Eat Crow (Cheap Thrills 6)

I think my first proper smile of the day came through at that news, and that said something seeing as how I’d witnessed Mark being kissed by a group of old women. He’d volunteered at the home for a couple of years and was remembered fondly.

Actually, maybe it wasn’t the first proper smile because I’d watched him shudder when one of them licked her hanky and wiped next to his lips to get some lipstick off. Now that was fucking hilarious.

So, I was going with my second proper smile of the day.

It still didn’t make my ass feel much better, though. I thought that it was prudent to point that out… to myself.

Walking over to the steps, I took them two at a time. “That’s great news, babe. When do you start?”

“Next Wednesday, so that gives me and Prince time to get the house done.”

Did I forget to mention that she liked the Prince of Darkness name suggestion? Well, just the beginning of it, that was.

I was about to reply when the smell of something rotting hit me. “Whoa, what the hell is that?”

“What’s what?”

Taking a breath in, I frowned and looked over the edge of the railing to see if I could see the source. “There’s a nasty smell at my apartment block.”

“Maybe it’s you?”

I would’ve felt like a dick lifting my arm to sniff under it outside my home, but I could feel what my body was doing under my uniform, so today was an exception. Inhaling, I lifted the vest and the collar of my shirt to see if it was coming from under there, but I couldn’t smell anything apart from my laundry detergent and deodorant.

“I’ve checked my pits and chest, and there’s nothing,” I told her, sniffing the air again. “Christ, it smells like death and sewage.”

She was throwing a list of guesses at me as I opened the door and stopped before I even put my foot down. There was shitty brown water in the corner of my living room—one that had a cream carpet on it, meaning I zoned out on what Bex was saying.

I told the landlord that carpet was asking for trouble. Granted, we had no clue that this was going to happen, but there was still a dark brown patch that was never coming back out again.

“Are you still there?”

After a brief argument with my vest, I managed to get enough of my shirt to pull up over my nose. “I think a buffalo shit in my living room.”

There was a brief silence, then she asked, “Do you know where the smell’s coming from?”

Looking up at the ceiling, I figured it out. “Judging by the bulging of a quarter of my ceiling, the hole in the corner of it, and the water dripping out of that hole onto my carpet—well, yeah.”

Knowing I needed to get this dealt with, I hung up after promising to call her back and rang the landlord to let him know.

An hour later, I had the great news that the guys who’d worked on the plumbing for the building had cut corners when they’d made them.

This meant that what I had on my floor was three apartments worth of sewage that’d gathered in an ‘overflow’ pipe—which shouldn’t have existed but had been installed because the main pipe was too narrow. It’d gotten backed up thanks to rough edges catching wipes and whatever else they’d flushed down it.

Now, I wasn’t a plumber, had never dealt with anything close to it my whole life, but even I knew that you didn’t do things like that. I also knew that my apartment was going to need a lot of work done to it, a lot of bacteria was going to need to be dealt with, and that it was unlivable for the time being.

And just to add to that great news, I’d called my parents to say I was going to be staying with them for the foreseeable future, and Dad had answered out of breath with Mom telling him to come back to bed in the background.

Hell no. I didn’t need therapy on top of shit water in my living room.

It was just as I was putting my stuff into bags to get out of there that Bex rang, which was why I ended up moving it all into her house.

Even though she only had one bed and the couch was at a specialist place to get new leather put on it.

This meant I would have to stay in her room because I didn’t own any of the furniture in my apartment.

And I had an even sweatier butt crack by the time I was done, and I’m relatively certain I had the beginnings of diaper rash or something, too.

Fucking great!