Holidays with Bang-ifits, page 1
Holidays with Bang-ifits
LILI VALENTE
Contents
Holidays with Bang-ifits
About the Book
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Sneak Peek
About the Author
Also by Lili Valente
Holidays with Bang-ifits
By Lili Valente
About the Book
Genevieve is like my little sister. Our rock star parents are all best friends, and we basically grew up together.
She’s a girl I want to protect from the dangerous things in the world, not one of the groupies that gather outside the stage door now that I’m a rock star, too.
Genny isn’t a one-night stand kind of girl. She’s too serious and intense for that. And she feels things way too deeply.
Even more importantly, on the night of our first kiss five years ago, she was only seventeen.
But now she’s all grown up. And so am I.
And the holidays are made for magic and second chances…right?
Chapter One
GENEVIEVE FRANCES HALLORAN
A woman on the verge of drowning in cat hair and despair…
Hindsight really is 20/20, even when a twenty-five-pound cat with one eye, three teeth, and a rusty meow is all that stands between you and certain doom.
Looking back, it’s easy to spot the domino I never should have let fall…
If only I’d demanded my share of our tips before Bryce and I closed the bar for the holidays. If only I’d held strong against his claims that taking our entire Friday night haul was the only way he could afford presents for his two kids and baby mama, Elana, a saint who deserves better than a flake like Bryce who’s never met a special occasion he couldn’t screw up by failing to plan ahead.
If I’d taken home my tips, I wouldn’t have been fifty dollars short on rent.
And if I hadn’t been short on rent, Carl, my heartless, Dickensian landlord wouldn’t have changed the locks on my stupid apartment while I was out grabbing my pitiful Christmas Eve cheeseburger dinner and refused to let me back in until I paid my debt.
And if I hadn’t been locked out, I never would have ended up here, at my Aunt Kirby’s house, breaking in through the kitchen window, tumbling onto the floor in a tangle of bruised limbs, and barely punching the security code into the alarm in time to avoid a visit from the Hidden Kill Bay police.
I thought that was it, the worst of it, and I was finally safe for the night.
Aunt Kirby and her husband Colin are out of town with my parents and the other original Lips on Fire band members. The band’s playing a reunion show at some swanky casino in the Bahamas and then they’re all staying on the island through New Year’s Eve for a break from the Maine winter quickly locking our sleepy coastal town in its icy grip.
But Aunt Kirby wouldn’t care that I broke in and plan on staying here until I head back to work on Monday, get my tips, and pay Carl the Wretched the money I owe him. Kirby is the coolest. I have no doubt she would have told me where the spare key is and encouraged me to raid her pantry for snacks if I’d been able to get a call to connect to her cell down there in the tropics.
She isn’t really my aunt, but she might as well be. I grew up hanging out in her office upstairs in the attic, writing poems in my journal while she banged away on her ancient typewriter. I’d pretend I was a famous author like her while the rest of the kids rampaged through the downstairs playing tag or hide-and-seek or that game Panic made up where you had to get from the second floor to the basement without touching the carpet.
Panic…
He’s everywhere in this house, memories of the children we were and the mortifying things I said to him the last time we were in this room together make my cheeks burn with shame.
I avoid making direct eye contact with his blue gaze staring down at me from the family portrait above the fireplace as I’m perched on the back of the couch like an unkempt gargoyle.
If I’d known I was going to get locked out of my apartment, I would have brushed my hair instead of shoving it up under my polka dot sock cap and swept on some lip balm to protect my lips from the winter wind. And if I’d remembered that Aunt Kirby’s latest crop of rescue cats are of the opinion that everyone, save Kirby, is a monster person who should be ripped to shreds with their freshly sharpened claws, I would never have dared enter with food in hand.
“Good kitties,” I whisper, my wobbly voice echoing through the eerily silent house as I toss another chunk of hamburger to the predators prowling the carpet in front of me. They pounce on it, hissing and scratching as they battle for a chunk of the treat. “But I’m almost out of goodies. So, you’re going to have to let me off the couch and over to the stairs. Okay?”
Beastly the Fourth, another one-eyed cat with a tattered ear from street fighting in his younger days, hisses and turns to glare at me like I’m personally responsible for his diminished hearing on one side. Floof Loaf, my big, fat, fluffy Calico protector growls low in his throat in response, a warning to Beastly and any other felines who might think of approaching the couch that only he is allowed to get this close to me and my bag of deliciousness.
Maybe he’s assigned himself my protector because he remembers I was there when Kirby found him stuck in a nest of wet leaves against a chain-link fence and I carried him home in my coat.
Maybe it’s just the fact that I’ve been feeding him tiny bites of cheese from my burger patty before I feed the meat to the other cats.
Either way, I’m grateful for the heavy weight of Floof Loaf on my socked feet as I toss chunks of meat and pray the other cats will be so sated by the time I’m done that they’ll let me dash upstairs to the guest bedroom without ripping my leggings and the pale skin beneath to shreds.
At that moment, Beastly and another fluffy white cat who’s new since the last time I visited Aunt Kirby, charge the couch. I squeal and cringe higher on the back cushions until Floof Loaf scares them away with his gravel-in-a-lawnmower meow and a bop on the nose for each of them with his claws.
Heart racing from the narrow escape, I again consider calling for help.
My cell phone is in the pocket of my old peacoat, and I know Panic and the rest of the guys in the band are right across town, housesitting at our Uncle Shep’s place.
Shep and his wife, Bridget—Kirby’s little sister—still have teenagers at home and for some reason they decided having a bunch of twenty-something rock stars watch over their two youngest kids while they were out of town was a smart idea. And yes, Eric and Leo, their older kids are fairly responsible rock stars, but they’re still rock stars and Panic is straight up trouble.
The man’s a bad influence and always has been, even when we were kids.
As if to flip his parents the middle finger for giving him a name like “Panic,” he’s almost obnoxiously laid back, the kind of chill, cool guy who’s too charming, too sarcastic, and too gorgeous for his own good.
My eyes drift back to the family portrait of Kirby and Colin sitting on the front porch outside with Panic and his younger brother, Zen, leaning on the columns behind them. They’re both teenagers in the picture, captured in skinny jeans and vintage blazers on the cusp of manhood and the fame that would come for them just a few years later.
Being descended from musical royalty, it’s not all that shocking that Colin and Kirby’s sons, Cutter and Theodora’s daughter, and Shep and Bridget’s kids all ended up in a band together. Or that Hello Gorgeous landed a record deal just days after their first indie album dropped while I was in college.
What’s surprising—and disappointing—is that I was born without an ounce of musical talent. I’m tone deaf like my maternal grandmother and my attempts at shaking my thing on the dancefloor have been mistaken for the beginnings of seizure more than once. My mom finds my complete lack of rhythm adorable, and my dad treats me like a princess. Neither of them has ever done anything to make me think they wish I were one of the “band kids,” too.
But my dad is a double superstar. He had a killer stretch with Lips on Fire and then went on to have an insanely successful solo career, mostly writing excessively embarrassing love songs about my mom. Music is number two for him, right behind taking care of our family, and always has been. It’s so important to him that I can’t help but wonder…
And worry…
And feel like I’ve disappointed him and Mom by getting my undergraduate degree in English Lit with a Poetry minor.
Maybe things would be different if I’d gotten into any of the poetry master’s programs that I applied to, but…I didn’t. One by one, every school turned me down, snuffing out the lights on my dreams. The last rejection came through last summer, just a few weeks after I started working at Chippy’s, a local dive bar our parents used to go to when they were young.
Apparently, it was even crustier back then. At least the bathroom works these days. Most of the time. And the tips are good.
So, I stayed on as second bartender after the summer rush, working for rapidly reducing tips as the beachgoers, then the leaf peepers left, and tourist season wound down for another year. I’ve slipped into a rut and, if I’m honest, a little bout of depression.
I don’t know who I am anymore. Growing up, I was the smart one, the creative one, the budding writer who was going to grow up and set the literary world on fire. I easily made straight A’s while most of my surrogate cousins had to form study grou
But graduate programs don’t care about good grades or flashy test scores. They care about innovative work, poetry that pushes boundaries, and writers who aren’t afraid to take risks, and they weren’t shy about telling me my portfolio just didn’t fit the bill.
I’m not good enough. I’m derivative and boring.
I’m a greeting card writer trying to be an Emily Bronte and failing miserably.
Hell, it would probably be best if the cats decide to rip my body limb from limb and devour my talentless corpse. At least then my death would be interesting. And if I’m cat food, I won’t have to worry about what I’m going to do with my life now that my dreams have withered on the vine and I’m too mortified to show my face to most of the people who used to be my best friends.
Eric, Leo, and Zen were all there the night I embarrassed myself with Panic, and I’m sure Anya heard the gossip at band practice.
Anya’s never let on that she knows I’m a bad drunk and a generally pathetic loser but she’s a sweetheart. She would never deliberately make another person feel bad, especially not her former best friend.
Growing up, we spent every Friday night sleeping over at her place or mine, whispering late into the night about the bands we loved and dreaming about writing bestselling songs together. She would write the melodies, I’d write the lyrics, and we’d tour the world together when we were grown up. She insisted I could be her band DJ thusly allowing me to be on stage, but safely tucked behind a turntable where no one could see how bad I was at dancing.
Instead, I got in deep with the Journalism Club in high school and she started making music with the boys and the rest is history. We grew apart, Hello Gorgeous blew up, and Anya spent her senior year being homeschooled by a tutor while she was on her first U.S. tour with the band.
But she would still come rescue me now. I know she would.
I should have thought of calling her first, but knowing when to ask for help is one of my many ongoing problems.
I should have left Panic in my rearview years ago, too, but for some reason he’s always there, hovering at the edges of my mind, taunting me with his signature smirk and his husky voice calling me “Frances,” even though no one has ever called me that but him. I still wake from dreams featuring his turquoise eyes boring into mine through the curtain of his hair, my brain returning to that kiss again and again, like a kid picking at a scab.
But I don’t have to be a scab picker anymore.
I’ll call Anya, make her promise not to tell Panic what’s happening, and get her over here to lure the cats over to their food bowls in the laundry room. Then we can lock them into the small space with their water bowls and plush beds, make popcorn, and catch up on all the news from the past five years. We’ve seen each other briefly at holiday parties and such but haven’t had an actual gab session in forever.
We can chat upstairs in the guest bedroom, far from pictures of Panic and the memories of what happened that spring before senior year.
I’m pulling my cell from my coat pocket to text Anya when a deep voice calls from the other side of the frosty window behind me, “Breaking and entering is against the law, kid. If I were you, I’d make a run for the back door before the police get here.”
Stomach sinking, I consider the advice.
Sure, I left my shoes outside in the snow before I climbed through the kitchen window—I didn’t want to break anything on my way in—but running through a blizzard in my socked feet is surely preferable to facing Panic Lawrence Donovan in my current state. I might lose a toe to frostbite, but what’s one toe, more or less, when it comes to salvaging the last vestiges of my pride?
I start to climb off the couch and suddenly all hell breaks loose. Beastly makes a running dive for my calf, Floof Loaf hurls himself off the couch like a big, fluffy cannonball, and I fall into the coffee table with a cry of pain that becomes a scream of terror as I tumble to the floor and my feline assassins pounce on their prey.
Chapter Two
PANIC LAWRENCE DONOVAN
A man who’s NOT going to kiss the girl,
no matter how much he wants to…
Sometimes I think my parents named me Panic as a joke.
That they looked down at my baby face in the bassinet at the hospital and thought—“We’re taking this kid home to live in a creepy Victorian cottage filled with disturbing memorabilia from his mom’s horror-writing career and plan to leave him alone in his playroom with the ghost parrot that haunts the third floor for hours while we’re busy with work. Wouldn’t it be fun to name him Panic, so every time he runs screaming into our offices, complaining about his latest supernatural encounter, we can tell him not to panic, Panic? Doesn’t that sound like a good time?”
If that was their plan, however, it backfired.
I came into the world cool, calm, and collected and have worked hard to make sure nothing shakes me. Or that I don’t let it show if it does. I pride myself on my level head in a crisis and my firm control of my emotions.
But as I burst through the front door, expecting to find some homeless kid racing out the back only to see Genevieve curled into a ball on the floor while Mom’s latest batch of semi-feral, completely insane, rescue cats swarm her like a sardine tossed into their treat bowl, I lose it. Every last bit of my infamous chill flies out the window as I rush at them, shouting, “Get off of her! Stop it! Beastly, Skullduggery, Insane Clown Posse, get! Shoo, you little monsters.”
The cats all scuttle away, hissing and growling their complaints, except for Floof Loaf, who remains crouched by Genevieve’s head, glaring at me with his one good eye.
I reach to pull her to her feet and Floof takes a swipe at me with his fat paw. I dodge his claws and assure him, “I’m not going to hurt her, psycho. I’m just going to help her up.”
“No, don’t. Don’t help me,” Genevieve moans from behind the arms shielding her face from the cat attack. “Leave me here. Let them pick my bones clean. Just…tell my parents I love them and that I’m sorry for being a huge disappointment who died by rescue cats.”
A smile curving my lips, I crouch down beside her. “You might be being a hair dramatic, Frances. Don’t you think?”
“No,” she moans, still hidden behind her hands. “Everything is bad.”
“I’m assuming that’s why you broke into my parents’ house? You could have just let yourself in, you know. The key’s still in the flowerpot out back.”
“I couldn’t find it,” she says with a sniff. “And how did you know I broke in? I punched in the code for the alarm.”
“Yeah, but the system alerts Mom via text message every time a door or window opens. Beastly sneaks out through the kitchen window sometimes. That’s what she thought happened tonight, so she texted me to come check and make sure he didn’t get locked out in the snow.”
Genevieve peeks over the tops of her hands, her green eyes bright with unshed tears that make my heart twist. “So, the police aren’t coming?”
“No, they aren’t,” I say gently, reaching out to scratch Floof Loaf between the ears, even though I’d much rather cup Genevieve’s sad face in my hands and promise her everything is going to be all right.
But I can’t touch her. I can barely look at her. I haven’t exchanged so much as five sentences with my surrogate little cousin since it happened. I haven’t dared. She’s made it clear that she hates me with all the considerable fire in her poet’s soul.
Genevieve is my opposite in just about every way—passionate and intense to my calculated reserve, shamelessly ambitious while I ‘play it cool,’ and capable of holding a grudge for years while I’ve already forgotten why she looks at me with a death glare Beastly, the shredder of all skin that is not my mother’s skin, would envy every time we run into each other at a family event.
