Looking up, I noticed that Garrett had somehow managed to get the hair clip I’d foregone earlier and was braving the pain to have his nasal passages clamped shut with it.
“What are we going to do?”
Keeping his face pointing away from me, he lifted onto his knees and grabbed his phone out of his back pocket.
“DB? Yeah, you gotta get to Zuri’s and fix what your daughter just did.” Silence. “She’s fine, but we’re not.” Silence again. “I’m telling you, there’s no way in hell either of us will survive doing what needs to be done, and your daughter’s ass is possessed by a demon, so you need to fix it.” Silence. “Right, and bring bleach. And more paper towels.” He paused and glanced at me. “And maybe some air freshener.” There was a beat of silence as he listened to what Dave was saying, and then he added, “Yeah, probably a couple of them. I think we’re going to need them for a while.”
After the call ended, I did a mental run-through of what towels I had that I didn’t like.
“Okay, I’m going to pick her up,”—I’d have to put my cast under one of her armpits and hold on carefully with my good hand—“and then you pull the doodie towel away and put it in a bag. My towels are in the cupboard in the hallway, and I don’t have much of an attachment to the one with the cat on it, so bring that one back, and we’ll put paper towels on top of it in case she blows again.”
Getting up, he jogged over to the kitchen, pulled out a large trash bag from under the sink, ran through to the hallway and found the towel before running back to me. “Can you hold her long enough for me to get the towel under her?”
Nodding, I carefully put my casted wrist under Sheena’s armpit and pressed my fingers in as best I could without hurting her, ignoring the pain it caused on my back and arm. Then, I used my other hand to lift her off the ground and watched as Garrett leaned in to pull the dirty towel out carefully.
Just as he was about to pull back, she decided to pee all over his bicep, which was right under her.
If I hadn’t been worried about dropping her, I’d have laughed myself to the point of also needing a diaper at how horrified he was when he looked up at me, with her still peeing away happily.
Yanking his arm back, he jumped up to his feet and held it in the air like he was expecting it to fall off. The dry heaves that had been coming out of intermittently before that moment changed to ones that sounded like they might just end up being less dry and more... well, wet.
He’d been close to puking before, but now he was damn near on top of it. The force of them had him bending over with his hands braced on his thighs.
And that’s what Dave walked through my door to see.
A large splash of baby poop across the floor, a balled-up shitty towel half hanging out of a plastic sack, his daughter giggling with poop on her legs and a puddle of pee under her, Garrett hunched over and gagging, and me holding her watching it all like it was either a dream or a nightmare.
Five hours later…
Not to say that he was dramatic, but watching Garrett rub Neosporin into his raw arm from where he’d scrubbed it hard enough to take some skin off was kind of amusing.
“Don’t laugh,” he growled, squeezing some more out of the tube and rubbing it into another raw patch. “I’m not used to people peeing and shitting on me.”
“She’s not people, she’s a baby. Plus, you’re about to become an uncle, so you might wanna rethink your issues.”
Picking up the lid for the tube, he put it back on with angry movements and then tossed it on the table on his side of the bed. “They’ll be angels.”
“Ah, that’s right,” I murmured, wincing when some of the wounds on my back pulled. Damn it, these things were itching badly now. “You’re going to have double trouble.”
“Me and Raoul are Irish twins, so we were super close when we were little. We used to go out into the garden or stop on the way home to sword fight,” he snickered.
As an only child, I envied him that part of his childhood. I also had no idea what he was talking about.
“Okay, explain Irish twins to me. I didn’t know your family was from there? And what in the hell is sword fighting? Like with swords?”
He’d been lying on his back, but when I started firing questions at him, he rolled onto his side so that we were face to face. Thankfully he’d also kept a t-shirt on tonight because sometimes when you were lying as close as we were, the vagina wanted what the vagina wanted, and a bare chest didn’t help it hold back its demands.