Amateur.
“He obviously hasn’t dealt with my brothers before, then. Holy water doesn’t make you feel any better, trust me. I once tried drinking it straight from the thing they use in the church to hold it.”
There was a pig-like snorting noise. “Shit.”
Picking up my purse, I moved past her to the door. “I’m going to go and get something to eat from the deli. Do you want anything?”
I was facing her as she listed some suggestions, and as I backed through the door, I didn’t see the person standing behind me. The first indication someone was there, in fact, was when I heard a deep voice curse as I bumped into them, followed by something icy spilling from the middle of my butt down to my feet, where it made a splashing noise on the tiled floor.
Jacinda’s eyes dropped and widened as she took in the mess, while I shuddered at the awful feeling of it soaking through my thin white pants and underwear. Hoping it was just water, I carefully looked down and tried to make sense of what I was seeing. Splashes of what looked like thick chocolate seemed to be everywhere, but the worst was the pool of it between my legs.
“Is that chocolate?”
“It’s the Three Musketeers milkshake you like from the diner,” a deep voice corrected. “There are even the tiny chunks of chocolate in it.”
“I guess it’s true what they say, you really shouldn’t wear white after Labor Day,” Jacinda murmured, watching as drops of the beverage slid off my ass and joined the quickly melting pool on the ground.
“Hey, guys, did yo— Oh, sweet shit, what the hell did you do?” a voice squeaked behind me, and I closed my eyes and groaned when I realized our friend Cyn had joined us.
“She had an accident,” Jacinda said, coughing at the end of it, and I just knew she was fighting not to laugh.
“Hey, no judging coming from me. Shit happens, although the saying isn’t usually this literal.” Cyn paused, “Or is it? Maybe it is, but I’ve just never had to use it this literally.”
“It’s not my shit,” I ground out, shuddering when I shifted and felt the milkshake covering my bottom half in new ways. God, it was awful.
“If you say so.” It wasn’t said sarcastically by Cyn. Her tone sounded more like she was distracted by something. Then again, if I were staring at what she was, I’d probably be distracted, too. “Hey, doesn’t it look like one of those drawings you did at school where you poured paint onto a piece of paper, folded it in half, and pressed down? I hated it when mine looked like a butterfly because everyone’s looked like that, but I did get a six-legged giraffe once.”
There was silence from all of us for a long moment after that. I couldn’t speak for Mark and Jacinda, but I was trying to picture what a six-legged giraffe would look like.
“Don’t they use those for psychological tests?” Jacinda finally asked. “I think I saw that once.”
“Six-legged giraffes?” Sadie questioned. “Hey, why does the brown stuff have tiny lumps in it? I want to say it’s a chocolate milkshake or cocoa, but the lumps are throwing me off.”
“It’s tiny pieces of Three Musketeers bar. Layla loves the milkshakes they do at the diner, and they came up with this one for her when we were kids,” Mark told her. “I’ll get some paper towels to clean this up with.”
Hearing the squeak of his boots on the tiles move away from us, I closed my eyes with frustration. How the hell shit like this happened, I didn’t know, but here I was, looking like I’d had a blowout or something.
There was a slightly louder noise which made me squeeze my eyes shut.
“Oh, there goes the straw,” Cyn pointed out. “I wondered when that little bugger would quit holding on and just give up the ghost. Hey, why didn’t they put a lid on the cup?”
“I think it’s under the shake,” Jacinda wheezed, and I dropped my head to look down at the rapidly melting puddle on the ground.
“Ah,” she muttered, “makes sense.”
“I was just coming to ask if Layla had time to come with us for lunch because she’s working back-to-back trying to do today’s customers and yesterday’s when this happened,” Jacinda explained, her eyes constantly dropping back down to the puddle.
“I don’t know how it’s getting worse, but I feel like the melting’s just making it look like you’ve got dysentery or something.”
“I’d spread your legs a bit farther apart,” Cyn advised. “It’s almost at your shoes now.”
I shot her a flabbergasted look over my shoulder. “Are you serious? It’s already on my shoes. What does it matter if more of it hits them?”
“You make a good point,” the Brit mused. “I think that was maybe my parent brain kicking in. The amount of times I’ve had to either lift Wick or tell him to adjust how he’s standing while I run and get something to wipe shit up with is insane.”
Jacinda made a gagging noise. “Like literal shit?”
With kids, it always paid to make sure.