Eat Crow (Cheap Thrills 6)

“If you fall asleep in the sun with your mouth open, something’s bound to happen. Just feel lucky a bird didn’t poop in it.” Granted, if I’d almost swallowed one and then had to watch it die, I’d be pretty scarred by it.

“And the one that sent me to the emergency room after it tried to blind me?”

“Sunglasses, my dude. Why do you think I have so many pairs?”

In all honesty, he didn’t know that I was a whore when it came to the things, so he couldn’t answer this. I already had three other pairs in Pops’ car, mainly because I kept forgetting I’d put them down in it, though. I just had enough backup pairs in my purse to keep making it possible to do.

“I don’t think they let you wear those in fourth grade, Bex. I don’t remember any other kid wearing them during recess, including you.”

“Look,” I snickered. “You ran into the butterfly—”

“It flew into me.”

“—and it left behind a couple of legs and some wing in your eye because instead of smacking it away from you, you crushed it into your eye.”

“I panicked,” he ground out. “It was instinctual. Plus, my eye was swollen and infected for over a week thanks to that bad bastard.”

It had been. His eye hadn’t reacted well to having the butterfly pieces in it, but it’d been made worse by him using toilet paper and the rough paper towels from the machine in the boys' bathrooms to try and get it out.

“You put those scratches on your cornea yourself.”

“Because I was panicking,” he cried. “I had butterfly body pieces in my damn eye.”

It was incidents like this that’d led to him freaking out whenever he saw a butterfly. By the time he turned thirteen, whenever he saw one, he’d crouch down and shut his eyes tightly with his lips pressed together.

“So,” I drawled, “does this mean we’re not getting a bu

tterfly tattoo?”

His expression was serious as he shook his head, but then it was replaced by a smirk. “What about a Black Widow tattoo?”

“Like the character?” I asked hopefully.

“No, like the spider. Or a Huntsman. Maybe something tropical that’s bright and pretty. Half on you, half on me.”

“You’re such a dick,” I hissed, leaning away from him and looking around the room to make sure there weren’t any. “Why would you say that? Did you see one?”

“No, but do you still leave your open soda can unattended while you do stuff?”

“Never,” I replied solemnly. “You only make that mistake once.”

“I’ll never forget you taking a mouthful and then spitting it out with a Black Widow in it. You were so fucking lucky,” he shook his head with amazement. “I don’t leave mine unattended ever because of that, unless it’s a clear bottle or glass.”

Shuddering, I checked inside my beer bottle before taking a gulp from it. “That was one of the worst moments of my life. I just felt something hard in my mouth—” I ignored the chuckle from him “—and thought it was a leaf or something. When I saw that damn spider…”

Both of us went silent after I stopped talking. I couldn’t say for sure what Logan was thinking about, but I was remembering some of the funny moments we’d had together now.

I jumped slightly when he burst out laughing at something. “Do you remember when we got stuck on the roof?”

“Oh yeah, it was during a thunder and lightning storm as well. Thanks for that.”

What had we been doing on the roof—this roof, to be precise—during a thunder and lightning storm? Honestly, we were doing our homework. I was late with a project on the universe and stars, and he was testing gravity because he had a paper to write on Isaac Newton.

Neither of us had bothered to pay attention to the warnings of the storm, and roughly ten minutes after we left the adults talking about politics after dinner to climb onto the roof, the shit had hit the fan. We’d scrambled to get back in again, but the tiles were too wet for us to get to the window.

What was worse was that the lightning was close to us, and when the thunder shook the ground, we slid down the tiles and closer to the edge of the roof. We’d even screamed our heads off for help, but they couldn’t hear us over the noise of the rain and thunder.

“Yeah, I don’t want to repeat that ever again. I still have nightmares about it,” Logan cringed. “If Dad hadn’t gone to the bathroom, we probably would’ve fallen.”