Page 48 of Black
She gave me a playful elbow to my ribs. “First of all, you big dork, I’m not fun, and I’m not your little sister. I’m not even your real niece.”
“I know, but you let me call you Candy, and Sugar, and Sweetie and stuff, and I like that.”
“I would never let you call me any of that in real life, you know that, right?”
I grinned. “Yeah, I figured that much.”
“Good, just wanted to make that clear.”
“Pull my finger,” I said with an earnest expression.
“Why?” she asked with confusion on her face.
“Just pull it,” I said and leaned forward.
She did it and I don’t know what was bigger, my grin or my fart, but I was clapping my hands, amused at how naïve she was.
Cia placed her hands on her hips but smiled. “Very funny.”
“Ohh, come on, every dad does that joke with his kid – you can’t go through a simulated childhood without being fooled at least once. I can’t tell you how many times I pulled my dad’s finger.”
“Why would you do it more than once if you knew what was going to happen?” she asked.
“Because it was fun and it was our thing… you know. Didn’t anyone ever pull that trick on you?”
She shook her head. “No, my mom never did that.”
“Didn’t your mom have any boyfriends?”
Her smile vanished and a dark cloud fell on her face. “Yes, she had boyfriends.”
I knew I had stumbled on a bomb in that minefield Bruce had described as her childhood. And I wasn’t so sure I had the right safety equipment to detonate it, so I carefully withdrew to a safe topic and asked her how old she would guess the trees in this part of the forest to be.
