Shift Happens (Providence Family Ties 2)

“You didn’t pack me any shorts?”

“I did.” Leaning over, I pulled out a pair with writing on them and wiggled them in front of her face. “See?”

Her cheeks went pink. “I think those are sleep shorts, Jackson.”

“What the big deal? Sleep shorts, normal shorts. Shorts are shorts.”

Glancing around me at the open door, she hissed, “They hardly cover my butt cheeks. In fact, I’m fairly certain they don’t.”

Rolling my eyes, I pulled out the rest of the contents and laid it all out beside her. “Bra, panties, shorts, tank top, deodorant.”

Groaning, she picked up the tank top. “This is a cut-off one. It’ll hardly cover my stomach, let alone my butt cheeks that’ll be hanging out the bottom of the sleep shorts.”

So, to me, the shorts were just shorts. To women, the fact they were intended for sleeping in put them into a different category of shorts—good to know. She was still wearing them home.

“Welp, they’re all you’ve got, so time to squeeze your bootie into them, and let's get crack-a-lackin.”

With that, I winked and walked back out to go and see the nurse, hoping it was the same woman as yesterday. Fortunately, it was.

“Well, there he is,” she called, smiling widely at me. “Are you ready to take your tortured love home?”

Tortured love, that was pretty appropriate.

“I am. I just wanted to thank you for taking such good care of her.”

The nurses all shared a look that confused me.

“Uh, how do you put up with it?” one of them asked me, snickering once she was done.

“Put up with it?”

“You know,” she gestured with her head to Sasha’s door. “It.”

All of my good humor left me in a blink. “Sasha’s not an ‘it.’ She’s one of the most amazing women I’ve ever met in my life. I’m fucking lucky to have her.”

“Oh, no,” the nurse I’d come to find said as she jumped into the conversation. “She wasn’t talking about Sasha as a person. She’s talking about how Sasha talks in her sleep.”

Did she?

I only just managed to catch myself before I asked it, remembering that I was meant to know this at the last second. I mean, a majority of people who were engaged in this day and age would have slept together, right?

“Um, it’s cute?”

All of the nurses burst out laughing.

“It’s definitely something. Last night, we couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, and when we found her, she was steering a pirate ship in her sleep. I thought she was awake and that maybe she was doing it because of the concussion or the painkillers, but when I spoke to her and asked if she was okay, Sasha said she wasn’t because she’d parked her ship somewhere and couldn’t find it.”

Well, if you’re going to find out a weird fact about your fake fiancée, something like that would totally blow you away—which is precisely what it did.

“She lost her ship?”

“Yup. Her exact words were, ‘fuck the rum, where’s my ship?’”

Huffing out a laugh, I glanced back over at the door to her room. “Now that’s funny.”

“She also yelled at someone to take their cowboy boots off on her fucking pirate ship,” she whispered, her shoulders shaking as she laughed quietly.

Oh, this was going to be a blast!

“Does she know?”

All of them looked at each other, but then the nurse I knew turned back to me and nodded. “We told her. Apparently, she’s been doing it since she was little and used to scare her dads with it.”

“Did you get a video of it?” That was a normal thing to do, wasn’t it? Everyone videoed everything nowadays, and I’d totally record something like that.

“Unfortunately, no. But if you manage to catch it, feel free to send it to us.”

“I should set up a YouTube channel dedicated to it, but she’d probably skin me alive if I did.” Which was a shame.

Making my way back to Sasha’s door, I had to take a deep breath not to burst out laughing at the glare she shot me.

It turns out she was right—the shorts did show her butt cheeks. It was so bad that I could see the turquoise of her panties under it because they were longer than the shorts.

Squinting, I tried to make out the writing on them. It was weird, like the top word was ‘Pek,’ the one beneath it was definitely an ‘a’, and the bottom looked like ‘bo.’

“Does that say pek a bo?”

Sighing, she leaned over, and the fabric that was hidden by the crevice between her butt cheeks straightened out, allowing me to read it properly.

Peek

A

Boo

The fact her ass had to spit out the letters got me, and I burst out laughing just as the nurse joined us.

“Well, those will do the job,” she snickered, making her way into the room.

“I had to squeeze them over the cast,” Sasha mumbled as she tried to pull the ends of them down farther over her cheeks. “I’m not sure they’re coming off again.”