It wasn’t a bad one, per se, but it didn’t feel good, either.
I idly wondered when it would feel normal again.
I mean, I knew that it’d take me a while to get back at it completely with weights and stuff, but just the everyday stuff—like washing my hair, reaching for coffee cups, or hell, even giving Laric a damn hand job like I’d tried to do last night—was a reminder that I’d been shot.
“What’s that look for?” Adam asked suspiciously.
I grinned full-out then. “Dad called Laric my man.”
Adam gagged. “Don’t talk about sex to your brother.”
I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t say anything about S-E-X,” I spelled out. “I said ‘Dad said Laric was my man.’ What part of that had S-E-X in it?”
“Why are you spelling out sex?” Adam tilted his head. “Dad, did you know that your daughter isn’t a virgin anymore?”
I felt my face heat, but I didn’t turn around and pretend that I wasn’t hearing what he was saying. Adam and I did this—embarrassed the shit out of each other. It was a game we liked to play.
“Dad, did you know that when Adam was seventeen, he did some cheerleader in the school bathroom?” I asked. “And then the girl walked around all day talking about how ‘fast’ Adam finished?”
My dad’s face was bored as he ignored us and drank his coffee.
“Well, at least I didn’t try to give some guy a blow job under the bleachers during the state football game,” he said.
I gasped. “I did not!”
Adam grinned. “You did, too. I heard about it from one of the football guys. Do you know how embarrassing it is to hear that your sister has a ‘suck’ like a ‘Hoover vacuum?’”
I narrowed my eyes. “I did not ever do that. It was a hand job!”
My dad sighed. “Why can’t y’all be normal?”
Adam turned to our dad. “Because you raised us wrong. If you wanted normal kids, you should’ve raised us to be normal kids.”
“I blame your mother,” he grumbled as he finished his coffee and stood up to go to the Keurig in the corner. “Y’all are seriously fucked up.”
I giggled and went back to the room for shoes. It was only as I was about to leave the room again, my hands in my hair to comb out the tangles, when my eyes lit on the paper next to my pillow.
I moved toward it, my hands falling to my sides, and read the note.
Call me if you need me. Have a good day. – L
I smiled at the note, then reverently picked it up and folded it before placing it in my bag next to his closet.
After ensuring that it would be safe, I walked back into the kitchen and said, “Hey, Dad. Will you braid my hair?”
My dad wasn’t the best hair braider in the world, but he was decently passable.
“Sure,” he grumbled. “But don’t bitch when it’s lopsided or too loose.”
“Or when you pull my hair so hard that it makes me cry?” I teased.
He rolled his eyes. “I’ve never pulled it that hard before.”
True.
But he did tend to be a little heavier-handed than my mom was.
“You’re fucking it up,” Adam said a short while later. “It looks lopsided.”
My dad grunted, but went back to what he was doing, pulling my hair tight enough that it caused my scalp to tingle.
“Who did it the other day when you got out of the hospital?” Adam asked. “It looked good when we FaceTimed.”
Speaking of FaceTime…
“Laric did it,” I answered. “Now, when are you going to bring the baby over? I need some snuggles, and you know that I can’t do the visiting right now.”
Adam grinned. “You were kind of disappointed when you saw me today, weren’t you? You thought I’d brought the baby.”
Truthfully, I hadn’t thought about the baby once. I’d been too focused on my hangover.
Which made me a bad aunt, didn’t it?
“I…” I began, but my dad held his hand out for a hair tie, which I didn’t have to give him.
“I’ll have to go look in the bathroom,” I said, taking the braided end from his hands and hurrying as fast as my hungover body could toward the bathroom.
When I didn’t find the hair tie on the counter, I did the next best thing to looking all over for it and instead called Laric using my brother’s snagged cell phone since mine was still dead.
“Everything okay?” he asked as soon as he answered.
“Yes.” I smiled at the concern in his voice. “My phone is dead as fuck. I’ll have to charge it in my dad’s truck. Also, I got my dad to braid my hair, but I can’t find a hair tie. Do you know where one is?”
He paused, hesitating so long that I was about to repeat the question when he said, “I have it on my wrist. Last night I took it out of your hair and forgot to put it on the counter this morning when I left.”