My stomach clenches.“Just Colby.”
Her body tenses. “What’d you tell him?”
I exhale. “Everything.”
Tessa sits up, instantly enraged. “Fucker! You’re the one who begged me not to tell anyone!”
“No, I begged you not to tellJosh, and, don’t worry, Colby won’t tell him or anyone else. Colby’s been a locked vault since I was five, when he aided and abetted my very first felony.”
She stares at me for a long beat, her anger visibly melting. Finally, she rolls her eyes and lies back down next to me. “God, you’re an asshole. How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Know exactly what to say to make me forget I’m mad at you. Now all I can think about is, ‘Gosh, I wonder how Colby aided and abetted Ryan’s first felony when he was five.’”
“Well, gosh, thanks for asking. Cuddle close again and I’ll tell you the whole story.” I pull her into my naked body and nuzzle my nose into her hair. “Now isn’t this better than being mad?”
“This changes nothing,” she whispers. “I’m still mad as hell you told Colby. It’s just that my curiosity is stronger than my anger at the moment.”
“Sex on Fire” ends and the next song on my playlist—“Beneath Your Beautiful” by Labrinth—begins. I hold her close and listen to the poignant lyrics of the song for a moment.
“Your very first felony?” she prompts, apparently not as swept away by the song as I am.
I kiss her head. “Okay. This is a Morgan-family classic: ‘The Story of Ryan’s Shitty Towel.’”
She giggles. “Oh my God.”
“Once upon a time, five-year-old Ryan took a gigantic crap in the toilet in our house and was then dismayed to discover the toilet paper roll empty. But, of course, because I’ve always been a can-do kind of guy, I solved my dilemma by wiping my ass with the nearest useful implement—which happened to be my mother’s precious Christmas hand towel hanging on a nearby rack.”
“Oh, Ryan.”
“It had little golden angels playing horns on it. Very pretty. Anyway, the minute I used Mom’s pretty angel-towel to wipe my little ass, I remembered she’d told Colby and me very clearly we weren’t allowed to touch her towels. And so, in an attempt to cover my tracks—pun intended—I re-hung the shit-streaked towel on the rack, exactly the way I’d found it and sneaked out of the bathroom.”
Tessa laughs. “Welcome to the criminal mind of a five-year old.”
“I was a criminal mastermind. So, seven-year-old Colby uses the bathroom a little while later and discovers the shitty towel hanging neatly on the rack, and he easily surmises the shit-wiper had to have been his stupid little brother, since Kat was a toddler in diapers, Keane was an avocado in our mom’s belly, and Dax didn’t exist yet. And you know what Colby did? If you think he ratted me out, you’d be wrong. Little Colby Morgan did the thing that laid the foundation of our brotherhood from that moment forward: he grabbed that shitty towel, sneaked outside with it under his jacket, and chucked it over our backyard fence into our neighbor’s yard.”
“Brilliant!”
“We were both geniuses.”
“And did you two get away with it?”
“We sure did. For about twenty minutes.”
Tessa giggles.
“That’s how long it took for Mrs. Wheeler from next door to come knocking on our front door, the shitty towel in her hand.”
“Fucking Mrs. Wheeler,” Tessa says.
“Fucking Mrs. Wheeler,” I agree.
“What’d your mom do to you?”
“She made us apologize to Mrs. Wheeler and to her, of course, and then she made us rake leaves off Mrs. Wheeler’s lawn and our own until we’d ‘worked off’ the price of a replacement towel.”
“God, I love your mom.”
