“Wakey wakey, Doc.”
I groaned at Lilah and pulled my pillow over my head for good measure. “Leave me alone,” I mumbled.
She persistently prodded my pillow. “Nope. Get up, shower, and get dressed. Real clothes, not sweats or PJs.”
“Why?”
Her voice came from around my bedroom door. “Jack will be here at 8:00. You have two hours.”
“Who the hell’s Jack?” I yelled from under my pillow.
“Your dinner date, girlie. Up.”
Frustration rumbled through my brain until I was awake enough to finally process what she’d said and pulled my head out from under my pillow. “Mydinner date? Can’t we postpone this?”
“No,” she called from the kitchen. “Get up or I get the bucket.”
“Goddammit.” I sat up, wrapped my blanket around me, and shuffled out to the kitchen.
By bucket she meant a bucket of cold water.
Yes, she absolutely would do it. She was an annoying morning person and I… wasn’t. Even though we were speaking about a dinnerdate, evidently I wasn’t all that much of aneveningperson either.
“Why do I have to do this?” I asked, fully aware I was whining.
She pointed at the steaming mug of peppermint hot tea sitting on the counter in my favorite Hello Kitty mug. “Because all three of us had a shitty twenty-four hours for pretty much the same reason, and we can commiserate over beef tips.” She smiled at me. “And roasted beets, plus a Caesar salad with freshly made dressing. And you can’t have a choco-maccy cookie until after dinner.”
I spotted the plate of freshly baked chocolate-macadamia cookies—also my favorite—on the counter and glared. “Not fair bribing me with my favorite foods.”
“Absolutely fair.”
I noticed she’d showered recently, her long, dark blonde hair still damp and piled on top of her head in a messy bun. She wore jeans and the long-sleeved Scooby-Doo T-shirt I’d given her last Christmas.
“I know how to play dirty. If nothing else we’re making a new friend, right? Didn’t we talk last week that we’re overdue to reach out more? Expand our social circle?”
I pulled the mug into my hands, wrapped my fingers around it, and leaned against the counter as I deeply inhaled its comforting aroma. “You suck.”
“Love you, too.”
I nudged her shoulder with my head because her hands were messy with whatever part of the meal she was now preparing before I headed back to take a wake-up shower.
She’d learned how to cook under the close tutelage of Mort and Sara and had spent countless hours doing it with them while working part-time at the restaurant. Meanwhile, I had usually been studying. I could cook but I didn’t enjoy it the way she did, and I limited myself to basic dishes like mac and cheese, spaghetti, hamburgers. I could grill a mean steak, though, and my meatloaf was better than hers. Even she grudgingly admitted that.
I was reasonably more awake a half-hour later when I returned to the kitchen to make myself another mug of hot tea. I drank tons of coffee in the morning and could still fall asleep, like I’d done that morning, but no matter what shift I worked, if I drank caffeine at night, it wired me and totally fucked up my system.
Unlike Lilah, who could drink coffee 24/7 and still fall asleep at the drop of a hat.
Lucky bitch.
I’d opted for jeans and a Flintstones T-shirt. Hey, I wore what the hell I want at home. On the days I wasn’t expected to be in surgery I usually wore scrub tops featuring cartoon characters or cute animals.
The fact that I could use the excuse the kids love them was a bonus. I figured Lilah and I didn’t have childhoods like the average person, and we have our own money, so we both wore what we liked in our free time. She has a Stitch collection to be envied, with the occasional other cartoon character tossedin, while my tastes ranged from Hello Kitty to classic cartoon characters. We both loved Star Trek, and our living room shelves reflected that fact via collectables we’d acquired over the years. We’ve both joked that we couldn’t live apart because we couldn’t bear to lose any of what we’ve purchased.
Sure that makes me weird, and I’ll own it.
What I held back from Lilah was the fact that Joe had also told me that night I’d have to get rid of most of my collectibles, because he didn’t want to explain them to his family. And that Lilah wouldn’t live with us.
The clown-car vagina hadn’t been the final tipping point because I’d been so stunned over that announcement that when he started planning my uterus’ future for me, I’d finally regained my voice and noped right the hell out.
