting laid and saving a little damn money. Besides, don’t even act like you’re too good for an app. Pretty sure I’ve seen you on LocalMeet.”

“Yeah?” Just as Tom excelled at tit pics, I excelled at social media hypocrisy, throwing shade at it almost as frequently as I used it for a quick hookup. LocalMeet was an app tailored to Savannah and the surrounding areas.

“Mm,” he grunted, then grinned, his knuckles drumming the wheel to the beat of the radio. “Pretty sure that was your microdick I swiped through last week.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “If you’re swiping through dicks, that means I need to get my game face on, ‘cause now I have a chance.”

“Not with a microdick, you don’t.”

“I’m of at least average size,” I countered, then upped the ante with a smirk as I started to unzip my pants. “Happy to show you.”

Tom gave me an agitated wave and tried to scowl.

“I saw you trying to sneak a look just then.”

“Fuck off,” he said, giving up and laughing. “And my final answer is no. I’m not going out. I’m fucking beat.”

In the parking lot of the little ramshackle corrugated building that housed College Buffs’ office, we secured the truck, double-checked our supply of blankets and dollies, and clocked out.

“Seven a.m. for Mr. Macomb’s, yeah?” Tom called out as he walked toward his car.

“Yep. You get lonely tonight, you just give me a call, sweet thang.” This time, my eyebrow waggle landed and Tom flipped me off, chuckling as he ducked inside.

As I drove home,I went through my mental black book, trying to think of someone to rope into going out with me. Not that I was too proud to go alone, either. The Tap House was the kind of place where the drinks were so cheap and the foot traffic so heavy that there weren’t any strangers after 11 p.m. As far as fishing ponds went, it ticked all the boxes, and my success rate there hovered around ninety percent. The week before, I’d gotten laid by a prissy recent grad with a killer smile who was on his last night of family vacation.

So Tom was out. My friend Max was gone for the next few days. I was pretty sure Sam had her gallery internship the next day with an ungodly start time. Danny was…I hedged. Danny and I were more school acquaintances than friends, but we’d slept together at the start of the summer and things had been weird ever since. Maybe it was best to just go it alone for the night.

I stopped to grab the mail when I got to my parents’ house, then pulled into the drive while I sorted through it. I’d had high hopes I’d be able to afford an apartment in the city with friends for the summer and my senior year, rather than the dorms, but the pile of bills in my lap was a reminder of how much had changed. I wouldn’t even be finishing my senior year, much less living outside of my parents’ basement. After shuffling through the bills, I separated them from the glossy junk magazines and flyers, then went inside.

Mom was in the kitchen throwing some macaroni noodles into what looked like ground beef simmering on the stove. Ever since she’d gone back to work, dinners were quick, thrown-together affairs, but no one dared complain and really none of us cared. We were a family in survival mode trying to pretend everything was normal. Which probably made us like seventy-five percent of America, anyway.

I tugged on her apron tie as I passed to drop the bills onto the counter.

“Your order pad is still in the pocket,” I said.

She laughed and patted it. “I was in a hurry.” She pulled the apron off and tossed it in my direction. I folded it and laid it over the back of a chair. I could hear my ten-year-old sister, Lainey, playing in the living room. And faintly, the strains of the History Channel coming from the guest room, where Dad had been sleeping ever since shit had gotten real with his cancer.

“Good tip day?” I asked, snatching a few noodles from the colander.

“Decent.”

“I told you Ma, you’ve gotta flash that smile, maybe a little shoulder. Dazzle them.” I winked when she gave me the Look—the one all parents were gifted with the second they popped out an offspring.

“More like blind them. Is that your secret?”

“Oh, I’ll always show some skin.”

She swatted me with her towel and I took the opportunity to steal another handful of noodles, then stood at the corner of the kitchen table to open the bills. Most months, our combined earnings were enough to cover them and the house payment once we’d taken my tuition out of the equation. Where it got tricky was the rent for the building my dad had leased just before he’d found out he was sick. The landlord had recently found a sub-letter, so we’d gotten out of what boiled down to an exorbitant storage fee, but now the medical bills were starting to come in, and the health insurance offered through my mom’s job at the diner was a joke. But better than nothing.

“How’s Dad today?” I was gone before he was up, but Mom’s head shake was enough. Not a good day, then. He was doing another chemo cycle after responding well to the previous ones.

“Left him heaving over the toilet this morning, bitching about how the chemicals were going to turn him into an Oompa Loompa.”