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Honestly, though being sprayed by a skunk sucked balls, I was glad that it hadn’t happened to Jubilee. If it’d happened to her, she might’ve started to puke.
She was very sensitive to smells and always had been. Smells also sent her into a downward spiral that usually ended up with her being sick as a dog with a migraine for days on end.
“Here goes,” Liner muttered.
Then the first large can of tomato sauce was poured over my head.
The sauce coated me from shoulders to chest and then started to fall down to my feet where I was standing in the middle of a kiddy pool.
I started to rub the sauce into my skin, trying to be very thorough in my application.
“Should’ve got a woman over here to do this,” Liner muttered. “It’s fucking weird as hell, a grown man rubbing another grown man’s back, spreading in tomato sauce.”
I agreed.
Yet, I didn’t have anyone else to help me, so I was taking what I could get.
“Appreciate you doing this, Liner,” I muttered darkly. “I didn’t know who else to call that wouldn’t be either working or on their way to work.”
Liner worked for the power company as a lineman. He was on call twenty-four seven, three hundred and sixty-five days a year since he was the supervisor of supervisors. However, those days that it wasn’t raining, he was at home sitting on his ass being fat and happy.
When a big storm rolled through, though, even the big boss got his hands dirty.
It helped that his father owned the power company. Technically, if he didn’t want to get out in it, he wouldn’t have to. His father didn’t any longer. But Liner never missed a day when he was needed.
Kind of like right now.
He may not have appreciated the smell—the hilarity of the issue he definitely didn’t miss—but he was there because he knew he was needed.
“Don’t forget to rub it into your hair,” Liner noted when he reached for the next can.
The next turn I had it in my hair, running down my face, and curling around my ears.
“Your hair’s gonna be red, man,” Liner noted.
I grimaced. “Maybe nobody will notice.”
***
“Your hair is a nice strawberry blond,” someone said from behind me.
I turned to see Jubilee standing there, looking too smug for her own good, wearing a slight grimace at the smell that still clung to parts of me.
It was better than it was, but still pretty bad.
They said that the more baths that you took in the tomato sauce, the better it got.
Since I’d only had two in the shit before I’d been required to be at the funeral, I knew I fuckin’ stunk.
And it was all because of the woman standing in front of me.
I narrowed my eyes at her and let her know that I wasn’t happy with her.
“Go away,” I muttered. “Before I force you to do something you won’t like.”
Her brows rose. “I’m fairly sure you’ve already forced me to do something I didn’t like at some point in my life. In fact, now that I say that, I can think of two right off the top of my head.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and glared at her. “Name them.”
She flicked up her finger and said, “Number one, the night that I was going to go to eat with my prom date and you wouldn’t let me leave. You forced me into your car instead and drove me home even though I didn’t want to leave.”
“That prom date was taking you to a hotel, not out to eat. And he had roofies in his pocket to ensure that he got what he wanted, something that you’d been quite vocal about not sharing during high school,” I felt it prudent to point out.
She gave me a level look.
“What I fail to see is why you sent me home.” She pouted. “I was trying to have fun, and you ruined it.”
“There were six guys there that had already spiked the punch. You’d drank like six glasses of it in less time than it took most of them to drink one,” I continued.
She shrugged. “Whatever.”
“What was the other instance?” I asked almost reluctantly.
Her eyes narrowed.
“Why are you talking to me anyway?” I asked. “You’ve talked to me more in the last week than you have in the last sixteen years.”
That was true.
I had.
And I also couldn’t tell you why.
Something was just telling me to seek her out, and I had no other recourse but to do my brain’s bidding or risk causing my brain to fuck up.
It’d already messed with my ability to make rational decisions such as sitting at the track for two hours watching her run instead of going back to my comfortable chair and sitting in the warmth.
“The other instance?” I pushed.
She sighed.
“When you kissed me in second grade,” she answered.
