Page 33 of Holly Jolly Cake Fight
“Why don’t you want to see me naked?”
Well, now,thatwas a bear trap Laurin would gladly chew his own leg off to escape. “Oh, I’m not saying I don’t. Do you have blankets in—?”
“You think I’m ugly.”
She was twisted in a funky position, her face was squashed onto her hand, and one eye was more open than the other, but no. She wasn’t ugly. She was mean sometimes and sad a lot of the time, lonely and stubborn and fragile, but not ugly.
“You’re drunk,” Laurin said, knowing his words were wrought with peril but preferring that argument to her current one.
Her lips pursed, and she wiggled them thoughtfully. “I don’t drink.”
“You did tonight.”
She flopped back down. “Why did you help me today?”
“Same reason you helped me.”
“Because you think I’m not competition?”
“That’s not what I said. I’m gonna go grab some blankets for you, okay?” He retrieved the blankets that he’d left by the fireplace to warm but waited until he heard her snoring lightly to enter her room again.
Chapter 13
The sound ofa bulldozer on the other side of the wall was sufficient to rouse Candace from her bed. She had no idea why a bulldozer was on the balcony of her modest fourth-floor apartment, but Trenton, NJ, was a weird place.
Her brain shook free of its moorings, sloshing around in her skull even though her head was clearly caving in on itself, when she sat up. She toppled right back over, inverted on the bed, cracking her temple smartly on the footboard that had never been there before.
She peeled her eyes open and groaned when she saw she wasn’t home at all. She was hungover in a campground in North Georgia. There was a bulldozer out front and a coffee pot in the kitchen. Her salvation was right down the hall, a million miles away.
Candace lay there dying for several more minutes before fashioning a cloak out of her blanket, cinching it into a tight hood to hold in her brain, and rocking herself up onto her feet.
Her entire body groaned. She was sure if she put a microphone on her knee, the sound would be just as resonant there as from her throat.
Clearing that throat was another crisis. She assumed she must have eaten an entire bag of flour last night; there was no other reasonable explanation for the utter lack of moisture in hermouth. Her lips had glued shut, and prying them apart didn’t do much for the tongue fused to the roof of her mouth.
She smacked her lips a couple times to get the saliva flowing and staggered out to the kitchen, where Laurin was throwing pots and pans around in the cabinet.
“I didn’t think you’d be up this early!” he shouted.
“Bulldozer. Out there.” She considered pointing but didn’t have the strength.
He plowed past her to look, his laugh piercing her eardrum as he said, “Just Greg and Mark. Building a bird house, by the looks of it. Weird. Want some coffee?”
She shuffled to the counter and slumped over it, thinking it was a good place to nap.
“Aspirin?” was the next thing she heard. She took them from Laurin’s hand and gobbled them up, only afterward realizing she had no water.
“Right here,” Laurin said, sliding the cup across the counter.
The sound of it, the scraping of glass on Formica, flipped Candace’s stomach right over. She barreled down the hall, crashing into the walls in her panic, barely making it to the restroom before purging the beast from her belly.
Laurin was right there when she croaked on her next breath, forcing air down the wrong pipe and triggering her stomach again. He rubbed her back through it, again pushing aspirin and water on her when she finished.
It stayed down this time. She thought the floor wouldn’t be a bad place to sleep or die, but Laurin kept her upright, dabbing her forehead with a damp cloth. He folded it over and wipedher lips off before tossing it into the hamper. “Do you feel any better?”
“Yeah. I should go back to bed.”
“You should take a shower. You’ll feel better for it.” He kept a hand on her for stability while he fiddled with the knobs to get the shower going. When he was happy with the temperature, he said, “Go on now. I’ve got the drain plugged, so you can just sit there and contemplate life for a while. Close the curtain behind you so I can bring you coffee.”
