She pours antiseptic onto the gauze and starts to gently clean the area, but it burns like a bitch. I hiss loudly drawing in a breath.

“Oh, quit being such a baby,” she chides. She bends down and blows across it, and I suppose she’s trying to ease the sting. But the gentle feel of her breath on my skin starts a brand new kind of ache. My dick starts to press against my fly.

“I can do it,” I say. I try to turn, but she grabs my belt loop and holds me still. I close my eyes and think about cheeseburgers. Warts. Ice. But then my ice turns into a drop of water melting and sliding down her skin in my lust-filled mind. Oh, holy hell. “I can do it,” I say again.

Suddenly she notices the bulge behind my fly. “Oh,” she says, her cheeks turning rosy. “Whoops.” She giggles and shoves the first aid supplies into my hands. “Didn’t, um, mean to, um, cause that.” She waves a hand toward my dick. “I mean, we can’t do that again.”

“We totally should,” I tell her, my voice gravelly. “I mean, if you ever drop your moratorium against sleeping with someone twice.”

She nods at me, her gaze once more falling to my dick, which is still standing at attention. “Tempting,” she offers. She grins at me. “You might need help with that.”

I roll my eyes. “I can handle it, thanks.”

“If you say so.” She turns and goes to her room. At the last moment, she turns back to me. “What time do you want to leave in the morning? I need to go talk to my mother’s doctor before we leave, and I guess you’re going with me.”

“Whenever you get up.”

She nods. “I guess we can’t say whenever you get up, since, well…” She grins at me.

“Beautiful and funny,” I mutter.

She lays a hand on her chest. “Did you just call me funny?” She bats her lashes at me.

“Among other things.”

She shrugs. “I like funny better.” Then she goes into her room, the door softly clicking closed behind her.

“Yeah, I do too,” I murmur to no one.

I think I’m in trouble. Big trouble.

Fin

Two cups of coffee is not enough. Tag doesn’t seem to mind my bitchiness, though. He walks solemnly beside me down the sidewalk. I take a deep breath, because for the first time ever, I want to tell someone about my mom.

“The first time my mother ever tried to kill me, we were on a Ferris wheel at the county fair. She was cycling, I know now. I didn’t know it then. I just though we were going to have a fun day. My mother had days that were really low, but every now and then she would have an up day. And when she was up, she was flying. She had an imagination and she wanted to go on adventures and we laughed and played.”

Tag walks along beside me and doesn’t say anything. He just listens.

“But I was six the first time she ever tried to kill me.”

I sink into the memory like it was yesterday.

“I don’t want to go,” I whispered to her, as we stood in line for the Ferris wheel.

She squatted down next to me. “What did you say, sweetie?”

“I don’t want to go,” I said again, this time a little louder.

She stood back up, still holding tightly to my hand. “Oh, everyone needs to ride the Ferris wheel, sweetie.” She spread her arms out wide. “The world looks so big from up there.”

I tugged on her hand again. “I don’t want to go.”

But she was already passing our tickets to the carnival worker. She jerked my arm and yanked me onto the platform. I followed her, because she was squeezing my hand so hard it hurt. There was a frantic look in her eye, and I knew that our up day was over. She was on the way back down and crashing hard.

And she was going to take me with her.

We got in the seat and the carnival worker clamped the long bar across our laps, but my legs were so small that it barely held me in. The contraption rocked as it began to rotate, and I grabbed the bar as tight as I could. Mom leaned over the edge and looked down. “Look, baby.”

I squeezed my eyes shut. I didn’t want to look.

The seat rocked again as more people got on. “Look,” she said again. She yelled it this time, and I saw the people in the bucket above us look down at us with a frown. I wanted to tell them I was fine, but I was not fine. I was not ever going to be fine.

The rocking stopped and we started to move in a slow circle. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Open your eyes,” Mom said.

The wind very gently blew my hair back, and I was glad I’d let her put the pretty pink bows in my hair before we left home that morning.

“I said open your eyes,” Mom snarled. She squeezed my chin between her thumb and forefinger and I let out a cry. “Are you afraid to fall?” she asked. She held her arms out to the side and closed her eyes, her face contrary to what was going on in her head. She confused me so much when she got like this. “Are you afraid to fall?” she asked again, this time louder.

“No,” I said quietly. I was much more afraid to be in that bucket with her.

Suddenly, she grabbed the front of my dress and lifted me from my seat onto her lap. The bar was so loose that it provided no resistance at all. I wrapped my arms around her neck.

“I’m going to teach you an important life lesson, sweetie,” she said, her voice close to my ear.

“No!” I struggled to hold on to her, but she pried my arms away from her neck as she turned me upside down. She held me by my feet over the back of the basket, and I flailed, trying to find something to hold on to. “Mommy!” I screamed.