Just Good Friends (Cheap Thrills 5)

“Mom, meet Zuri Hadid. Zuri, this is my mom, Luisa.”

Squeezing her arm through the gap between my side and the wall, she shook Mom’s hand. “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Evans. That’s a lovely… uh, dog you have there.”

“Don’t lie,” I hissed over my shoulder. “It might attach its soul to yours.”

Putting Fonzie down on the ground, Mom placed both of her hands on my side and pushed me away.

“Oh my God, you’re beautiful,” Mom breathed, her hands going to her chest. “I… Are you guys…” she started flapping her hands around. Sticking one finger out, she pointed at both of us. “Don’t you dare move. Let me get your dad.”

And with that, she was off and running down the hallway, the dog following her, grunting like a wildebeest the whole way. “Harry? Harry, you’ve got to see this.”

Taking Tamsin’s hand, I pulled her down to where the entrance to the lounge was. At one point, the house had been all open plan, but Mom hated the concept and had insisted on walls.

“This is beautiful,” Tamsin whispered once she saw the living room, and I had to agree.

“I think this is what I want my home to look like,” I agreed, taking it all in again.

Mom’s sense of taste ran more toward the country design. She detested any form of plaid and leaned heavily toward the artistically scuffed look and pitchers and milk jugs, with plain cream curtains in the windows. On one side of the room was a wood-burning fire that had an old fashioned metal protector in front of it, with all the old type shit that they had for fires about two hundred years ago.

“Here she is. I told you,” Mom announced, holding her hand out to Tamsin like Dad had called her a liar. “Her name’s Zuri, Harry. Isn’t that amazing?”

Tamsin blinked at them both and then looked at me for reassurance.

“Mom, I think you might be scaring her.”

“Oh, pish posh, Garrett. Zuri, this is my husband, Harry. He’s Garrett’s father, you know.”

“Nice to meet you, Zuri,” Dad said, trying to relax her with a smile as he held his hand out.

Shaking it, she smiled back, and I saw Dad lose his balance slightly when she did. “Thanks for having me, Mr. Evans.”

I smirked when dad looked at me to make sure I wasn’t yanking his crank. Yeah, I didn’t bring girls home, and definitely not one as beautiful as her.

“You can call me Harry,” Dad muttered, looking as flustered as Mom was now, “because that’s my name. Harry. I mean, it’s Harry Evans, but Harry’s—”

“She gets it, Dad,” I chuckled, moving next to her and putting an arm around her to give her some support.

“You must call me Luisa as well, Zuri. Mrs. Evans is my mother-in-law, and if I tried to take the title from her, she’d probably find a way to curse me.”

This wasn’t a lie.

“There are seats. People sit on them,” Dad stuttered, pointing at the couch.

Leading her away from me to it, Mom asked, “Would you like a drink? Maybe a sandwich? I’m making lunch, but you might be hungry before that.”

“Could we have some coffee, please, Mom? Zuri’s been struggling to maintain her normal caffeine intake with her arm because she can’t do jack with her left hand, so it’s important that I keep her topped up when I can.”

Like they’d both just noticed the cast, they both started fussing around her.

As Mom went to make coffee, Dad put a cushion on her lap and lifted the broken limb to rest on top of it. “Tell us if you need to see the doctor, okay, Zuri? You can never be too careful of things like clots and infections.”

Smiling shyly, she explained that she’d had it for a while and then told him about re-breaking it, too. Well, at least she was getting along with my parents, that’s the main thing.

I’d just sat down beside her when the weird dog thing jumped up and made an odd noise at Tamsin as it tried to curl up on her lap.

“Poor baby has terrible mucus and phlegm problems,” Mom murmured, nodding her head at the beast. “At night, he snores louder than your father.”

Because his chair was angled away from hers, she didn’t notice him pointing at her and mouthing, “Hers is still loudest.”

The emergency that’d led to us visiting turned out to be them installing a doggie door for the beast.

I’d been on my hands and knees helping Dad do it at one point, and Fonzie had come closer to me while my head was turned, scaring the shit out of me when I’d heard something breathing harshly right next to my head. He might have been scary as fuck with a few feet distance between us, but with only a few inches, it’d been a whole new level of near pant shitting fear.