Reid coughed and moved to join me where I was standing. “What?”
“The clouds. I want to be a cloud,” Cole said dreamily. “They all look so happy.”
This was where Reid went wrong. He incorrectly assumed Cole was on the placid side of his high, forgetting what’d happened after this moment last year.
“You’re probably tired after getting those drugs at the dentist, man. Why don’t you lie down and have a nap while they fix the cut on your head,” he suggested.
“Drugs?” Cole shouted. “I didn’t get any of those. I was cheated.”
I stayed quiet, watching and waiting while Reid dealt with him verbally.
“Yeah, you did, Cole. You’re as high as a kite right now. Try and touch your nose with the tip of your pointy finger.”
Cole did just that, missing and hitting his forehead and growling at the pain.
“See? I can do that. I can also do this.”
And it happened. Oh, shit, did it happen.
Lifting his hands, he put them on his head as he sang, “Head,” then moved to his shoulders, singing that word, too. It was when he got to his knees and toes that the shit hit the fan.
For some reason, he wasn’t wearing underwear under the hospital gown—which opened at the back. When he bent over, there were screams and gasps from the waiting patients and family members as they literally saw the darkest part of his lily-white ass.
“The children!” someone cried just as a chorus of adolescent sounding wails broke the air.
To make matters worse, either the concussion or the medication he’d been given caused Cole to slump down until he was lying on the ground, face and shoulders on the floor and ass in the air.
Reid stared down at him in disbelief. “Welp, face down, ass up, that’s the way I like fu—”
“Why won’t it go away?” a male voice screamed, and I looked over to see the new minister covering his eyes with his bloody bandaged hand.
“I’ll get his head, and you get his….” Reid gestured at Cole’s ass.
Glaring at him, I pushed my hand under Cole’s left shoulder and the floor and nodded at the right side. “You get him that side, and we’ll drag him into the room.”
I can’t say it was worse than the squirrel incident, but it would be dubbed #starfishgate in the future.
It’d been a year since I’d bought this house, and I still hadn’t done anything to the inside of it. It was the property Layla had wanted to live in, the one we’d walked and driven past and made dreams about.
I think those dreams would have been very different if we’d seen the inside of it at the time, though.
From the outside, it looked like something out of the movies, like the one in Father Of The Bride. It was red brick and had white shutters and trim all over, and the front yard was filled with rose bushes and what had once been a perfectly manicured green lawn.
Now, the lawn was overgrown, and about two months past needing cut. The rose bushes weren’t so perfect but were still filled with beautifully colored flowers, and the rest just needed some TLC and to be repainted in the necessary areas. Once that was all done and the driveway had some cracks and holes filled in, it’d be perfect.
But the inside… Holy shit, the interior was some 70s monstrosity. What the owners had been thinking, I didn’t know, but my parents kept saying that at one point, the way it was decorated was fashionable.
There was a large living room with an impressive brick fireplace on the left as you walked into the grand entrance, one that could be filled with a sectional or multiple sofas, depending on your preference. At the back of it was a decently sized office area, where the previous owners had two desks with ample space for another couch.
The spiral staircase that greeted you as soon as you opened the front door took your breath away—for all the wrong reasons.
Wrapping around the outside of it, right under the handrail, were gold mirrors and different colored panels of glass that were attached to the rail. The wall had also been covered in matching mirrored panels from floor to ceiling, and the tiles they’d laid on the ground in the entrance were a deep green that clashed with everything else.
For some reason, the room they’d made a ‘formal dining room,’ which was on the right side of the entrance, had original wooden flooring and had been painted white. It looked normal compared to every other room and space in the property.
Still, I’d seen the furniture and crockery when I’d viewed the place—it’d all been golden and brightly colored glass, so they’d still managed to make it fit in with the staircase. They’d also had massive gold candelabras on the table with different jewels hanging off them, like table chandeliers or something.
Which mimicked the same chandelier they’d had hanging over the entrance, but fortunately, the owner had requested to keep it during the sale, and I’d been grateful. It would have given me nightmares.