Forcing Gravity Read Online Free Page A

mother clapped her hand s together, startling us both and forcing us apart. I knew she was annoyed t hat the attention wasn’t on her and had to immediately bring the focus back where she wanted it. I gave Skylar a look that was just shy of an eye roll, and she grinned and rolled her eyes back at me since our mom couldn’t see her. It was our secret way of saying we’d have our own personal bitch session later once our mother was out of earshot.
    She flopped back down on the couch, across from the couch where my mother was perched daintily on the edge , so I took the chair between them.
    “So, Logan, tell us wha t you’ve been up to this summer. We’re dying to know, ” my mother said, her attention suddenly rapt.
    A glance at my sister let me know she had tuned out and was engaged in a rapid-fire text me ssage conversation with someone, but to her credit, she knew what I’d been up to since we actually talked on the phone.
    My mother followed my gaze. “Skylar!”
    My sister’s head snapped up. “Yeah.”
    “Participate please. You haven’t seen your sister in over a year.”
    “Yeah, but I just talked to her two days ago,” Skylar said, and the ‘duh’ on the end of her sentence was definitely implied. She glanced down at her phone and fired off one last text before setting it down on the coffee table next to her propped-up feet.
    I appraised her, realizing how much she’d grown since I’d last seen her. As far as outward appearances went , my s ister and I couldn’t have looked more different. Of course, we had different fathers, so that had something to do w ith it. Her father was Luiz Oliveira , a famed Hollywood producer that my mother had dated for eight years after she divorced my dad .
    Luiz was from Brazil and had made his millions producing a slew of well-known action movies and high-powered dramas over the past fifteen years. My mom had met him when she was auditioning for his next big film, the year after his first movie broke blockbuster records the weekend it opened . He ’d alread y gaine d a good amount of clout in Hollywood, and she was itching to work for him.
    Unfortunately for her, Luiz hadn’t selected her for the role, but they’d dated and even lived together for a while when I was younger. Luiz was always nice to me and bought me presents whenever I visited, and he helped me gain the sibling I’d always wanted. And he treated me like his daughter, which always made me feel special, and not at all like I was invading their life when I visited. Even though he was no longer dating my mother, I always made a point to see him when I was in L.A .
    Skylar definitely favored her father’s Brazilian genes with dark hair, hazel eyes and olive skin that I’d kill for. She also had a curvy little body that guys would go nuts over when she really filled out. I had almost no curves, and like my mother, had light hair and light skin that got decently tan in the summer, but not nearly as dark as my sister. We did share the same nose and mouth, though, so if you looked closely, you could tell we were related .
    “Well, I haven’t talked to her,” my mother whined, pouting just enough so we knew she wanted our sympathy. It was obviously all about her and how slighted she felt. Of course, she didn’t realize that if she really wanted to talk to me, she could have picked up the phone and called me!
    I seriously wanted to bang my head ag ainst the back of the stiff arm chair I was sitting in. Or run next door to Ethan’s. His mother would have hugged me and made me a plate of nachos while she gabbed on a mile a minute about how good it was to see me a nd how great I looked. So far from my mother I’d gotten none of the warm feelings Carol Lewis would have projected , and I knew I wouldn’t . My mother just wasn’t nurturing.
    “Well,” I said, figuring I would talk since my mother was looking at me expectantly, “I’ve just been working at the rec center, teach ing volleyball camps,