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And she was ready for it.
Those experiences.
“Are we gonna eat that cake or what?” Brody tapped his toe to her shin under the table. “Or am I going to wilt into nothing while we wait?”
Meems chuckled. “You just ate three bowls of spaghetti and meatballs.”
“What can I say? I’m a growing boy.” Brody stretched his arms out to the sides. He’d just turned seventeen. Not even a year younger than Elena and pretty much double her size.
“He needs the extra sustenance for all the trouble he gets into.”
Trevan knocked his elbow into Brody’s shoulder.
Brody chuckled. “Hey, man, I have you and Silas to look up to.”
Both Trevan and Silas flinched.
Elena had felt a shift in them. The normal pride they exuded when they wore that cut thinning, and she could almost sense a change coming on the horizon.
Elena sure hoped there was, in so many ways.
“I’ll do the honors,” Meems said, sliding the cake closer to her and taking the big knife and cutting it into slices.
She passed them around, and everyone ate. Smiled and chatted.
While anticipation began to churn in her belly.
Her cake polished, she slid her paper plate away. “Are we about ready?”
Silas groaned. “You still insisting on this?”
“Um, yes. I absolutely am. I’m not going to stay home on my eighteenth birthday.”
He sighed. “Fine. But we’re only going for a couple hours.”
She squealed and pushed from her chair, pecked a kiss to his cheek. “Thank you. I’m going to go change.”
She ran to her room, stripped out of her jeans and tee, and pulled on the cute floral dress Meems had helped her pick out for tonight. Paired them with her white canvas sneakers.
She looked at herself in the mirror.
At her pink glossed lips and the braid in her hair.
Her eyes so big and wide.
She was ready.
She whipped open her door, then stalled out when she found Trevan stepping out from the bathroom on the other side.
She lost her breath.
He seemed to falter a step, too. Eyes rolling down her for a beat.
He looked back at her face and cleared his throat. “You sure you want to wear that? You’re going to be riding on a motorcycle.”
She glanced down at herself, self-consciousness flooding in. She fisted the material. “I thought it was pretty.”
Trevan exhaled something heavy. “It is pretty, Elena.”
