Kathleen loved holding Colin so I figured there must be a reason she was so abruptly handing him back to me. I didn’t have time to think about it because during the attempted baby handover the back of my hand accidentally brushed Kathleen’s shapely left breast. My neglected dick threatened to awaken and all of a sudden I was sorry I was standing there in nothing but flimsy boxer shorts.
Think of something else, anything else. Hamburgers. Dog shit.
“Uh, hold on,” I said, swerving over to the sink while Kathleen continued to hold the baby out. “I’ve got to wash my hands.”
This was fucking ridiculous. I wasn’t some horny teenager drooling over the first feel of a tit. Just because I hadn’t touched one in a while didn’t mean I was on the verge of losing control.
“Nash?” Kathleen said, sounding exasperated.
Baseball. Road kill. Dryer lint. Anything but tits. ANYTHING BUT TITS!!!
“Just a second.” I squirted hand soap into my palms and struggled to tame my impulses with completely sex-free thoughts that had nothing to do with unintentionally touching Kathleen Doyle’s boob for half a second. I needed to get off as much as the next guy but this girl sure as hell wasn’t going to volunteer to play hide the salami. Anyway, there were other priorities besides sex.
For the next twenty seconds I became the most industrious hand washer in the state of Arizona. I didn’t rinse the soap off until I was sure my dick had calmed down and wasn’t going to come popping out of my shorts.
“I’m good now,” I said, shaking the water off my hands and turning back to face Kathleen.
She gave me a funny look and stuck my brother in my arms.
Colin kept squirming while I tried to pat his back. I noticed Emma was still on the floor with Roxie. She was petting the dog and whispering something while Roxie stared at her with rapt fascination. Kathleen moved to go lean against the far wall, staring at me with her arms crossed like she was waiting for something to happen.
A few seconds later I figured out what that ‘something’ was when Colin bobbed his head, opened his mouth, and spat slimy white baby vomit all over my right shoulder.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Eww!” Emma shrieked.
Roxie barked.
Colin started to cry.
“Aw, it’s okay my precious sweetheart,” Kathleen said and for a weird second in all the confusion I thought she was talking to me.
She wasn’t. Once again she snatched Colin away while murmuring to him in that sugary sweet tone of voice that made me want to either roll my eyes or barf. Kathleen carried the crying baby upstairs, leaving me covered in puke while her kid gaped at me.
“You need to clean that up,” Emma informed me and then resumed petting Roxie.
“Thanks, I will,” I muttered.
I grabbed a handful of paper towels to absorb the bulk of the mess but that didn’t get rid of the stickiness. Plus I now reeked of sour milk. Not once had it ever crossed my mind that I’d end up serving as a canvas for both piss and puke in the same morning.
Meanwhile, I could hear Kathleen upstairs. She was singing some nursery rhyme about bunnies in the forest and Colin had stopped crying. I tossed the gross paper towels in the trash. More than anything I wanted to take a few minutes to clear my head in the steam of a hot shower.
“Listen, “ I said to Emma, “will you be okay down here for a few minutes?”
The girl looked at me, blinked her big brown eyes and then laid her head down on the kitchen tile beside Roxie’s paws. Roxie sniffed at her hair and licked her face. I took that to mean all was well so I jogged up the stairs.
When I peeked into Colin’s room Kathleen had her back to me while she cleaned him up on the changing table. The blue flowery skirt she wore was loose and long and didn’t hide the fact that she had a great ass. I might be a piece of shit for doing it but I stayed long enough to get a real good look at the view before retreating, then grabbed a change of clothes from one of my suitcases and retreated to hall bathroom.
The old pipes groaned as I switched on the shower but the water was blissfully hot. I felt slightly better after about thirty seconds under the spray but I was still amped up in a way that water couldn’t solve. For the past week my life had been all sadness and funeral arrangements and anxiety and regret. I needed something else. A release, just something brief and sordid to refocus my thoughts. My dick twitched and then hardened when my hand closed around it. With everything going on in the house at the moment it wasn’t really an ideal time to jerk off while thinking about a flower-covered ass and firm tits. I did it anyway. No one would have to know.
By the time I emerged from the shower and threw on some clothes, Kathleen had taken Colin downstairs. I found her in the kitchen, pouring some ghastly looking pink cereal into a bowl. Colin had been happily installed in his bouncer and placed in the middle of the wide kitchen table. He was clean, wearing a different outfit, and his wisps of light hair had been combed. He seemed content to swat at the colorful toys that hung from the bouncer. Emma sat on a booster seat at the table and Roxie’s head was in her lap. It seemed my dog had found a new master.
“I hope this is okay,” Kathleen said, retrieving a spoon from a nearby drawer and setting the bowl of cereal down in front of her daughter. “Heather watched Emma so often she tended to keep her favorite foods around.”
I shrugged. “Fine by me.”
Kathleen looked me up and down. I didn’t know what she was looking at. I was no longer almost naked so there was nothing to see. I wore jeans and a green t-shirt with the letters so faded I’d forgotten what they had once said.
But in case Kathleen’s legendary intelligence included psychic powers I grabbed a bottle of all purpose cleaner and started spraying down the tiled countertop so she wouldn’t guess I’d just jerked off to an imaginary fuck in which she’d played a starring role.
“Looks like your hand is all healed,” she said, pointing.
I looked at the back of my hand. There was still some bruising and scabbed skin but there was no need to wear a bandage anymore. Still, I was reminded that Kathleen was no fool and I needed to pick my words carefully.
“Yeah,” I said, keeping my tone even. “I’ll be more cautious in the future.”
“Nash, you can be honest with me if this isn’t working.”
I stopped spraying and stared at her. “What’s not working?”
She glanced at Colin and looked sad. “You don’t seem ready for this. You never expected to be the guardian, did you?”
I set the bottle of cleaner down a little too hard. The resulting noise was a bit loud. Roxie’s head popped up and she looked at me, startled. Kathleen crossed her arms again. Emma continued eating her cereal.
I spread my palms on the countertop and tried to keep the anger out of my voice. “It doesn’t matter what I expected. Heather and Chris didn’t expect to die. This is the way things are. And despite what you seem to think of me, I’m not going to flake out on my responsibilities.”
She raised an eyebrow. “I wasn’t implying that. You just really seem to be struggling.”
“Kathleen, give me a break. Two days ago I buried my father and his wife and found out I’ll be raising a kid for the next eighteen years. I’m still trying to let it sink in. My life has been turned upside down.”
She let out a small hiss, a sound of disgust. “This isn’t about you nailing yourself to the cross, Nash. This is about what’s best for Colin.”