This was unreal!
“Come on.” He touched the tip of my nose with his knuckle. “It’ll be okay.”
I sure hoped so.
How could this go wrong?
When we went into Callum’s parents’ house, I fell in love.
With Derringer and Reedy. Will and Cannel. Ashleigh and Petra—Will’s nieces.
With his brothers.
With Clem and Sophia.
I just loved them all.
All of them, that was, except for Dorcas.
After knowing that she and Bram weren’t happily married, I was able to look underneath the surface a bit.
And I saw how underhandedly petty Dorcas was.
How she wouldn’t eat if she wasn’t handed a plate of food by Bram.
How, when nobody talked to her, she had the biggest resting bitch face.
How, when she was being spoken to, she always had this sense of superiority about her.
I had a feeling that she’d always been like this—an outsider in their family.
But I realized rather quick that that’s how she wanted it.
She purposefully stayed on the fringes, not interacting too much.
Meanwhile, I threw myself into the middle of them all.
My stomach gurgled, and despite me telling it to behave, no amount of pleading with it to control itself would get it to stop.
I winced when I whispered quietly to Reedy that I had to use the facilities.
After directing me on where to go, I went and did my business, feeling an exuberant amount of pressure to finish fast so no one—Callum in particular—knew what I was doing in here.
Because, just because I was comfortable around him, didn’t mean that I was ready for him to realize that I did, in fact, have to poop every once in a while.
I wanted him to think I was this perfect, beautiful girl that didn’t do that kind of stuff like normal people.
For all that he was concerned, I was a poopless, fartless, burpless person.
Only… the worst possible thing in the history of worst possible things happened.
I clogged the toilet at his mother’s house.
Honest to God, I was a wiper.
I wiped a lot, and liked to make sure I was really clean, because I was a sensitive bitch. Hell, I was so sensitive that even sometimes the wrong brand of toilet paper messed with me.
Which was why I was happy to see that they had Charmin brand.
But…
After not being able to go earlier with Callum—because who the hell wants to do number two when you’re in front of the man you want to fall in love with you?—I’d held it.
And obviously paid the consequences.
I looked at the toilet, then looked around the toilet in dismay.
There was no plunger.
Even worse, this was the bathroom that I’d seen no less than four people come out of in the time that I’d been there for half an hour.
I made a keening sound in my throat, my entire body coiled in shock and desperately made one more search through every available part of the bathroom before admitting defeat.
“Son of a bitch,” I whined as I quickly washed my hands. “Only me.”
Seriously.
Only. Me.
How did shit like this happen to me? Literally.
How did I always manage to do this? Experience the most embarrassing things that a person could experience.
Carefully, I opened the door and looked around the hallway.
The coast was clear.
After closing the door, I hurried to where I’d last seen the man that would never fall in love with me after this.
I found him near the grill, drinking a beer, talking to his brother, Haggard.
Only, he kept glancing around the party looking for me.
As if that wasn’t embarrassing enough, I was the only person missing from the party, meaning that there was never any doubt in his mind what I’d been doing all that time I’d been gone.
I marched across the yard with a purpose to where he was sitting in a lawn chair next to the grill.
Haggard was standing next to him, moving meat around on the grill.
When I arrived, it was at the back of Callum’s chair.
Haggard, surprised by the arrival of a girl, looked at me with curious eyes.
“Callum,” I whispered when Haggard finally looked away to go back to the hot dogs he was grilling.
He looked up and stared at me with surprise.
Okay, I’d been gone a long time.
There was no denying what I’d been doing.
Even worse, now I had a dilemma that only he could help solve.
I moved around the chair he was sitting in and went to his side.
“Yeah?” he asked, pulling me in by the back of my thigh.
God, he was hard.
Not ‘there’ hard. But body-wise, he was hard.
All over.
He didn’t have any fat on him whatsoever, and he had muscles on top of muscles.
Jesus, I didn’t want to tell him.
But I couldn’t let someone else find that.
No way.
I bit my lip, really, really, not wanting to tell him why I needed help.
But in the end, I knew that I couldn’t leave it in there. They would all know.