Out of Bounds - Quick Snap

Me: Are you insane? You’ve left your sister alone with no security?

The three little dots on the screen moved, then stopped, then started moving again. I’d expected an essay by the time the response arrived, but all I got was:

Hayden: Shit!

“I’m sending you my alarm company’s number,” Will told me. “They were quick when I wanted one put in Meg’s house, and they’ve done the rest of the family’s homes, too.”

Glaring at the response from her brother, I finally tapped out:

Me: I’ll deal with it.

And then I was going to kick his ass when he got home.Chapter 4AshleyThrowing the cup hadn’t been my best idea, and trying to find all the pieces of it now was impossible. Every time I walked through the kitchen another piece would turn up even though I’d vacuumed it twice already.

Picking up the most recent shard which was at least an inch long and had somehow escaped the vacuum cleaner, I got as far as taking one step in the direction of the garbage when a sharp pain shot up through the sole of my right foot.

With a squeal, I dropped the piece in my hand and lifted my foot up to see where the pain was coming from. Unfortunately, that involved me hopping onto my good foot, and right onto the just dropped piece of porcelain, which promptly went into the bottom of that foot.

Dropping to my butt on the tile floor, I tried to figure out what to do.

First, I should probably see how bad it was.

I’d never been flexible. Even as a kid, it was like torture doing gymnastics in gym class, and with the way I was currently sitting, pulling both feet up to look at the bottoms of them, I looked like a turtle that was stuck on its back.

From the quick glimpse I got, though, I could clearly see a smaller chunk of mug in the bottom of my right foot, and the large dropped one in the bottom of my left.

“Oh, holy mother of pearl.”

Here was the other problem, I was a big wussy. Heck, I hadn’t even gotten my ears pierced until four years ago when I was twenty, and I don’t think I’d changed them out of the ones they’d pierced them with since.

Lunging, I tried to pull the smaller piece out of my right foot but missed by a mile.

Chewing on my lip, I looked around for where I’d put my cell when I’d come in, groaning when I saw it on top of the counter furthest away from me. Of course that’s where it’d be.

Then a sound that filled me with hope came from behind me—someone was typing in the code on the keypad to the kitchen door. Only a handful of people had that code: me, Hayden, the cleaner and he who shall not be named.

Looking hopefully over my shoulder, I almost cried when I saw it was the latter of the list.

And the shithead was laughing.

Taking in my position, his brows shot up. “You okay down there? I mean, not that it hasn’t been hilarious watching you try to do whatever it is you’re doing, but still.”

Unwilling to say it out loud—seeing as how he’d know immediately where the new ceramic piercing in my body had come from—I scooted around on my butt and held both feet up for him to see. His chuckling stopped immediately.

“Oh, what the fuck?” he groaned, crouching down and wincing when he saw it up close. “Didn’t you clean it up?”

Breaking my silence is golden policy, I ground out, “Yes, I did. I vacuumed twice and I’m still finding pieces of it.”

“So are your feet,” he pointed out unhelpfully.

“Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

Rolling his eyes, he leaned in closer to my right foot, and before I could blink or tell him not to, he was holding the piece from it between his fingers. “Here’s that little bugger.”

The shard was freaking tiny. “It felt bigger.”

“That’s what she said,” he murmured distractedly, his focus now on my left foot. “I think you’re gonna need a doctor to get that piece out.”

The news almost made me cry. The insurance from my new job hadn’t come through yet, so this was going to drain me dry. Oh, and let’s not forget the huge amount I was going to have to pay the charity for my stupid bid last night that I didn’t even have.

Sighing, he picked me up like I weighed nothing, and then started walking toward the door that led up to my apartment, avoiding Able who was excitedly wagging his tail at the newcomer.

I knew what I was saying was a lie, but I said it anyway. “I can walk, you know?”

“No, you can’t,” he murmured. “Your right foot’s bleeding, and if you put pressure on the other one, you’ll push that iceberg deeper in.”