I frowned. “You didn’t bring any kids with you, did you?”
“No,” they both answered as Dillan added on, “It’s mother’s day out. So we brought your momma over here to cook for us. We’re going to have margaritas and talk about how much we’re stressed.”
“Oh.” I paused. “I’m okay with you being here for an hour and a half, but no more. I got this new Whoop strap, and it tells me that to reach peak potential tomorrow, I have to go to bed at eight fifteen. And, since I stayed up late last night editing Hastings’ latest book, I really could use it.”
“What’s a Whoop strap?” my mother asked.
I showed her the monitor that I wore on my ankle.
“That looks like you’re under house arrest,” she teased. “Which I would understand more than you wearing a fitness tracker when you don’t do fitness anything. Unless you count fitting donuts into your mouth.”
She had a point but…
“I’m trying to get better about my sleep habits,” I admitted. “I started getting really bad headaches, and when I did research on them, I determined it was due to the blue light from the computers. So I got some blue light glasses, stopped playing on the computer after a certain time, and essentially stopped my headaches. But there are some times, when I get rush editing jobs, that I realize I can’t totally just stop the blue light. But last night was a special occasion. Hastings has been working on this particular book for like a year. And I wanted to see if it was as good as she kept hinting at. It was, by the way. You should both read it. It’s about the SWAT team and all that jazz.”
Hastings was married to another member of the SWAT team that my brothers were on, and she’d gotten ‘inspired’ last year.
Needless to say, her inspiration knocked it out of the park.
“What does you getting off the computer and going to bed early have to do with this fitness tracker?” my mom asked as she placed the cheese she’d been stirring on the stove in the middle of the table for us to start dipping chips in. When she was back at the stove, I took a seat at the table and scooped my own bowl of cheese even though I trusted Delanie and Dillan implicitly.
I’d always been pretty particular about my food.
None of it could touch until I wanted it to touch.
I didn’t share food or drink—I’d learned the hard way from when one of my brothers had stolen my drink and I’d found a popcorn kernel in the bottom of my cup when I was eleven.
I did not, under any circumstances, eat anything yellow.
That was why the cheese sauce that was on the table was white queso.
And so much better than the yellow.
I also did not eat anything cold that was supposed to be hot, or vice versa.
“It helps me figure out when I need to go to sleep. If I was disturbed in the middle of the night by anything. How many hours of sleep I got. How good of sleep I got. What my strain level is for the day.” I paused. “I joined a group of people who are low level on the autism spectrum, and we all compete to see who can perform the best each day. And since I’m currently losing, it’s forcing me to make better life choices. Like going to bed early. I’m hoping these margaritas give me a sedative effect and help me conk out. I want to beat this one bitch. She’s won every single day since I joined, and it’s driving me insane.”
My mother laughed as she came back to the table with the fixings for tacos. She placed the white cheese next to me and handed the fiesta mix to my two sisters-in-law.
Once we were halfway through our first margarita, and I’d eaten three tacos, Delanie said, “So tell me about this Bruno?”
I did, not skipping one single detail.
“You think he has a big penis?” she repeated.
I shrugged. “Well, his hand size, in correlation to his foot size, I would guess so. The guy is hulking.”
My mother, used to my bluntness, just shook her head. “Penis size means nothing when you can’t have sex.”
That was true.
I’d not been able to force myself to have sex.
The exchanging of body fluids thing, paired with the fact that the man would have to practically tell me everything he was doing before he did it, meant that I wasn’t number one on anyone’s ‘have sex with her’ list.
“True,” I admitted. “But I think, if anyone could do that, it would be Bruno. He understands a whole lot more than any man I’ve ever taken a chance on spending time with. Not to mention he’s exceptionally observant.”
My mother’s eyes widened. “Don’t ever repeat this conversation to your father.”