“Me?” I squeak. “Oh, I’m just great. No worries here.”
“If you say so. Be cool, Papa Bear.” And he disconnects.
I sigh and hang up the phone, and Otter bursts out laughing. It startles me for a moment because I thought he was still asleep. He lets go of my leg and rolls over onto his back, clutching his stomach and bellowing out laughter. I glare at him and cross my arms. “What’s so fucking funny?” I scowl.
“‘Everything’s cool h-here?’” he sputters, mocking me. “You s-sounded like you were going to throw up through t-the whole phone call!”
My eyes narrow. “You were awake for the entire conversation?”
He nods, wiping his eyes.
I kick him on the leg. “Why the hell didn’t you help me?” I shout.
I raise my leg to kick him again, but he’s too fast for me. As soon as my foot shoots out, he rolls over nimbly onto it and squashes it into the bed. I’m pissed, so I raise my hands to beat him off me, but he reaches up and grabs both my arms with one big paw and pulls me down onto the bed. He pushes my arms to the sides and pins them with his knees and straddles my stomach. It happens so quickly that I have no time to react. He smiles down at me wickedly, his intent naked on his face. I glare up at him, a sneer twisted on my lips. He cocks his head to the side.
“Everything cool here, Bear?” he says through his grin.
“Get the fuck off me, Otter!” I say, trying to twist and wiggle out from underneath him. It’s no use. He’s too big, and the grinding of our hips isn’t exactly supporting my cause, either.
“Good morning to you too,” he says, arching his eyebrow. He leans forward until his face is a few inches from mine. I don’t move, not wanting to be the one who shows weakness here. I won’t lose this game. His nose touches mine, and it distracts me from what he’s really doing, and when his hand comes up and he starts tickling me, my eyes bulge and I start squealing like a girl. My mind goes blank, and I try to break free, and I scream at him shrilly, to no avail. His face is still down near mine, and I do the only thing I can: I reach up and grab his bottom lip with my teeth and pull none too gently. He immediately stops tickling me and doesn’t move. I jerk my head lightly to the side, threateningly.
“You gonna stop?” I say through a mouthful of Otter.
“Depends on what you’re going to do next,” he says and presses his face against mine, taking my mouth in his. I kiss him back even as the alarms go off in my head. I grimace slightly as we both taste like we gargled dead animals, but he sticks his tongue in my mouth, and my hands go to his back and rub the landscape there through the shirt. He lays down flat against me, and I can feel him pressing against my leg, and I find the place where his shirt has lifted up from his ass and my hand touches bare skin and my brain shorts out again as I slide a tentative fingertip underneath the waistband of his shorts….
“Bear?” a little voice calls from the other side of the closed door.
My hand freezes. My eyes open wide, and Otter quickly rolls off me to the side. He pulls the covers up around his waist, but not before I can see his dick outlined through his shorts, hard and bulging against the fabric. I look down at myself and see the same, and so does he, and he has a brief moment to stare hungrily at me before the door opens and the Kid makes his entrance. I bring the comforter up around my lap before he sees too much.
“What’s up, Ty?” I say, my voice coming out deep and rough.
Ty jumps up onto the bed and sits on the end of it. “Were you guys fighting again?” he asks us accusingly. “Bear, you woke me up because you were screaming.”
I blush and avert my eyes. “Er, no,” I stammer, scooting as far away from Otter as I can without falling off the bed. “Otter was… he was….” I don’t know how to finish. I might be in possession of the smartest nine-year-old vegetarian ecoterrorist-in-training but there’s some things even he shouldn’t be told. Especially when I don’t even know what the hell I’m doing.
The Kid looks at me expectantly, and I open my mouth to make something up when Otter comes to my rescue. “I was tickling him,” he says soberly. I shoot him a look that tells him I will be kicking his ass later, and he shrugs and grins his grin.
Ty laughs. “That’s why Bear sounded like a girl,” he tells Otter. “He always does when you tickle him.” I scowl at the both of them as they laugh at me some more. Otter reaches over and ruffles the Kid’s hair, and Ty smiles so beautifully at him that I let the pseudo-anger wash out of me. I dare you to try and stay mad when you have a fake-son who smiles like that and a guy lying next to you who, up until two minutes ago, was doing things to you that you’ve never even thought about.
Ty jumps off the bed and walks to the door. “I’m going to go watch MSNBC. It would sure be good if I had some waffles to go with it,” he calls back to us as he leaves.
“There are cartoons on,” Otter shouts after him.
“Cartoons?” he says incredulously. “Otter, I’m nine now, not some little kid.”
Otter looks at me indignantly. “What do you expect?” I ask him. “He’s nine now.” He grins and reaches for me, but his phone rings again. He groans as I hand to him. I stand to follow Ty and am almost at the door when I hear him leap up from the bed, and he grabs my hand and whirls me around and kisses me again.
I hiss and pull back. “The Kid is awake!” I whisper to him. He rolls his eyes and a shadow briefly crosses his face, and I can’t quite place what it is. He shakes it off and grins crookedly, and as he puts the phone against his ear, he says “You owe me,” as he pokes me gently in the chest. He says hello into the phone, and I’m about to turn and leave when I see the smile slide quickly off of his face.
“Oh, hey,” he says into the phone. “What’s up?” He sees me still standing in the room and covers the phone and says he’ll be right down. I nod and walk out of the room and am about to head down the stairs when I hear him say, “What do you want, Jonah?” This causes me to stop.
Have you ever tried to eavesdrop on a phone conversation? It sucks. Big-time. It’s one-sided, and you wish you could see the person on the other end. Not that you want to know what they look like or anything, but because you want to put a face to a name. You hear the person near you say things like, “Why would you say that?” and “Jonah, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and all you can do is imagine what is being said to make a person respond like that. It doesn’t help either when you start to feel something strangely like jealousy, and it burns away at your insides like acid. You try to grapple with this and shove it away, but you lose, and it envelops you completely. You ball your fists and grit your teeth and hear the person say, “What do you expect me to do?” and you think, I expect you to hang up the phone, and you almost reel at the thought because you don’t know where it came from. You start to feel queasy at how strong this sensation is. You wonder why you’ve never really felt jealousy before until now (not that it’s really jealousy or anything; this is all hypothetical), and you start to question if you’re getting in over your head, and you start to think that maybe the last twelve hours have been a big mistake and that life was perfectly fine before a certain someone (who happens to be on the phone with a certain someone else) ever came home. You begin to distrust yourself and the person in the other room who is now saying, “I never meant for you to think like that!” and you smile sickly to yourself at how quickly all of this is happening to you. You never asked for this, did you? You were good before. Peachy fucking keen, even. And then you can’t make out the next words that are said, and you inch closer to the room, knowing what you just didn’t hear was probably the thing you wanted to hear the most. As you are almost back in
the room, you freeze because you hear the phone slap shut and you hear a sigh. You then turn, shamefaced, and leave quickly before you’re caught.
Ever been in that position?
I’m just asking.