Fireball (Cheap Thrills 1)

I couldn’t lose her. In fact, I wasn’t going to lose her. I’d do anything and fight anyone, even her, to keep her in my life.

I just needed her to understand what I had to tell her.

Tabitha“Welp, if you can do it then do it is what I say. He’s a great guy, good looking, has a good heart, and obviously thinks my little sissy is the shiznet, so he’s ok by me,” Jose said down the phone into my ear. “Isn’t that true, Livvy? Isn’t the sheriff giving our Tabby a big old d…”

“Jose,” I snapped, stopping her. “You can’t say that to a baby. She doesn’t know what a dick is. At least, not a penis one. She heard her dad talking in the womb, so she knows that kind of dick, but still.”

I changed it to speakerphone while I put the finishing touches to my makeup. Putting mascara on with a phone wedged between your neck and shoulder wasn’t conducive to maintaining your vision. Any woman who has even tapped her eye with that wand knows not just the pain, but the trauma of having mascara swimming over your eyeball and collecting in the corner of your eye for the rest of the day. Mascara gook in that little space wasn’t a good look. And don’t even get me started on doing it when you’ve got a big old brace on your hand, something that I was no longer wearing because my hand was already feeling better and I preferred to be able to move it normally.

“I was going to say dose of loving,” Jose sighed. “Why must your brain always be in the gutter?”

She was talking shit. Normally, my brain was in the gutter, I had a filthy sense of humor and could turn a lot of things into an innuendo. However, since we’d met, Jose hadn’t been hit with nearly a tenth of my filth potential, which meant she had been about to say the word dick.

“Uh huh, you might want to open a window. I’m sure the strong scent of bullshit isn’t good for the baby.”

I could hear rustling from her side of the phone, followed by the sound of something being wound up. When a lullaby started playing, I realized she was putting Olivia down for a nap.

“Ok, baby can’t hear me saying this to you,” she whispered.

Lips twitching, I almost lost sight of where the wand was in relation to my eye when I glanced down at my phone. “Why are you whispering then?”

“Because. Ok, I’m switching to video.” Just then my phone started making the incoming video sound, so I tapped the screen with my free hand, giving her a wave when I saw her grinning at me. “I can only see your boogers. Move your phone so I can see what you’re wearing.”

I’d had my phone laying down on the dresser which meant she was staring up my nose and at the bottom of my chin. Adjusting it so it was now leaning against the wall, I tilted my head back and tried to look up my nose in the mirror.

“Do I really have boogers?”

“Dunno, your boobs blocked it out. Hey, how big do you think yours will get when you have babies?” She gestured to her new bodacious ta-ta’s, courtesy of milk and Olivia. Not like you could miss them to be honest, they were freaking huge.

“I don’t want to think about babies, Jose. I want to think about getting through each day, living my life, and just being Tabitha Newton for a while.”

She stayed quiet for a second and then sighed and rolled her eyes. “You’re so full of shit. The sheriff tickles your twat, admit it. And you’re trying to convince yourself that he doesn’t, but he totally does,” she leaned closer to the screen and pointed downward mouthing ‘twat tickling’.

Putting the wand back in the tube and throwing it into the basket of makeup beside me, I gave myself a final look over. I hadn’t gone all out, but I’d attempted to look natural, but better than natural. You know the natural makeup look that takes forever, but looks like you just threw it on and you don’t look much different to this without it on – but you totally do? That’s the look I was rocking right now.

“Go stand over there so I can see what you’ve got on,” Jose instructed, making a shooing motion with her hand.

Walking backwards, I stopped when she held her hand up. “Well?”

I’d put on a short light blue denim skirt with buttons up the front. It was tight and looked awesome against my new Texas tan. Let it also be said, that I hadn’t purposefully gotten the aforementioned tan. This had happened naturally thanks to shorts, the blazing hot sun of Hades shining down, gardening, and falling asleep next to the pool. On my top half, I was wearing a racerback tank in a turquoise color that had subtle sprays of a paisley type pattern sporadically placed all over it. There was only a slight shade variation between the pattern and the color of the tank so you had to look closely to see it, but I loved it and how it looked with my hair.