Just Good Friends (Cheap Thrills #5) - Mary B. Moore Page 0,41
as he held his hand out.
Shaking it, she smiled back, and I saw Dad lose his balance slightly when she did. “Thanks for having me, Mr. Evans.”
I smirked when dad looked at me to make sure I wasn’t yanking his crank. Yeah, I didn’t bring girls home, and definitely not one as beautiful as her.
“You can call me Harry,” Dad muttered, looking as flustered as Mom was now, “because that’s my name. Harry. I mean, it’s Harry Evans, but Harry’s—”
“She gets it, Dad,” I chuckled, moving next to her and putting an arm around her to give her some support.
“You must call me Luisa as well, Zuri. Mrs. Evans is my mother-in-law, and if I tried to take the title from her, she’d probably find a way to curse me.”
This wasn’t a lie.
“There are seats. People sit on them,” Dad stuttered, pointing at the couch.
Leading her away from me to it, Mom asked, “Would you like a drink? Maybe a sandwich? I’m making lunch, but you might be hungry before that.”
“Could we have some coffee, please, Mom? Zuri’s been struggling to maintain her normal caffeine intake with her arm because she can’t do jack with her left hand, so it’s important that I keep her topped up when I can.”
Like they’d both just noticed the cast, they both started fussing around her.
As Mom went to make coffee, Dad put a cushion on her lap and lifted the broken limb to rest on top of it. “Tell us if you need to see the doctor, okay, Zuri? You can never be too careful of things like clots and infections.”
Smiling shyly, she explained that she’d had it for a while and then told him about re-breaking it, too. Well, at least she was getting along with my parents, that’s the main thing.
I’d just sat down beside her when the weird dog thing jumped up and made an odd noise at Tamsin as it tried to curl up on her lap.
“Poor baby has terrible mucus and phlegm problems,” Mom murmured, nodding her head at the beast. “At night, he snores louder than your father.”
Because his chair was angled away from hers, she didn’t notice him pointing at her and mouthing, “Hers is still loudest.”
The emergency that’d led to us visiting turned out to be them installing a doggie door for the beast.
I’d been on my hands and knees helping Dad do it at one point, and Fonzie had come closer to me while my head was turned, scaring the shit out of me when I’d heard something breathing harshly right next to my head. He might have been scary as fuck with a few feet distance between us, but with only a few inches, it’d been a whole new level of near pant shitting fear.
They didn’t know what breed it was because it appeared to be a mix of quite a few, but it was probably twice the size of a Yorkshire Terrier, with wiry salt and pepper colored hair. On the top of its head was a big chunk of black hair like a mohawk with a streak of white at the front. Add that onto its weird eyes and teeth, and it was the stuff nightmares were made of. I was also fairly certain that it hated me and was planning my death while my parents weren’t looking.
When we’d finished, and the lock release mechanism was fitted onto Fonzie’s collar so that the door would open when he wanted in and out, Mom had sat us down for some lunch, which was what we were doing at this precise moment. She’d been quiet to begin with, but once my parents started telling Tamsin embarrassing stories about me as a kid, she came out of her shell.
Mom was holding onto Dad’s arm, laughing. “I-I came home, his sister, Cat, was on the couch watching a Transformers cartoon, and there’s no sign of Garrett and Raoul. I thought maybe they’d snuck out because they were shitheads like that, but when I went to our bedroom to make sure, there they were, makeup all over their faces and my grandmother’s clip earrings on their ears,” she wheezed, mascara trailing down her face with the tears. “Garrett smiles at me—” she broke off, howling as I tried to sink under the table.
Dad, who was also laughing, held up a finger. “Wait there, it might be better if I got something.”
Laying my face on the table, I muttered, “No, it wouldn’t.”