Page 24 of Colt
“Oh.” I reach into my pocket, and I take my phone out. Dammit. She’s sent me a string of texts and is getting increasingly worried. I respond that Allison is with me, and shemade me spaghetti, and it’s fine. Even though I have a feeling Allison already told her that.
This way, maybe she won’t think I only checked my phone because of Allison.
“I’m surprised she didn’t move in.”
“If I hadn’t agreed to look after you, she would have.”
I grimace. That tracks. “Thanks. I love my mom. Don’t get me wrong. But I don’t exactly want to cohabitate with her.”
“Fair enough. I love my dad, but I don’t want to move back in with him.”
“Yeah. Well, I think my mom would mean well and do everything in her power to stop me from getting a hangnail at this point. So, I wouldn’t be allowed to do anything for myself.” I try to say that with no irony, but given I’m sitting here being served by her, and she even got the TV remote for me, I feel a little bit stupid.
“She loves you.”
I laugh. “Oh. I know. I’m not under any illusion that my mom doesn’t love me. I’m lucky that way.”
She nods. “Yeah. You really are. Your mom is the best. I’m lucky too.”
Parents are such a thorny topic. Her real mom is dead. My real dad is just a horrible human being, and the fact of the matter is, we’re both lucky our parents met and married. Honest truth.
But, it’s still thorny. I don’t often sit in the thorns. I’m usually too busy moving on to the next thing.
Ohtani hits a home run, and she points to the TV. “That was good. I know enough to know that was good.”
“You’re practically ready for the MLB now.”
“Yep. That’s me. Very athletic.”
I never thought of her as unathletic, but she was definitely more inside than out. When she was really little, back when she was just my friend’s little sister, she used to trail after uson her dad’s property, following Gentry and me all around, and complaining loudly whenever she was made to be even a little bit uncomfortable. She didn’t like bees, she didn’t like getting her feet wet, didn’t like it when she got burrs in her socks.
I can’t say that I like any of those things, but we were twelve-year-old boys with an annoying nine-year-old trailing after us, and I would have pretended that I love nothing more than to stick my right hand into a beehive and my left ankle into a sludgy pond if it meant demonstrating my toughness in the face of her whining.
I suppose that’s a pretty good indicator of how we ended up with the relationship we have.
She was always just a kid, irritating to me, and I didn’t hide it. If she’d had pigtails, I’d have pulled them.
I look up, and she’s got her gaze fixed on the TV, her face in profile. She’s beautiful. Her nose reminds me of a ski slope, sweet freckles sprinkled across it, all around her cheeks. She used to hate them when she was little, and now I’ve seen girls paint freckles on their faces because they’re so trendy. It’s funny how that stuff happens.
She’s got that striking red hair. Copper mixed with deep, russet tones. Her hair isn’t really curly. It isn’t really straight. It’s a mix of the two, and often does its own thing. She keeps it in a messy bun a lot of the time, which, right now, she has it down, tumbling over her shoulders.
If I think about pulling her hair now, it has a whole different undertone.
Oh. Hell. No. No. I’m not going there.
“This is great,” I say, because interrupting my thoughts seems like a good move at this point.
“You were just in a hostage situation with hospital food for weeks.”
I snort. “Right. That is true. But this is still good.”
“Thank you. My left wrist really got a workout opening that jar.”
My brain stalls out, trying to make a joke about the last time my left wrist got a workout, though given that I was just reflecting on the fact I haven’t had a hard-on in weeks, there’s not much to say. And anyway, I shouldn’t say it in front of her. There was something…
There was something when I made that joke about the sex tape. Then she started talking about pickup trucks and penises.
Well, she didn’t actually say the word.
