Page 51 of Rough Around the Hedges

She beamed.

“You’re nice, mister.”

I looked across at the little boy with spiky ginger hair who’d just spoken. “Thank you.”

“I don’t fink you’re the duke,” he continued. “You’re nice, and Mummy said the duke is a wotten bastard.”

Ah.

This was going well.

“You shouldn’t say—”

“Wyan!” Danny gasped. “You can’t say that word!”

Ryan blinked at him. “What word?”

“The last one—”

“Wotten!” Danny said, speaking over me. “It’s a mean word. My sister said so.”

Ryan looked at us all. “I fink that’s what Mummy meant, though. She said lotsa mean fins about the duke. Like, um, a wotten bastard, a wittle shi—”

“Maybe we should change the subject,” I said quickly. “And refrain from repeating adult words we hear at home.”

A loud cough came from a few feet away, and I looked in that direction to see Rose with her head dipped and her shoulders shaking.

She heard.

Every word.

And she was laughing.

All while I was being mildly harassed by five-year-olds.

How had my life come to this?

12

OLIVER

From Bad to Worse

“Stop laughing.”

Rose’s shoulders trembled. “I—I’m trying.”

“Try harder,” I grumbled, pulling the ring on one of the cans of beer we’d bought not long ago. “I have to admit that this isn’t what I was expecting when you said you’d buy me a drink.”

She finally turned her head towards me, peeking at me with her hazel eyes from between her fingers. “Well, I wasn’t about to walk into the pub with my mortal enemy, was I?”

“Oh, but taking me to a nursery to be verbally abused by a five-year-old is perfectly acceptable in your book?”

“I thought it’d make a nice change from me being the one verbally abusing you.”

I stared at her when she opened her can of wine spritzer.

Who knew wine came in cans? Not me, that was for sure.

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