“Maybe if you hadn’t been riding so close to the cars, this wouldn’t have happened.”
“Maybe if you had looked before you opened your door, I wouldn’t be almost dying.”
I fought the urge to roll my eyes. “What happened to this being totally worth it?” I mocked, trying to mimic his deep voice. Instead, it came out sounding like I was an asshole.
“It was,” he grumbled. “I would do it again if I had to.”
What the fuck? “You’d run into my car door again? Why?”
He looked down at his hands. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
And, of course, I started to sputter. “What… you can’t say that… that’s just… I… you… so damn cute… why… just why….”
So, after that, at least for a moment, I was a bit more lenient. I let him nod off for a few minutes before I woke him up, just to make sure his pupils weren’t dilated and he could remember my name and answer a simple question. I asked him who the vice president was and he looked at me like I was out of my goddamned mind. “How the hell am I supposed to know that?” he grumped at me. “I didn’t vote.” So, instead, I asked him to count to five. When he started counting out of order and slurring his words, I got freaked out. Then he grinned and winked at me and said, “Just kidding.” At that moment, I gave very serious consideration to making his concussion much, much worse, but then he whined a little bit in the back of his throat and sounded so much like Wheels when he was hungry that I crumbled completely.
Manipulative bastard.
So, of course, when I finally told him he could go to sleep and stay asleep, he wasn’t tired. I listened to him bitch and moan on my couch about how much his back hurt and how much his ass hurt and, wow, wouldn’t it be nice if there was someone who would be willing to give him a massage? He’d sure like a massage, he said, to ease his sore muscles. He wondered aloud if there was anyone in his immediate vicinity who would be willing to provide such a massage; perhaps a certain individual feeling guilty about something? Perhaps that guilt extended from causing a certain accident to happen? It was entirely possible, he hypothesized, that should a person feel guilty about such an accident that caused injury, an easy atonement would be offering to give said injured person a rub down.
It took six minutes of me grinding my teeth before I got up and went into the kitchen, telling him I’d get him some more juice. While I did this, I also ground up two of the muscle relaxers into the juice and brought it out to him, not feeling guilty in the slightest (about the secret-drugging thing; I still felt like crap that he hit my car). I stood next to him as he drank it down, smacking his lips, telling me how much he loved pulp in orange juice.
It was twenty minutes later that I found out that, regardless of whatever else he was, Vince was a lightweight who got stoned very, very easily. We were sitting on the couch watching Animal Planet (“I could wrestle an alligator,” he told me confidently) when I felt eyes on me. I looked over at him and saw the loopiest grin on his face.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re awesome,” he said, a slight slur to his words. This time, the slur sounded real.
“Uh. Thanks?”
“You’re welcome. How come….” He got distracted by something on the ceiling. “Whoa.”
“Oh boy.”
He looked back at me, trying to widen his eyes. “You poisoned me!” he said, trying to be stern, but his lips kept quirking into a smile.
“I did not!” I said indignantly, even though I sort of did.
“You made me high!”
“You need to go to sleep.”
He tried to point a finger at me, but it kept going off in other directions, like he was trying to dance with one hand. “What’d you give me?” he asked, very interested in his hand. “Crack?”
“You think I gave you crack?”
“Maybe.”
“Is there anything about me that screams crack?”
He grinned as he swayed. “Your butt crack,” he whispered before dissolving into giggles.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” I muttered. “You are going to be so embarrassed when you wake up tomorrow.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re giggling like a five-year-old girl.”
“I am not. I’m all man.”