Total pages in book: 74
Estimated words: 69910 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 69910 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 350(@200wpm)___ 280(@250wpm)___ 233(@300wpm)
“It’s all good now. The bird is gone.”
“Thank goodness for that. Devil bird.” Patience thinks I’m talking to her. And maybe I am, through the skunk. God, I’ve become a special kind of coward. I want to apologize for accidentally showing her my junk, but she makes a noise between her teeth and walks off.
I’m at the perfect angle to see her feet go out of my field of vision.
Tomorrow morning. I’ll apologize tomorrow morning. And I’ll figure out what to do about our dads. We both will. Together. Not like the old days, where we’d put our heads together and could dream up anything, but like the new days. The good new days.
“Looks like I owe her a new pair of pajama bottoms,” I tell Bitty Kitty. “You hungry? I could use a snack.”
She twists around my legs again.
“Skip the snack because it won’t sit right for a swim? Good idea. A very good idea. You’re going to come out and watch me?” I say to Bitty Kitty.
She won’t wander off, not even at night. She would never go into the woods without me. I like night swims. Maybe not in the middle of the night, but swimming in the dark is nice. Bitty Kitty loves to curl up on one of the lawn chairs. She’ll watch for a few minutes and then do her skunk guard by curling up into a tight ball and passing out, likely from boredom. It’s only so interesting to watch a dude swim laps for so long, I’m sure. Whenever I get out, she always wakes up and follows me in.
She looks at me like she’s telling me to remember to get changed first. It’s a great idea. Swimming in the nude is no longer an option. Not that I ever did that. Okay, fine, a few times, but hardly ever in my pool. More like in the lake with friends on skinny dipping dares and whatnot.
“Swim right now.” I scratch under her chin, where she loves to be scratched. “Tomorrow, Project Get Our Dads Not To Hate Each Other begins. You up for it, girl?”
She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. Like there isn’t any hope in the world that this is ever going to work.
She’s probably right.
CHAPTER 6
Patience
I’m tired the next morning when my alarm goes off at seven. Apollo’s dad will be at the airport, landing about now. Then, he’ll rent a car and drive out and be here by eight-thirty or nine. He declined our invitation to pick him up the same way my dad did. No one wanted to inconvenience us.
I blink my grainy eyes at the ceiling. It’s not fancy like some houses, but instead, it has stucco and is domed like a cave roof. It’s not a low ceiling, but it does curve at the top. In the middle of the room, the most impressive light fixture of blown glass leaves looks like it’s on as the sun plays over it. I wonder if that was intentional in the design. The windows here aren’t stained glass like the one on the main floor, but they still let in lots of pink-gold early morning sunlight.
I keep watching the flickering lights on the ceiling as I think about last night.
I can still hear the horrible cry from that poor bird. I’m glad it got outside. I hope it’s okay.
I hope I’m okay after getting an eyeful of everything Apollo. I missed this whole stage. Those awkward, formative years when a guy goes from being a boy to a teenager and then to a man. I’ve said this before, but it was never more obvious than last night when naked Apollo appeared like a…god damnit…like a sun god, all bronzed, muscled, and hard.
Well, not like…everywhere. Not down there. But still. He was still…um…well endowed.
Okay, fuck, whatever. If you saw your one-time best friend’s stick and berries out of the blue, it would haunt you too. And by haunt, I mean get stuck in your mind, not like a ghostly haunt, and not a creepy doll haunt. They’re not frightening. His package is just a package, and I certainly have no interest in it, just like I have no interest in the rest of him, muscles and all.
I noticed a few things last night. He has a crescent-shaped scar on his left peck, and he has no ink that I can see. He’s been carved out of the earth, just like this mushroom house. His skin is made of finely spun gold, and it looks terribly soft.
Jesus, god. Fuck on a mushroom.
My hormones are acting like how they would have acted if I had known Apollo in high school. I no doubt would have woken up one day and noticed that my bestie had turned out hot. I probably would have been the awkward one. I would have gone through this embarrassing phase where I avoided him. He’s a boy, and I’m a girl. It was bound to happen when we left our childhood behind, our bodies changed, and we slowly became aware of that.