The connection that I felt to him at that moment didn’t surpass how I felt to him normally, but it made it feel stronger and deeper.
That’s why, after he’d gotten rid of the condom and had slid into bed beside me, I didn’t even wait for him to pull me into his side. Instead, I moved so that my head was on his bicep with my arm around his waist – aka, my happy place. We’d discussed me going on the pill, so I had a doctor's appointment next week to discuss it. I would have thought I’d blush and dread going, but in reality it excited me that we were dispensing with condoms. Just him and me, it felt… more.
“Are you happy?” he muttered, just as I was starting to fall asleep.
“Happier than I’ve ever been in my life.”
If I’d been more awake, I might have realized that the fingers he’d been running through the long strands of my hair paused. “Really?”
Tipping my head so that I could give him a kiss on the chest, I mumbled, “It’s why I love you so much,” just as I fell asleep.
Fifteen
Katy
A lot can happen in two weeks. Stuff that’s organized just so can get messed around, things can get put out of place, my uncle can get news that at the end of the month he can work from home which meant I wouldn’t get Elodie as often. And those three things were just top of the list of things that had happened. Jarrod’s insurance company had also sent him a check for his car, which meant I got dragged car shopping with him, and I’d found out that Gloria had a twin – which had just happened.
Maude had come over thirty minutes ago for a catch up while Jarrod was out helping his brothers with something, and we’d been sitting discussing her wanting to buy wigs like Gloria’s.
“What would you use them for, though, Maude?”
Thinking about it, she just shrugged and reached for a cookie. “Don’t know, don’t care. I think it would be awesome to have an array of hairstyles and colors to suit my mood, don’t you?”
“An array?”
“That’s right,” she nodded. “An array. Gloria always looks so beautiful in hers and the height I got on that first one was phe-nom-en-al!”
And there we had it, that’s why she wanted wigs.
A knock at the door got our attention seeing as how I hadn’t been expecting anyone at all today, and while I was walking to answer it, I asked, “Why don’t you ask her to go shopping with you for one then?”
“I did and we’ve been. I’ve got three waiting for me at home.”
Rolling my eyes, I opened the door and came face to face to the lady herself. When I looked at the woman beside her, I did a comical back and forth between the two of them – at least, it would be comical to them. For me, what I was seeing was confusing the hell out of me.
“How’s there two of you?” I asked, still looking to see which one was the real Gloria.
That question was answered when she gently nudged me aside to get in. “This is my sister Rita. She’s over from Jamaica for a couple of weeks and wanted to meet her nephew’s woman, so here we are.”
Smiling at Rita, I shut the door behind them and watched as Gloria picked up Elodie who had come running to see her.
“Oh my god, she’s beautiful,” Rita sang, walking up to see her.
Elodie’s face went bright and then the smile dropped as she looked back at Gloria. Then she looked at Rita and pushed the top half of her body away from Gloria with a hand on her chest.
“What’s wrong, little button? She’s doing that because you’re ugly,” Rita told Gloria, giving her a smack on the arm for good measure.
Elodie looked over at me and let out a little squeak, her bottom lip wobbling slightly.
“This is my sister, Elodie. Her name’s Rita, can you say Rita?” Gloria asked her, and Elodie looked back at Rita and shook her head.
“She calls Jarrod cawot,” I told the duo as I walked past them to the kitchen. “If she can say Rita, he’s going to be so mad.”
Following behind me, Gloria gave me hers and Rita’s coffee orders, and then reluctantly let Elodie – who was now warming up to the fact that there were two Glorias in the room – go to her sister.
Once the coffees were made, we sat down in the living room with Elodie excitedly showing Rita every single toy that she had.
Looking between the two, I was shocked at how much alike they looked even after seeing Jarrod with his brothers. I mean, I looked like my siblings, but not to the extent that this family did.
“I didn’t know you were a twin?” I asked. “That’s pretty cool.”
Putting her cup down on the table, Gloria shot Rita a look. “My twin is a pain the ass and we definitely do not get along.”
Maude shot me a wide-eyed look that reflected what I was thinking at that moment, too – awkward AF – and her lips pressed tightly together as she kept in the questions she no doubt was dying to ask.
“Yup,” Rita agreed, stroking Elodie’s purple teddy and grinning at her. “Gotta take her in small doses.”
Well, it was probably best that they lived in different countries then, I guess. When the silence dragged from ‘reflective silence’ to ‘awkward as hell silence’ I started to think of questions to ask that would be diplomatic and neutral.
“So how often do you see each other then?”
“Once every five years or so,” Gloria replied, watching Elodie with a warm smile on her face, which threw me seeing as how she was in the presence of a sister that she apparently didn’t get along with. If that was me, I’d be struggling to smile and be tense.
“Last time I saw the b…” Rita stopped and looked down at Elodie who was now holding a fabric ball out to her, “burned out piece of trash was two years ago,” she said, then glanced over at Gloria. “And she looked like a burned out piece of trash. Bright pink spandex leggings, highlighter green tight top, tits bursting out, and her hair looked like she’d been dragged through the streets and then swirled in a toilet. It was during Carnival, but still.”
Gloria pulled a face and then pointed at Maude. “She does good hair. You know my wig with the hair to here,” she pointed just past her shoulders and got a nod from Rita. “She styled it so perfectly, I didn’t want to wash it.”
Maude had been thinking about something through this, so she didn’t hear what was said. Instead, she tilted her head and said to Gloria, “I didn’t see any spandex or bright clothes in your wardrobe. That would totally suit you, and I could rock a hairstyle to match them. You need to get some more because that wig you’ve got with the auburn highlights in it would kill with those colors, and then we could put some curls through it, give it volume on top…” she trailed off, lost in her hair fantasy. “Oh, what about that wig at the shop we went to that had the long bangs at the front like Katy’s? We could totally make it look like Cher in that Turn Back Time video when she’s in the tiny little leather swimsuit thing with boots up to her thighs.”
Rita had stopped playing with Elodie through this and was now looking at Maude with her mouth open. Gloria on the other hand was mulling this over. “I don’t think I want the spandex and bright colors, but I could totally do a tank and those jegging things.”
“Depends on the colors, though,” Maude pointed out, putting her finger to her lower lip.
“Obviously,” Gloria agreed, her mind stuck on the potential new look.
There was another silence, but this time two of the people in the room were lost in thought and not feeling the horror/awkwardness that the other two people were feeling at the mental image that had hit us at the description given by my grandmother.
“Do you…” Rita started, her eyes flicking between her sister and Maude’s hair, “do you do your own hair?”
Patting the side of her bouffant, Maude grinned at her proudly. “Of course, great ain’t it? If you’ve got an hour this week, I’ll do yours for you. The higher the hair, the closer to heaven and all that.”
Seeing that Rita didn’t want to be rude but also had no intentions of her hai
r reaching heaven before she did, I cut in. “I’m amazed at how much y’all are getting along given that you don’t normally. Which one of you was born first?”
It was a desperate grab to save poor Rita, but it was also a stupid grab because it brought up the tensions that we’d been trying to bury after their tales of dislike for each other. Stupid, stupid me.
“Oh, we’ve always been close,” Rita replied, waving her arm in the air dismissively. “Gloria’s fifteen months older than me, so I’m the baby of the family.”
This information confused the hell out of me because I wasn’t a mathematical genius, but fifteen months would be a hell of a long time to wait for the second twin to be born, right? It’s not like their mother popped one out and then lay there waiting for the other one to come out for fifteen months.
I was busy thinking this, but it was my grandmother who said it out loud. “Wait, so your mom had to stay pregnant for fifteen months after Gloria came out? Didn’t they say they’d do a caesarean or anything? I know things have changed from the days when I was born, but still, I would have assumed they’d be worried about you and your mom enough to not make her wait that long.”
The two women looked at each other and then back at Maude. “Um, she wasn’t in labor for fifteen months with me,” Rita said slowly. “She got pregnant with me after Gloria was born.”
Maude’s head jerked slightly, and she looked quickly between the two of them. “So how in the ever loving hell are y’all twins?”
Both women burst out laughing, finding this hilarious for some reason. I was relieved that I hadn’t been the one to ask the question, but at the same time I was struggling to figure out the answer to it, too.
“We’re not twins,” Gloria chuckled, waving it off like it was a ridiculous notion. “My twin’s in Jamaica still.”
Now that blew my mind and broke my silence. “How do y’all look identical if you’re not twins? I’ve seen it with Jarrod and his brothers because those guys look like quads…”
“I don’t think they look that alike really,” Gloria mused. “They’ve got similar features, but everything else is different.”
“Are you high?” Maude screeched, slamming her cup down on the table and making us all jump. “Those boys look so alike that I got them to show me their driving licenses to make sure they weren’t talking shit.”
“Shih!” Elodie yelled as she held both fists up in the air, making all of us flinch.
Uncle Leo was going to kill Maude for teaching his daughter to say a cuss word as one of her first words. There was no way that was going in the baby book I’d started for her after she was born either. I had no intention of sitting with her first boyfriend in seventeen years’ time (and he’d better be her first boyfriend, and one who had no interest in doing anything else because holding hands was racy enough), showing him her achievements as a baby. When we got to the page about first words, there’d be a list of them including the word shit at fourteen months old.
Shooting a glare at Maude who was now inspecting her shoes, I crouched down in front of my niece and stroked the back of my finger down her face, getting a goofy grin in return. “We don’t say that word, ‘Lodie. It’s a mean word that only big people say, not pretty little babies.”
Apparently at that age, those words meant nothing because Elodie just shrugged and repeated it. “Shih!”
Glaring over at my grandmother, I snapped, “You’re in so much trouble with Leo. And how am I going to put this in the baby book?”
Sensing that this could escalate, Gloria interrupted us by taking us back to the original conversation. “Maybe it’s because they’re my sons that I don’t see the fully how alike they look. But then again, I don’t think I look anything like Rita and my twin, Anna, and we’re meant to be identical.”
That made sense, I guess, but it was still hugely inaccurate. Jarrod and his brothers looked more alike than I’d ever seen any siblings look and given the age differences it was testament to the strength of, it seemed, Gloria’s DNA. It stood to reason that a mother would see her kids as each being unique as well as not seeing the visible similarities between her and her siblings, but as an outsider, trust me, it was blowing my mind that they weren’t all from the same fertilized egg.
“I agree with the ladies,” Rita said. “Those boys look like they were all in utero at the same time, and that some paranormal event occurred where one tiny egg the size of a pinhead split into four massive babies.” Getting a glare from her sister, she then decided wisely to start talking about Port Royal, telling us about different places in Jamaica that we should visit. The more touristy parts had no allure to me in any country, I preferred to go off the beaten track, but when she told me there was a place called Fern Gully, I made a mental note to break the beaten path rule and go visit it. That movie had seen me through a lot as a kid, and who wouldn’t want to go to the place it was named after?
As we were talking, Elodie made the red pooping face that she always did, and then started clapping her hands. This was something she’d done from the minute she could do it after she’d been constipated for three days as a baby, and when she’d finally broken the poop force field, we’d all clapped for her. Now, every poop was celebrated with a red face and a round of applause – even if you had company.
Picking her up, Maude took her upstairs to change her.
“I really need to start potty training her,” I muttered, making a mental note to get a book on how to do it. I wasn’t sure if there was a book that dealt with a psychological approach to potty training, but I was adamant to find the closest thing I could to it.
“Jarrod, Bond, Canon and Reid were all using their potty by the time they were sixteen months old,” Gloria told me, like this was information I needed to know about these grown men. “It was Canon who took sixteen months, though. The rest all figured it out pretty quickly and were using it by thirteen months.”
The fact that it was my boyfriend and his brothers aside, this was actually kind of intriguing information. I also needed the answer to something. “Who was the fastest to learn it?”
Not even hesitating, Gloria said, “Jarrod. He got a green potty the day after his first birthday, pooped in it that same day, and a week later was ripping off his diaper to sit on it.”
Holy shit!
“He could do that when he was just a year old?” I asked, double checking she had the age right.
“Of course. Jarrod started walking at ten months and was advanced for his age, too.”
“Boy basically uncurled after he was born and started playing music,” Rita snickered. “I swear he was born at thirty-nine weeks, but he came out a twenty-year-old man.”
That I could see, but still…
“Do you think Elodie’s delayed with her development?” I asked both women. “Her mom is an addict, but she stuck with marijuana while she was pregnant. Elodie was tiny and a bit premature and it’s always worried me all of that would affect her.”
Leaning forward, Gloria said seriously, “Every baby is different, Katy. I get so annoyed with those baby books because they don’t take that into account and it makes new parents worry.”
That was true. I had three of the books upstairs so that I could figure out how to look after her when she was born. When she hadn’t hit the milestones by the stage that they’d stated in the books, I’d freaked and taken her to the pediatrician to get checked over. Fortunately, she was confirmed to be ‘healthy as a clam’, but it was hard to switch off the worries given Effie’s history.
“Your niece is good, honey,” Rita added, backing up what her sister had said. “My daughter didn’t start walking until she was nineteen months and she refused to use a potty until she was almost three. Then, at the age of nine, she decided that she was old enough to wear a bra and took one of mine and stuffed it with apples. After that, it was makeup at ten that she applied with a heavy, heavy hand, and she was borrowing my wigs. She’d gone from taking her time to being impatient for time
to move more quickly. I was never worried, though, because she’s her own person and kids personalities and will power differ from child to child.”
“You worry a lot now, though, Rita. That child is wild,” Gloria pointed out, shaking her head at the thought of what her niece got up to.
Letting out a frustrated sigh, Rita adjusted herself on the couch, no doubt trying to get more comfortable during an uncomfortable subject. “That’s putting it mildly. She’s a hellion who makes an impact wherever she goes.”
“Shoulda had boys,” Gloria muttered, shooting a smirk at her sister. “My boys have always been sweet and easy.”
Rita and I shared a disbelieving look before we looked back at Gloria to see her glaring at us. “They’re angels,” she snapped, and I almost choked on air.
“Katy,” Maude called from upstairs. “You’re almost out of diapers, honey. There’s only one left.”
That’s what I’d meant to get when I went to the store – diapers. I knew I’d forgotten something.
“I better go get some,” I sighed, getting up to get my purse. “Are you guys ok to stay here with Maude? Jarrod should be home soon, so I can always text him to come here so he can see Rita.”
“How far away from the store is the garage he works at?” Rita asked. “I might go with you and head in to surprise him there. He can drive me back here when he’s finished.”
So that became the plan. Maude and Gloria would stay here to look after Elodie, and I’d drop Rita at Ren’s garage and head on to the store, which was exactly what we did. During all of it, I thought about how much more secure the world felt having the Kline family in it. In the grand scheme of things, they’d only known me for a matter of months, but it felt like I’d known them my whole life.
Talk Flirty To Me: Cheap Thrills Series Book 4 Page 18