“What, no jokes?” she snapped, reaching for the roll of toilet paper and taking off a bunch to put under my hand.
“Jokes?” I asked, watching her warily as she unscrewed the lid of the bottle of hydrogen peroxide. I hated that shit, it felt like acid.
I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek as she tilted the bottle so I wouldn’t make a noise. And then she poured—Christ, did she have to use so much?—making sure it got into each cut like she was being graded on it.
“Yeah, like, is your mum a sack of flour? I’ve heard a lot of shit like that over the years.”
Sadie didn’t look up from what she was doing while she spoke, and I wanted to say she was diligent because she cared about my wellbeing, but the likelihood was I shouldn’t have asked the question.
“Kids are assholes,” I mumbled, biting my lip when she prodded the deepest cut. “I used to get teased about my teeth.”
Her head came up quickly, and she stared at my mouth. Knowing what she wanted, I rolled my eyes and showed her my teeth.
“There’s bugger all wrong with them. Why did they tease you?”
“There’s nothing wrong with them now, but at the time, I had gaps at the top and weird overcrowding at the bottom,” I snickered, remembering them. “I was also scrawny for my age with really long arms.”
This time she looked at me like I was crazy, so I reached into my back pocket with my good hand and pulled out my cell to show her. Finding the photo that I wanted, I turned the screen back toward her.
Dropping my hand, she took it from me, staring at the screen in shock.
“I don’t believe that’s you. I mean—” Sadie paused, then held the phone next to my face. “Obviously, you look different with the thingy,” she pointed at my nose, specifically the tampon. “But it doesn’t even look like you. What happened?”
Taking my phone back, I wiggled my hand at her to get her to go back to what she’d been doing. If her eyes weren’t on me, it was easier to tell the story. Adolescent pain lasts, and the embarrassment was still there all these years later.
“When I was thirteen, I had my last baby teeth removed by the dentist. They’d caused major overcrowding, so he put braces on a week later, and I spent eighteen months getting teased about them until the summer break that I turned sixteen.”
Picking up a bottle of Betadine, she put some on a cotton ball and dabbed the cuts. “What happened that summer?”
Blushing, I tried to think of a nice way to phrase it. “I got the braces off at the start of it, had a growth spurt, and uh met some girls.”
One side of her mouth tilted up, giving me a half-smile as she finished putting the iodine on the wounds. “Basically, you shagged around that summer.”
Clearing my throat, I raised my hand to inspect the cuts, making sure I didn’t need any stitches. One of them could probably do with some adhesive strips, but I’d recheck it in the morning and see Parker if I needed to.
“When I went back to school, I was the tallest in my class, and I’d started working out because I’d visited my cousins and saw how to do it. The chicks dug it, so the teasing ended,” I shrugged.
“Which cousins?”
That was a fair question seeing as how I had a lot of them. One part of my family lived in a place called Piersville, about two hours away from where we were in Gonzales County. The others lived here and worked for Townsend Oil. It was only me and my brothers who were spread out over the country instead of all living in the same place. I missed the closeness with my brothers, but at the same time, I preferred having my own space.
“Ren, Brett, and Cole.”
They were the ones who lived in Piersville, and I think she’d only met Cole when he’d come to see Ariana, our cousin who lived here and was kidnapped by her boyfriend’s crazy ex-stepmother and her boyfriend a few months ago.
Sadie had ended up getting kidnapped with her and shot through her calf. Lucky for the man, he was in jail with his court date pending, or I’d shoot him through the ball for what he’d done to her. I’d been there when we found them, and I’ll never be able to get how pale she was and the amount of blood she’d lost from her leg.
Grabbing my hand back, she leaned in to inspect it more closely. “That one’s going to be a pain in your bum. You might want to see Parker in the morning about it. The rest look like they’ll be okay, so long as they don’t get infected.”