“We’ll cover that weird question in a minute. What I meant was: do you think brothers don’t fight or argue over things? Hell, I remember the time Jarrod held Canon’s head in the toilet, just for stealing his deodorant.”
“That’s a bit excessive,” I mumbled, thinking of the time Cash had to hold me back from shaving a chunk out of Sayla’s hair while she was asleep. That was different, though. She’d broken my hair straighteners.
“You did something similar,” he noted, his eyes dancing with laughter.
“Not over deodorant, and I had Dad’s electric shaver in my hand, not the toilet. That’s just disgusting and unsanitary.”
“My point is, sisters fighting isn’t unlike brothers doing it, and that was pretty funny.” If he said so. “Now, moving onto the eye porn from birth, I don’t know how to answer that. We were just babies and then little kids.”
I highly doubted that.
“I was an ugly baby,” I told him, sitting in the spare seat. “I swear my nose was three times the size of a normal baby’s, and my legs had these big old rolls of fat on them.”
“I won’t believe you were an ugly baby until I see a photo.”
Shrugging a shoulder, I pulled my phone out and went to the family album I’d started in my photos, quickly finding proof of what I’d just described to him.
Taking it from me, Bond squinted at the screen. “You weren’t an ugly baby, you were freaking adorable.”
Adorable equaled—it’s wrong to call a baby ugly, so we just go with ‘adorable.’
“I had a potato nose and was a chunky monkey.”
Holding my phone to his chest, he looked coolly at me. “And if you ever heard Nemi talking about herself like that as a baby?”
I snorted. “That girl was gorgeous from the second she came into the world, and I’m not being a biased parent when I say that. She had these big brown eyes, a truly adorable button nose, the most perfect lips, and soft brown curls on her head. All she’s done over the last three years is grow into that beauty.”
Turning the screen to face me, he said, “That’s what I see when I look at this photo of her mom. Big brown eyes, a button nose, perfect pouty lips, brown curls, and baby fat on her thighs. And it’s fair to say you’ve grown into that beauty, too.”
If he said so.
The door opened before I could reply, and in walked Jess, the girl who usually did mine and Naomi’s nails.
“Hello, hello,” she cried. I swear this woman was the happiest lady in the world. I doubt she had a bad mood day like the rest of us. “I hear we’re doing a couple’s manicure and pedicure session today. How exciting.”
Bond’s face said clearly it was anything but exciting. Me? Oh, I was loving it. Thank God I hadn’t given in and canceled.
As his feet soaked in the basin, Bond endured his first manicure.
“Jess, do you know where they have those little fish that bite the dead skin off your feet?”
Not looking up from trimming his cuticles, she sighed. “Those turned out to be unhygienic, and the way the fish were being looked after was cruel, apparently. There are probably some places that have managed to perfect the issues, though, so you could look it up online. A client of mine was telling me about this spa with a pool you go into, and the fish nip away at your whole body.”
Now that was pushing it. In all honesty, I just wanted to rile Bond up a bit, and judging by how wide his eyes were and the way he was shaking his head, it was working.
“I’ll take a look online. Won’t that be fun, honey?” I asked sweetly, scrunching my nose on the word ‘fun.’
“Yeah,” Jess continued, unaware of the glare I was getting now. “They’ve got this huge gym with exercise equipment for everything, trainers who can make you fit in ten days, and treatments and pools to help you relax afterward. It sounds like a mixture of heaven and hell to me.”
Now hold on a cocking fucking second, that sounded like absolute hell to me.
Looking pleased with this new news, Bond smiled smugly. “I’ll look it up online and see what sort of things they offer, baby. We should go away for a couple’s weekend there.”
Well, shit.
As Jess moved onto Bond’s feet, I discovered something about him I hadn’t known yet. Then again, we were still very new, so that was to be expected, and who quizzes their new boyfriend about their feet? That’s just weird and a realm of kink that needed not to exist.
Bond had ticklish feet. And I mean, almost peeing his pants as he squirmed around in the seat type of ticklish.
By the end of the pedicure, Jess was soaked from where he’d accidentally kicked up water and had managed to evade every single kick from him, thankfully. Now that’d been a workout.