Cherry Pop (Mercury Rising Book 3) by Samantha Kane Read Free Book Online Page A

center and the foundation, really I am. I love my job, you know I do. I think what we’re doing here is great. I’m just…floundering.”
    “Ah,” Brian said knowingly. “Now we get to the heart of it. Tell me what you need, Ben.”
    “Oh, shut up,” Ben snapped. “From Sherlock to Freud. I don’t need psychoanalyzing. It’s no secret my life blew up a year ago and I had a hard time moving on.” Understatement of the decade , Ben thought. “This move to Mercury—temporary move ,” he amended, “is a big step. But I have no plan. I’m thirty. I should have a plan of some sort, shouldn’t I?” It felt good to finally articulate his recent dissatisfaction.
    “A plan for what? Retirement?” Brian asked incredulously. “A life plan? You know what my life plan was? Yeah, me neither. It sure as hell wasn’t to fall in love with some small-town Southern preacher man and uproot my life and my business for him, to suddenly find that the only thing that matters to me is making him happy. This was not what my crystal ball prophesied.”
    “Oh, yeah,” Ben said sarcastically. “Back to Brian. For a minute there I thought we were actually going to talk about me.”
    “Now you shut up,” Brian said without rancor. “My point is life plans are for shit. They blow up in your face. You have to wing it, Ben. You have to be open to the possibilities and accept the gifts that God gives you. We don’t know what we need ahead of time. We discover it on the journey.”
    “Wow,” Ben said, staring at Brian wide-eyed. “You are getting married to a preacher. I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk like that before.”
    “I haven’t done a lot of things before that I’m going to be doing from now on,” Brian said with a shrug. “That’s what change means. Everything we do, every decision we make, leads us down another path, where different things are required. You adjust, you adapt, you accept.” He searched the desk and grabbed a sheet of paper. “I’ve got to write that down. Evan says I need to write a book with all this stuff in there. This is pure gold.”
    “Whew,” Ben said with a whistle. “You’re back. You were really channeling Buddha there for a minute.”
    “The great ones are always mocked in the beginning,” Brian said, writing. “You’ll see.”

    * * *
    “ S o , I like Ben,” his mom said. Tripp glanced up from his phone. He’d been waiting since Ben drove off yesterday afternoon for her to say something about him.
    “Uh-huh,” he agreed. He looked back down at the news he’d been reading. The world was a real shithole these days. He tossed the phone away in disgust. He’d rather talk to his mom about Ben. “He is.”
    “What’s a guy like that doing here?” she asked, walking over to the kitchen table with her coffee and sliding into a seat across from him. She was wearing shorts and a tank top, her hair in a messy bun on her head, no makeup, and even Tripp recognized that she still looked damned pretty. His mom sure was something.
    “What’s wrong with here?” he asked, itching for a fight. He didn’t know what had got under his skin today, but he’d been spoiling for it since he rolled out of bed. Maybe it was because he hadn’t slept very well last night. He’d been thinking a lot about Ben, actually, which was why he hadn’t slept. He’d been wondering the same thing about him as his mom, but wasn’t going to admit it.
    “Nothing,” she said. “At least not for folks like us. But for people like Ben? Mercury is a real push down the ladder.”
    “Folks like us?” Tripp asked, leaning forward. “What’s that mean? What kind of folks are we? Aliens?”
    “Rednecks, and you know it,” she said, refusing to get into a fight with him. He’d never understood how she stayed so calm all the time. He’d never even seen her mad at his daddy, and Lord knew that man deserved it even more than Tripp.
    “There’s nothing wrong with rednecks,” Tripp said