There’d been moments when something would happen, and he’d take charge—like the time I fell out of a tree and skinned my knee and arm badly. He’d calmed me down and carried me back to the house. While Mom was cleaning it out and bandaging it up, he held my hand and checked to make sure I wasn’t in pain. He’d been fourteen and I’d only been five, but I remembered his expression clearly all these years later—a concerned adult in a teenage boy’s body, a protector.
Both Layla and I had been tomboys and had followed my brothers and cousins around, copying what they did. I’d had a catalog of injuries over the years, most of which he’d been there for because my cousins were reckless idiots.
The memory that stuck out the most was when I’d broken my ulna. I’d been twelve, and he’d been twenty-one at the time. He’d come back for the fourth of July celebrations and had been staying with my cousins with his brother, three years into his medical degree. The doctors had wanted to sedate me, and I’d freaked out because, well, needles. Eventually, Parker had come into the room, held my hand, and distracted me while they gave me something that’d knocked me out so they could work on my arm. In all honesty, it was probably the hysteria that’d made them need to sedate me. I’d been so fixated on not having an injection from the second they’d said I needed to go to the hospital that I’d ended up having one so they could just do their jobs.
The last words I’d heard before I’d passed out were, “Keep her safe, Doc, and do a good job. I hate when she’s in pain, so if there’s anything you can do to make it so that she doesn’t feel any when she wakes up, do it now.”
Had I had a crush on him? Probably not because of the age difference and the fact he was part of my family, but there’d been something.
Thinking back on all of it again, I felt guilty that I hadn’t known his protectiveness was because of what he’d gone through with his stepmom. I should’ve picked up on something or at least seen that the tension wasn’t normal.
A nudge from the man in question brought my attention back to the table to see that Dad was talking to me.
“It’s this week’s viewing of your drunken escapades,” he said as he turned his chair to face the wall they were projecting it onto. Turning at a noise over his shoulder, he shouted, “Pizza’s here!”
“You lot really ordered pizza for this?” Sadie hissed. “You know, we should be charging you for watching this. At least that might make it worth going through this torture.”
Figuring that saying nothing would probably be the best thing, I dug my phone out of my pocket and decided to do some shopping online. I didn’t care what it was, I just wanted to look at anything so I didn’t have to focus on this place.
Then I had shopping inspiration: stuff for the goats. What kind of toys would they play with?
Typing in toys for goats, I started chuckling at the first picture that came up. Apparently, for a cool grand, I could get what looked like a colored, oversized toilet brush with a nifty metal arm on it to change the angle it was at.
Feeling a chin on my shoulder, I turned and saw Parker looking at the screen.
“They want a thousand bucks for that?” he asked incredulously. “Why not just get ten toilet brushes from a dollar store and glue them together?”
See?
“I might just do that.”
Reaching across me, he hit an article on goat playgrounds and scrolled down the page to the photographs. In one, the owner had buried old tires in the ground, leaving different lengths poking out so the goat would have to go up and down when it jumped on them.
“That’s pretty cool,” he hummed. “And we could get tires easily.”
I wasn’t that enthusiastic about it, though. It just seemed too dull.
The next idea definitely didn’t—it was a kid’s jungle gym. The person had removed one of the walls and angled it so there was an incline up to the center part of the structure.
“Now that looks fun!” I breathed, picturing me running up after them and then going down the slide that the next photo showed could be added onto it.
“We could surround it with the tires,” Parker suggested. “Paint them different colors to keep the goats interested, and get one of those jungle gyms that’s like a pirate ship and do this to it.”
I didn’t realize how close our faces were until I turned to agree with him and our noses bumped.
“If y’all are going to kiss, at least wait until I’ve finished eating,” Levi growled, sounding like he already had a mouthful of food.