Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
Mark
I was enjoying sleeping later than I usually did when I heard the thump, and Layla screamed, “I’m late!”
Getting up, I scratched my belly and looked around the spare room I was in. It faced the trees at the back of the house and was a good size, but it was boringly plain.
From what I could remember from my tour the night before, the only rooms she appeared to have even spent a tiny bit of attention on decorating were the living room, kitchen, and her bedroom. Even then, they lacked the unique brand that was Layla Townsend.
Seeing movement in the trees, I waited for my eyes to focus on what it was.
Was that… Was it a rooster? The freaky thing was it was watching me as closely as I was watching him.
Hearing more cursing and thumps coming from Layla, I figured it’d be an act of kindness to make her some coffee and made my way downstairs, wincing when I heard a loud thump that could only have been made by a human body landing on the floor.
I’d just shoved a travel mug under the machine when she rushed in, her pants undone, two different shoes on her feet, and her shirt on backward.
“I don’t have any dry shampoo,” she wailed. “I usually wash my hair at night and last night was the wash night,” she rambled. “I was too tired to do it, though, and now I’ve got gross hair and no dry shampoo.”
I thought through the contents of my toiletries, trying to figure out if I had whatever the dry shampoo was. “I don’t think I’ve ever used it or that I even know what that is, Layla.”
Her hand zoomed around her head like she was showing me what it involved. “It’s this powder in a can that you spray on your hair, and it takes away the grease and buys you more time.”
“Isn’t there something else you can use?”
“I don’t know.” Her eyes moved rapidly around the kitchen, and then she began opening and closing cupboards.
Wanting to help, I went to the pantry, hopping over her big-assed rabbit, Skippy, and looked for something powdery.
Seeing two packages, I yelled, “There’s flour in here.”
“All-purpose or self-raising?”
“Both?”
This time when she spoke, it was from right behind me. “Pass me the all-purpose stuff. I don’t want to risk my head foaming if there’s anything in self-raising that’ll do that.”
Passing it over my shoulder, I watched as she went out onto the back porch and shook some onto her hair, then did a ferocious scratching thing and shook her head out over the railing.
“Does that shit work?”
When she lifted her head back, I expected her hair to be a mess, instead, it was just streaked with the flour. “How does it look?”
“Do you have a brush nearby?”
Growling, she stormed past me and dug around in her purse. With a banshee like cry, she pulled out a brush and began pulling it through her hair.
I know that Brett had brought up the color of it last night, but I loved the look on her. It gave her an edge, whereas her regular brunette locks made her look soft. Both looks worked for me, I’d take Layla any way she came, but I couldn’t say I preferred one over the other.
When she was done, her hair was flat around her head and looked worse than when she’d first come down.
“Can you flip it and put some body back in it, maybe?”
Unfortunately, she was so uptight about the prospect of being late that she didn’t realize how close she now was to the counter. When she flipped her head forward, there was a thunk noise as it hit her head, causing her to cry out.
She straightened up as I made my way quickly to her, her hand clasped firmly to her forehead. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”
“Shit, are you okay?” I eyed her hand, wondering if pulling it off would cause her more pain.
“Define okay. If it’s even close to—do I feel like I’m going to pass out, or am I seeing double? No. But if it’s closer to being in agony and wondering if death would be a kinder alternative? Kind of.”
I was definitely worried now. “How is the second one better than the first?”
“Dude, I just head-butted a counter! Why are you even expecting me to make an iota of sense?”
She had a point.
Deciding it’d be okay to look at where she’d hit her head, I gently pulled her hand away. There wasn’t any blood, but there was an ostrich egg and a bruise forming.
“Don’t move. I’ll get you some ice.”
I was just at the fridge, opening the freezer door, when she muttered, “Don’t have ice. The machine broke, and then the freezer broke.”
“So what do you have that we could put on it? It’s already bruising.”
Opening up the door to her fridge, I came across an alternative.
Layla
“If you need me to pick you up, just text or call me, okay?” Mark said from the doorway as I walked slowly to my car.
Each footstep jarred something inside my head, and if it hadn’t been for the amount of time I’d already had to take off, I’d have called out for the day.
I couldn’t do that to my patients, though. I took my job seriously, plus today’s were all facials, chemical peels, and things that didn’t involve needles and something that could go horribly wrong. Well, a chemical peel could go wrong, but I wasn’t that injured that it’d happen. Thank God for small mercies.
Turning around slowly, I smiled weakly. “Thanks for helping me this morning.”
His eyes slid to look at something behind me, and I carefully turned around to see what’d gotten his attention. Cole and Ren were standing behind my car, watching me with angry expressions on their faces.
“Why are you holding a block of cheese on your head?”
This wasn’t a bad question because I was indeed holding a block of cheese against the area I’d hurt.
Although, if they wanted me to be honest about it, I’d set them straight about one thing. “It’s actually half a block.”
Yes, the best thing I’d had in my fridge had been one of those massive blocks of cheese from Costco. I’d bought it a couple of weeks ago when I was on my period and had somehow forgotten to eat it. I now had half a block in a Ziploc bag that I was going to have to eat soon, or it’d go weird, and I didn’t like weird cheese.
When Mark had reached in and shown it to me, I’d initially told him to pass me the pack of Velveeta I’d bought at the same time, but that’d been too hard and painful, so the cheese it was.
And let’s face it, it wasn’t a hardship having to eat half a Costco block of cheese. I felt it was pertinent to continue stressing to myself where I’d bought it from so that I had enough time to mentally prepare myself for the amount of the stuff I would end up consuming later. Was it possible to become lactose intolerant by overdosing on it?
Ren’s scowl intensified. “Why have you got half a block of cheese—which, FYI, is the equivalent of two of the blocks I bought from the store just yesterday—on your forehead?”
Leaning against the side of my car, I held a finger up. “First, you’re being ripped off. Come with me to Costco next time and get one of these bad boys. Second, I bumped my head on the countertop in the kitchen this morning, and because my ice maker and the freezer are on the blitz, I only had this or Velveeta to put on it.”
Cole, the one who’d probably done something similar at least fifty times in his life, motioned at me to lift the cheese and immediately motioned for me to put it back down again.
“Why didn’t you use the Velveeta?”
The question was random and unexpected. “Out of that story, that’s what you decided to focus on?” When he just shrugged, I snapped, “Because the box hurt my head when I tried to put it on it.”
“Did you open it to see if it was in a foil wrapper?”
Shit.
However, the response I was about to give him was honest. “Well, if I get hungry later, I’ve got a snack to munch on, don’t I?”
Ren hadn’t focused on the cheese at hand—literally—because he was standing at the bottom of the stairs muttering something only Mark could hear.
“Listen,” Mark snapped, “we weren’t doing anything dirty, nor was I ‘defiling’ her in the damn kitchen. Layla wanted dry shampoo, and we only had all-purpose flour because she didn’t want to use self-raising. To give her hair back some volume after she brushed it, she flipped her head forward and head-butted the counter.”
Ren looked over his shoulder at me. “So why’s she wearing her shirt backward, and her pants are undone?”
Did I?
A quick check proved, yes, in fact, I was that big of a loser. As I adjusted them and got my shirt the right way round, almost choking myself in the process, Cole cleared his throat and pointed at my feet.
I was an even bigger loser because I had one green shoe on with a three-inch heel and one pink one with a five-inch heel, neither of which I’d generally have worn to work. I hadn’t even picked up on the difference in heel height as I’d walked through my house and out to my car. I’d just thought it was the weight of the cheese on my forehead weighing me down.
Mark whistled and tossed a pair of slip-on Converse that I kept next to the door at Cole, who then passed them to me with a wink. “Don’t want to risk hitting you in the head again.”
I was already over today, so with a tired wave, I got into the car and slowly made my way to work, hoping there’d be no more milkshake or coffee and muffin disasters. I couldn’t take much more today, and I’d only been awake for twenty minutes.