“Are you going to see him again?” I asked, watching as her lips quirked up in a small smile.
“Probably not,” she answered, shaking her head. “We didn’t even exchange phone numbers.”
“What? Seriously?” I went to Rebel, who was no longer eating, but smearing her taco into the soup left at the edges of her tray.
“It’s fine,” she assured me. “We both knew what it was going in—I’ve got no complaints.”
“You’re nuts. I couldn’t do that.”
“Obviously, since Will was here all night and you didn’t do anything. Did you exchange numbers?”
“No,” I replied, realizing it as soon as she mentioned it. We hadn’t exchanged numbers or even mentioned seeing each other again. I lifted Reb from her seat and carried her toward the bathroom. “Come on, she needs a bath.”
I set Reb in the tub, stripped her down and turned on the water as Mel came to stand in the doorway.
“He seemed really into you,” she said, fiddling with the lotions and creams on the countertop.
“I don’t know,” I replied, shaking my head. “We’re a lot to take on, you know? It’s not just me.”
“If that’s his issue, he’s a douchecanoe.”
“You can’t really blame him. We’re twenty-one. Most people our age don’t have any kids.”
“But a lot of them do,” Mel argued, coming in to sit on the closed toilet seat.
“It’s fine,” I said, reaching out to gently take Reb’s glasses off. She was disoriented for a minute until she figured out why her world was so blurry once again.
“Well, it was fun while it lasted, right?” Mel asked, leaning down to brace her elbows on her knees and her chin on her hands.
“Yeah, it was.” We made eye contact and giggled. Even though Will had been a complete asshole before he’d left, it had been fun while it lasted. “Will smells really good,” I said quietly. “And I rode on his murdercycle.”
“Fun, right? It was a good thing that the guys were there last night, ’cause I wouldn’t have been able to drive. Rocky drove us home on his bike and then took me to my car this morning.”
“We should do it again,” I said with a smirk.
“Yeah?”
“But probably not until like . . . next month. My dad was pissed that Will was here, so he’s not going to babysit for a long ass time.”
“Your dad has a stick up his ass.”
“He just worries.”
“He worries that he has a giant stick up his ass.”
I snorted just as Reb squealed, smacking her hands into the rising tub water, soaking me and Mel.
“You’re crazy!” I sang to Reb, making her laugh and slap the water again.
I let her play for a while as Mel and I chatted about anything and everything. That was the beauty of being best friends with someone. You could segue from the awful security guard at your job to a discussion on mall cops to the movie Mall Cop and somehow end up discussing Jennifer Lawrence’s open letter about getting paid less than her male counterparts, with no breaks in between.
We continued to talk as I emptied the tub and climbed inside with Reb, shutting the curtain so I could turn on the shower and bathe us both. Mel held out a towel and wrapped it around Rebel as I handed her out so I could wash my hair, and she followed me into my room as I grabbed some clean clothes for us out of a laundry basket at the end of my bed.
“What do you want to do today?” she asked as she wrangled Rebel into a diaper. “I need to get some Christmas shopping done.”
“It’s only October.”
“I like to be done before everyone else so I don’t have to deal with idiots taking up all the parking spaces close to the stores.”
“You want to go to the mall, Reb?” I asked, pulling a shirt over my wet hair. She gave me a short nod and climbed to her feet, her hands rubbing distractedly at the eczema on her little belly.
“Okay, first, let’s grease you up!” I called, catching her as she tried to run out of the room.
I pulled the thick cream the doctor had given us off the top of my dresser and sat down on the bed, pinning a squirming Reb between my thighs. “Should we blow on it?” I asked her as I squeezed some of the cream into my palm. She hated when the lotion was cold, so we’d started blowing warm air over it before I rubbed it in. I wasn’t sure if it actually warmed it up, but she believed it did, so it was worth the few extra seconds it took.
Reb leaned close to my hand, and I felt her warm, wet breath waft over the skin of my palm.
“You’re not supposed to eat it!” Mel exclaimed, making Reb giggle.