I Love You, I Hate You: Part 1

“When?” Danika sits up on her elbows. Her eyes bounce from the broken rubber to my face too many times. If I wasn’t so confident with myself, I might get a complex. “How?”

“I don’t know, Danika. It's not like I attached a camera to my dick and can tell you.” She glares, apparently not finding my comment funny. Truthfully, it sounded better in my head than it did out loud. “Couldn’t you feel it?”

“No, Logan,” she spits, climbing out of bed. She grabs a towel from the bathroom and tosses it at me. “I couldn’t feel it.”

Danika stands beside the bed and begins jumping up and down, holding her massive tits in place with her hands. I try not to laugh but can’t help the grin that takes over my face. “What are you doing?”

“I’m helping gravity pull all the little yous out of me!”

I take Danika by the wrist and pull her into a hug. “Not sure that’s how that works, baby.” I nuzzle into her chest and she wraps her arms around me. Her heart’s racing. I can only imagine the havoc in her brain right now. “I’m sorry for freaking out.”

“Yeah. Me too.” She sighs.

I look up into her worried eyes. “Hey. Everything will be fine. We’ll stop and grab the morning after pill on the way home. Things like this happen all the time.”

50

Danika

The past few weeks since coming home from our week-long vacation have flown by. We had two days of school and then we were off for Thanksgiving break. Mrs. Harris, under the direction of her ex-husband, took Logan, Cooper, and Piper out of state for the week.

Thank God for texting and Facetime. Although, while I had all the privacy I needed, Logan was almost always surrounded by someone. So there was no hot sexting, or dirty video chatting but we made up for lost time when he got home.

When school resumed again, we had ten days of mundane work. Mrs. Harris made Logan take a shift at the Red Onion three nights a week. Apparently, she thought he needed to expand his extracurriculars outside of the bedroom since the football season came to an abrupt end. That sucks too, but it gives us somewhere else to hang out besides our houses.

“Are you okay?” Logan asks, running his fingers through my hair. It’s Wednesday, Cooper and Piper’s day to work, which means I get Logan all to myself tonight. It feels like an eternity has passed since we’ve been able to curl up on the couch like this. I really really miss Miami.

“Yeah. Why?” I roll onto my back and look up into his ebon eyes. Logan has his glasses on today, something he’s started doing more since coming home. To the rest of the world Logan is a sexy jock with a temper, but here he’s my soft, cuddly nerd. I love it.

He shrugs, twisting my locks into a failed attempt at a braid. “Tomorrow is your first Christmas without your mom.”

“I’m trying not to think about it.” I turn back towards the TV, blinking the tears that have begun to form back and tuck my arm under my head. I’ve done well to force tomorrow from my thoughts, but now that Logan has brought it up, I can’t hide from them. “I don’t know what we’re going to do for breakfast this year.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mom used to get up before us, before Dad even, and bake french toast. Every year up until she got sick, I’d wake to the smell of vanilla and a warm cup of hot cocoa. In the hospital, she would beg, bribe, and plead with the staff to help keep our tradition alive. Even if french toast wasn’t on the breakfast menu, someone would always bring it in for her.”

I smile, remembering last year. Dad brought a twin size blow-up mattress for me, while he slept in the awful reclining chair Christmas Eve. It didn’t matter we lived minutes down the road. We knew our time was running out, and that every minute counted.

I woke at the last check in before shift change, when the nurse came to take mom’s vitals. Mom smiled sadly at me, her hollow cheeks even more skeletal like in the dim lights. Even in her weak state, covered in wires, and wearing a faded hospital gown, Mom was beautiful. She didn’t wear a wig, instead opting to rock the straggly hair that had begun to grow back. At first, we thought the hair growth was a sign the treatment was working. We were wrong.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

I shushed Mom, letting her comfort me when in our twisted reality I was actually comforting her. I crawled into bed with her, careful not to pull on her wires and laid there until the sun came up. Dad had just begun to stir when there was a knock on her door.

I climbed out of mom’s lap, figuring it was this morning’s nurse when the door opened. I’ll never forget her—Tammy, the tattooed, twenty-six-year-old who carried in two massive bags from IHop. Tammy set them on the foot of Mom’s bed. “I’m freaking starving this morning. I hope you don’t mind, I brought breakfast.”

It wasn’t vegan, but it didn’t matter. That was the last Christmas we’d have together. There were presents, but nothing that mattered. Everything store bought was mundane compared to the memory that the nurse gave us. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. Not only is tomorrow the first Christmas without Mom, but it’s the first one I’ll wake up to alone because Dad has the graveyard shift tonight.

I wake on the couch with a smile tugging at my lips. I open my eyes and see it’s only six-forty-five. Dad is still at the hospital for another fifteen minutes which means I’m alone. I realize the glorious smell of vanilla wafting through the house is nothing more than a memory tinged dream and I’m in some semi-lucid form of consciousness.

I force my feet to move, knowing that everything about this moment is fake. But I’ll bask in it, allow myself to see mom again because I haven’t dreamed of her since she died and I miss her. I miss her more than words can convey.

I stop in my tracks and cover my mouth with my hand, choking back a laugh and a cry at the same time. Logan’s standing in my kitchen, a Mrs. Claus apron tied around his neck. Cooking. French. Toast. He looks over his shoulder, sensing I'm here, and grins. “Good morning, beautiful.”

“Hey,” I say, breathlessly.

“Sit.” He motions to the table with his spatula. I take a seat in front of a bowl of fruit and a pre-poured glass of orange juice. “I really, really hope you like them. I was up all night testing out different recipes. I think I finally found one that works using coconut milk.”