Meet Me Halfway(2)

“That means you have to actually go into the bathroom,” I hollered over my shoulder, not even bothering to turn around.

“Ugh, how do you always know?”

“Eyes in the back of my head.” I chuckled, hearing him grumble to himself before the sink turned on and drowned him out. I wasn’t buying it and was one-hundred percent going to smell his breath before he climbed in bed.

At eight years old, he’d never looked a thing like me. His dirty blond, straight hair and ocean blue eyes were polar opposites of my dark brown, spiral curls and chocolate eyes. Honestly, it was no wonder people assumed I was his babysitter.

His personality; however, might as well have been a carbon copy of mine. He was sneaky as a fox and stubborn as a bull. It made me want to rip my hair out most days, and I had only myself to blame. Lord knows my mother found it hilarious and exactly what I deserved.

But for as stubborn as he was, he was a sweet kid. He enjoyed hiking and exploring, but he wasn’t a rough and tumble kind of kid. He was just as happy vegging with me at home as he was hanging out with friends at school. I considered myself beyond lucky.

Crawling on my hands and knees, I made my way across our small living room, picking up the pillows we’d strewn across the floor. Prior to our match, we’d partook in a pre-game, epic fight to the death for the last package of gummies. He may have escaped with his life, but I won that battle.

Was he in elementary school? Yes. Did he only come up to my shoulder in height? Yep. Did I go easy on him because of that? Not a chance. Sweets were rare in our house. He knew the stakes.

I had just finished brushing crumbs off our faux-wood coffee table and readjusting the rug when he opened the door and walked out.

“That was fast. Did you wash your face?”

Insert dramatic eye roll. I didn’t even need to see him to know he was doing it. “Yes,” he said, drawing out the end like a snake.

I glanced up, narrowing my eyes. His skin didn’t look damp, and there wasn’t even the tiniest hint of pink to his cheeks. “You sure?”

He stared at me for a second longer before he turned without a word and stomped back into the bathroom.

Kids.

I sat back on my heels, pushing up off my knees to stand. “Come on, time to go potty,” I told the covered mound next to me. Nothing. Shaking my head, I lifted the blanket off the black-haired, sausage roll of a dog hidden underneath. “Don’t you ignore me.”

Said sausage roll glared up at me, and I swore if she could talk, she’d be telling me to fuck off. You’d have thought she was seventy rather than six by the way she acted. If food wasn’t involved, she wasn’t interested.

She was a short-haired, miniature dachshund and had been a puppy no bigger than my hands back when we bought her. I remembered back then that we’d had her for a few days, and for the life of me I still hadn’t been able to pick a name. So, like the genius woman I was, I decided to let my two-year-old name her.

“What’s your favorite thing?”

“The rug!”

“Okay, what’s your second favorite thing?”

“Pants!”





And thus, Rugpants was named. Genius woman, indeed. I nudged her limp form, “Come on Rugsy, outside, let’s go.”

She rolled off the couch like a potato on a kid’s project ramp and trotted her short, stubby legs toward the patio door. It was literally two feet away, but she still found time to stretch and yawn on the way over.

Yanking on the handle, I forced the door to slide open as far as I could while it fought against me. I sighed, mentally adding ‘call the landlord to fix patio door’ to my never ending to-do list.

Rugpants looked up at me, pure sass in her buggy eyes. “Don’t give me that look, it won’t open any farther. You can fit.” I nudged her out, leaving the door ajar so she could make her way in when she was done.

Walking backward, I plopped onto the couch, closing my eyes and listening to the cicadas serenade me through the opening and praying no mosquitoes took advantage of my laziness.

Jamie would come back any minute with a book, and I was dreading it. Not because I didn’t enjoy reading with him, I loved his interest in books, but because reading time meant nighttime, and nighttime meant schoolwork. No matter how much I tried to enjoy them, the evenings were never long enough.

I allowed myself one more minute of self-pity and then sat up, breathing deeply and clapping my hands together. “It’s bedtime, let’s go!”

I heard the faint clatter of something in the bathroom—I didn’t even want to know what an eight-year-old boy was doing in there—before the creak of the door echoed out, and he darted into his room.

“Are we reading out here or in there?”

“In here!” he yelled.

Of course, we were. Lazy bum. Slapping my hands on the couch, I heaved my butt up and trudged toward the first bedroom in the hall, directly across from the bathroom.

We’d moved in last week, and Jamie had been so excited to have his own bedroom and bathroom. It’d been a struggle not to burst into tears at his excitement over something he’d always deserved to have.

I crawled into bed next to him, shoving my toes under his legs to warm them and biting back a laugh when he hissed and slapped at me. We didn’t fit on his twin mattress, but I’d keep squeezing in as long as he’d let me.