SWOLLEN: A Secret Baby Sports Romance (14 page)

“
Three beds, Mom. You said three beds. The advert said three beds.”

“
Well, to be fair, there are three beds.”

Gah. Twin beds in one room and a double bed in the other doesn’t count. Am I the only one that seems bothered by this somewhat integral anomaly.

“
Maybe they meant the lounge. Is this a sofa bed?”

I watch The Donkey wrestle momentarily with the tiny two seater sofa, until he determines beyond reasonable doubt, that it isn’t in fact guilty of camouflaging itself as a bed.

“
I can’t stay in here with him.”

Mom looks at me and then she looks at Marvin and then everyone looks at me. The Donkey shrugs his thick, muscly shoulders.

“
They said it was perfect for a family. Three beds, cute little cottage in the countryside. It is a cute little cottage.”

“
I’m fine with it.”

Landon has already put his bag down and is testing the bed for comfort.

“
Mom?”

“
It is what it is, darling. We’ll just have to make do.”

“
Make do. I’m nineteen years old, not nine.”

“
Nineteen, are you really?”

I don’t like the way Landon is looking at me.

“
Can you call them?”

“
And say what?”

“
I don’t know, maybe they can put us in a different cottage, or they can give us a refund or whatever.”

“
Sleep in the lounge if it bothers you that much, but I’m staying here.”

That’s typical of him.

“
Come on, you’re both adults, I’m sure we can work this out.”

“
Exactly, Marvin. Adults need their own space. I can’t believe you booked this with only two rooms.”

“
Well, maybe Landon will take the lounge then.”

“
No, he won’t.”

“
Am I the only one that sees a problem with this?”

I’m being ignored. Marvin is busy unpacking the bags while Mom takes control of the kitchen and Landon just lies there on the bed in what should be my room, his huge arms folded up by his head, my question hanging in the air.

“
Fine, I’ll sleep in the lounge.”

“
Do whatever you like, dear, but you know Marvin and I get up early and I don’t want you in the way.”

Great. The Donkey gets a whole room to himself, while I have to get up at the crack of dawn with superman and wonderwoman. I should never have come on this holiday in the first place. I knew he’d be like this too. Arrogant, selfish, chauvinistic, and frustratingly good looking.

I get half way through wrestling the mattress off the bed before I realize there is no way I’ll be able to set up my bed until everyone has finished with the lounge, which also rather conveniently doubles as the dining room. Landon watches me with his sexy eyes, laughing every now and again at my efforts. Screw him. Even if I have to get up at 6 am, I’m still going to get a much better night’s sleep without being in the same room as him and listening to him go on and on about how many records he’s broken or how thick his biceps are or just how long it takes him to wash every inch of his perfect, swollen, manhood.

I decide to take a walk around the property just to cool off. The tour of the house, which from now on I’m refusing to call anything other than the bungalow, takes about a minute. The lounge, which also doubles as my bedroom, the dining room, and open plan kitchen, is at the centre of the property and is where the front door immediately opens on to. From that, there is a room either side, the smaller of which - The Donkey’s room - has the bathroom next to it.

Perhaps the bungalow’s best feature is a huge single wall set of french windows that lead onto the decking at the back of the property, upon which sits a jacuzzi that looks like it hasn’t been used in years. Beyond, and as far as the eye can see, there are fields that disappear towards the horizon.

I can’t see another house, bungalow, shed, kennel or any other structure that might offer shelter or a suggestion of inhabitation. A walk to what looks like a flattened perimeter fence at the bottom of what I guess is the garden to the property, takes about five minutes. From here, if I wanted to, I could walk for what looks like hours across fields without getting anywhere.

It’s isolated, and it’s supposed to be peaceful, but I’m not entirely sure whether it is or not.

My cell phone still has no bars. I head to what looks like the highest spot on the land, and I still can’t get reception.

One week. Seven days. One hundred and fifty six hours. Just me, The Donkey, my mom, his dad, a huge penis, and a whole lot of nothing else to concentrate on. This is going to kill me.

Landon

While Little Miss Moody goes off to the end of the garden to hopefully never return again, I make the space she’s left me my own. I haven’t brought a lot of stuff with me, just a few hundred movies, weights, skipping rope, running shoes and essential exercise gear, magazines - but not the kind of shit she reads, a signal booster for my cell phone that doesn’t work, and as many footballs as I could fit into the trunk. The garden, cornfield, wild forest or whatever you call it, looks like the perfect place to practise my targeting, and I already know who I’m going to get to bring the balls back to me as well. Tilly might not look too bad skipping across the fields in a short cheerleader’s skirt either. She looks like the kind of girl who might need to do a bit of that to let her hair down.

Once I’ve got myself organized, I’ve checked out the jacuzzi and the rest of the miniscule property, I slump down on the couch in the living room and wait for something interesting to happen.

It doesn’t.

“
How long are we here for again?”

“
One week, Landon.”

How is it exactly that no matter where they are, parents never seem to get bored? Rachel’s waltzing around the kitchen like she’s been here a thousand times already, something on the stove and God knows what else already in the oven, and Dad’s found an armchair, and a stack of maps and tourist pamphlets in a drawer, he’s busy strategically going through.

“
One week. Remind me exactly what it is we are doing here? I can’t even get cell phone reception.”

“
What do you need your cell phone for?”

“
To connect with the world.”

Rachel doesn’t seem at all impressed by that.

“
Landon! Look at this place. It’s incredibly beautiful. We are surrounded by countryside, nature, trees, this is the world.”

“
The world has people in it.”

“
Why don’t you go and find your sister if you’re looking for something to do, maybe you two can play a board game or something.”

I don’t even dignify that comment with a response.

“
Look, I don’t know what you did when you were my age, but people these days need their cell phones, they need the internet. I didn’t even think there were places in the world where you couldn’t get a cell phone reception.”

“
You can last a week without Facebook, it’ll do you good.”

This is going to be harder than I thought it would be. Less than an hour in, and I’m already bored. Maybe I should go and find Tilly, at least I’d have someone to tease. She clearly doesn’t like me, although I have absolutely no idea why, which means that teasing her and entertaining myself in the process is going to be ten times as easy as it would be if she were drooling all over me like ninety five percent of the rest of the female population. Now that would be complicated. Even if my body wasn’t on temporary lockdown, and in some kind of strange alternate universe I wanted her,  step-sister is clearly a classic and perennial no go zone. Imagine that one in the papers. That wouldn’t just bench me for a couple of years, that might end my burgeoning model career too.

It’s a good job she’s not my type. Of course, I can’t help it if she’s attracted to me, which would go some way to explaining her weird mood, but at least like this it’s going to be much easier to get through this period of forced abstinence.

I’ve no idea when I’m going to get the chance again, and seeing as there’s little else to do here, I’m going to make the most of the week I get to have a little sister. She’s going to be doing absolutely everything I want, and I’m not going to give her a choice about it either. Of course, as we all know, every younger sister idolizes their big brother. They naturally want to please them in everything they do. That’s just the science of evolution.

“
What?”

Tilly’s reappeared at the french windows, her hands on her hips, staring at me staring at her. It could be worse. With the light behind her she actually looks alright. I wonder if she knows her dress is a little see-through, and not only can I tell the color of her panties, I think I even recognize the brand.

“
Nothing”, I say. “I was just thinking about evolutionary traits.”

Tilly flashes me a look of mistrust, and then she ignores me completely.  

“
There’s a dead bird at the end of the garden.”

“
Welcome to the real world”, I say.

Tilly looks for somewhere to sit, and disinclined to share the tiny sofa with me, she hovers for a while, pretending to be occupied by something important, before finally disappearing into our bedroom. I keep my eyes on her, because I know she’s going to come straight out of it again.

“
There’s stuff on my bed.”

Her comment is directed at me, even though she’s not looking at me directly.

“
Mom.”

“
A dead bird, I know. Maybe there are foxes.”

“
Foxes live in cities”, Dad says without looking up from one of his brochures.

“
Not the bird, the bed”, Tilly says, repeating herself. “The room is full of Landon’s exercise equipment.”

Rachel looks from her daughter, to me. I put my hands up passively. In this T-shirt, I know I look ripped, and I’m not letting the irony get lost.

“
I thought you were sleeping in here.”

“
I still need the mattress, Landon.”

She really is uptight.

“
I’ll move the stuff before you need it, don’t worry.”

“
I can’t even sit down.”

“
Sit down in here”, I tell her. “I thought this was meant to be a family holiday anyway. We can get to know each other.”

“
Exactly”, Rachel adds.

Tilly looks infuriated and very uncomfortable. It makes her look cute.  

“
Sit here if you want”, I offer, the size of the space to my side clearly just big enough for her to wedge herself into.

“
I’ll sit on the decking”, Tilly says. “We don’t even fit in here.”

“
Suit yourself.”

“
One hundred and sixty nine kilometres of tracks around here”, Dad says, finally looking up from his stack of leaflets. “There are owls too. I think we should take a walk tomorrow.”

“
You do what you like tomorrow, I’m going to sit here and watch movies all day.”

“
You can sit inside in the city all you like, you shouldn’t waste the opportunity while you’ve got it. A walk might do you good, a bit of country air.”

Country air is not what I need to get me through the summer. Landon Maddox is not the kind of guy to pull on gumboots and track animals through the trees. Hunting girls? Yes. Hunting animals? No.

“
I’ve done alright without it so far, city air is just as good.”

“
You’ll be the one missing out.”

I can’t be bothered to argue. Family holiday to please the coach, the owners, Rachel and Dad. I can cope with that. I owe them that for not making the wedding. I can stay out of trouble here, even if it bores me senseless. Seven days putting up with Dad’s idiosyncrasies, Rachel’s relentless enthusiasm and Tilly’s teenage mood swings. In agreeing to come, it buys me brownie points with the club, which are likely to come in useful if anything happens next year. It gives me the opportunity to demonstrate to my new mother-in-law that I’m not the Landon Maddox of the magazines and the vast newspaper column inches and it gives me the opportunity to finally find out what it’s like to have a girl in my life I’m not allowed to sleep with, although with this fix I’m in, I guess that every single girl in the world falls into that category.

This is more than that though, this is
can’t sleep with
even if coach called me up tomorrow and said I was released from my obligations. This has
don’t touch
written all over it, from now until the end of my football playing career. This may be only a week for all of us here, but Tilly and I are going to be step-siblings until the end of time. I never thought Dad and Mom were going to split up until it was obvious that they were. Looking at Dad and Rachel now, I don’t think I can remember seeing anyone else so smitten, content, and sickeningly in love as those two. Tilly and I are in for the long haul, that’s for sure. I better make sure we go to know each other then.