ChapterThirteen
Layla
It’s my birthday, and I’ll die if I want to.
My test results were back, and I’d not only tested positive for the flu, but I also had strep throat and a chest infection on top of it. Fucking yay!
Curling into a ball on the couch, I snuggled Zeus and pulled the blanket up to cover both of us.
“Dad, just apologize to her,” Cole demanded as he glared at him.
“I don’t need to apologize for anything. I adopted those puppies, knowing full well that she’d fall in love instantly.” Dad tilted his chin up, looking defiantly back at my brother. “Then she told me to stay on the couch until she’d fed them and gotten snuggles so she could ream my ass.”
Whose parents used the term ‘ream my ass?’ Mine, that’s who.
My brother looked as grossed out as I was about it. Sometimes, things just brought on vivid mental images, and when it involved your parents, that wasn’t a bueno headspace to be in.
“So, she likes the dogs?” Cole checked, steering clear of ‘reaming.’
“Loved ‘em, which is why I refuse to get shit when she’s happy about them being ours.”
I closed my eyes and tuned them out, hoping I could grab a quick nap. The problem was that the tickle in my throat was starting to burn.
“Cole, could you get me the Tylenol and ibuprofen? They’re on the counter in my bathroom.”
He got up out of his seat without acknowledging the request and went to the stairs and—hopefully—up to my room.
“Shame you finished the kids' stuff,” Dad muttered, picking up the remote and channel surfing. “I’ve got a headache coming on, and that shit tasted awesome.”
He wasn’t lying. Why drug companies didn’t make more things flavored like kids' medicine was, I didn’t know. If they made them grape, banana, or bubble gum flavored, fewer people would forget to take doses or have an issue with pills. As it was, I was still struggling to swallow, so I was dreading taking the ones I’d asked Cole to get me, but I had to.
A flashback of me sitting up and spitting out pills while Mark watched hit me, but that couldn’t be right, could it? When would I have spat out— Ohhh.
Seriously, why hadn’t he demanded a divorce by this point? Cheese on the head, flour in the hair, arresting my brother, and me spitting pills as far across the room as I could because my throat hurt too much to swallow them were just the tip of my crimes against attractiveness.
“Did you hear that?” Dad asked, muting the television and looking around the room.
“No, what was it?”
“Shh, I’m waiting to see if it happens again.”
At that moment, the faint sound of someone cursing came from upstairs.
“What’s the boy done now?” he sighed, getting up off the couch and moving to the bottom of the stairs. “Cole, what’s wrong?”
The floorboards creaked slightly above where I was lying, and then he was at the top of the stairs, glaring at Dad.
“You know those stupid bottles they put the pills in? Well, they’ve got one of those impossible childproof locks on them. I pressed down like it told me to and tried to open it, but nothing happened, so I threw them at the wall to open it like the guy online said to do when I Googled it.”
“Why didn’t you just shout out that you needed a hand or bring them downstairs, genius?”
I could make out my brother’s footsteps on the stairs as he headed back down them.
“Because I was trying to do something nice for my sister.” He crouched down in front of me and looked apologetic. “I’m so sorry. I’ll find you something to take, okay?”
“Just pick the pills up off the floor. It’s clean, so I’m not worried about the five second rule,” I mumbled, feeling my throat and head burning even more now as the pills I’d taken four hours earlier wore off.
He cursed under his breath. “They didn’t fall on the floor. The open bottles fell into the toilet.”