Grinning widely at me, Hurst held his phone up. “Wanna see Levi in action when it comes to dealing with his kid’s poop? Lottie says he’s got something called coprophobia, I say he’s just a pussy.”
I knew what coprophobia was. A guy I’d been in the Air Force with had it, too. I’d seen a grown man have a panic attack at having to clean the portable heads out when we’d set up a base camp that was going to be built on and expanded. They’d brought in temporary toilets until the proper ones could be installed, and those things got nasty as hell, but I’d never seen a man do it with baby doodie.
Moving closer, I gestured with my chin at his phone as I took a seat on the desk next to him. “Lemme see.”
Hitting play, I watched Levi bend over with his hands on his knees and heave. “Oh, that’s…” he stopped and then gagged again.
In the background, his kid was lying on its back while it played with its toes. “Baby, damn, why can’t you save that for your momma? You know she’s okay with this shit,” he dry heaved again.
Straightening up, he stared down at a bag on the floor. “I’m the master of my mind and soul. I’m the master of my mind and soul,” he chanted as he leaned over to pick it up, aborting at the last second and dancing away from it. “I can’t do it.”
Then, he disappeared for a moment and came back with a mask on and these long black gloves that went up to his armpits. After he pulled the last one on, he reached behind him and pulled out a pair of tongs.
“I can do this.”
“No, he can’t,” murmured Hurst, shaking his head and laughing.
With his arm stretched out as far as it could go, Levi bent over and tried to pick up the bag with the tongs. For some reason, they wouldn’t pinch it hard enough for him to lift it all the way up, though, so he kept dropping it and having to start all over again.
“It’s like that grabbing arm game in an arcade,” DB mused. “I don’t get why he can’t get a pair of tongs to work.”
Shrugging, Hurst shook his head slowly. “The guy’s afraid of his kid's poop. I’d say not being able to use one of the easiest things in the kitchen is the least of his worries.”
I was inclined to think they were tied.
Eventually, Levi managed to balance the bag on top of them and was walking carefully toward the camera, like he was carrying a bomb. As he got closer, I groaned when I saw the bag.
Pointing at the opening, I muttered, “He didn’t tie it shut, did he?”
“Nope.”
Just as he got to an open area in his living room, someone knocked on the door, making him jump.
In the background, we heard a, “Hey, honey. Just thought I’d stop by and check on y’all,” but our eyes were on the bag.
See, as he’d jumped, he’d also turned his head to look behind him, and his hand had bounced the bag slightly. With the load inside shifting with it, the opening of the bag moved toward him. Thanks to it not being tied shut, the dirty diaper inside dropped out, and there was an audible thud as it hit something.
The look on Levi’s face as he looked down will live in my head for the rest of my life. I hope that when I’m ninety and eating pudding with my own diaper on, I’ll remember it and chuckle enough to dribble some of the pudding back out again.
Seeing what’d hit his foot, Levi dropped the tongs, grabbed two handfuls of hair, and let out a scream that would make a horror movie victim proud.
Then, he kicked his foot, booting the diaper far away from him, but unfortunately dislodging some of the poop at the same time, which we saw visibly land about a foot away from him.
Sadly—for him–he wasn’t looking at it. Instead, he pointed at his foot and yelled, “Shit on my toe!”
His mom, Erica, came into view as she ran toward him with her hand over her mouth, just as he took a step forward, right onto the poop.
I didn’t see what happened next because I was laughing so hard I had tears, and it wasn’t helped by the other two guys with me laughing just as hard. But I definitely heard the moment Levi puked.
After it ended, Hurst turned his phone off and put it on the desk. “His wife sent me it last night, but I still haven’t seen it all the way through. As soon as he steps in it and bellows out that noise like a buffalo, I start laughing too hard to see anything.”
Smacking his large hand down on my shoulder, DB gasped, “Just as well you only gagged and didn’t follow through with barf.”
True story!
It took us a moment to settle down, but Hurst cleared his throat and picked up a cup of coffee I hadn’t noticed once we did.
“How’re things with Miss Hadid? You looking after her, son?”
“Sure am. She met my folks over the weekend.”
One corner of his mouth tipped up in a smile. “Now, I like the sound of that. How’d it go?”
DB moved away from us and over to the coffee machine in the corner, then picked up a mug and held it in the air, asking without words if I wanted one. It went without saying that I needed as much caffeine as I could get right now, so I nodded and looked back to Hurst.
“It went well, they love her. She was nervous, to begin with, but once she realized how down to earth they were, she got over it.”
There was a moment’s silence as DB handed me my cup, and then Hurst blew my mind. “How are you gonna help Tamsin with her shit?”
The mug had almost been at my mouth, so I almost tipped it over when he basically said point-blank that he knew her story. Glaring at DB, I saw him hold his hands up in the air and shake his head rapidly.
Scowling at Hurst, I bit out, “How do you know?”
“Alex told me when it all happened. I was going to meet her instead of DB and Tabby ‘cos we didn’t think either of them would be able to keep the story quiet, but then Lindee had a scare when she went for her titty exam at the hospital, and we couldn’t do it.”
DB and I glanced at each other again. “Linda had a scare? She’s good, though, right?”
Blowing out a breath, he pushed his hand through his hair and stared into his coffee. “Yeah, there was a lump under her arm, and when they did the titty exam and an ultrasound on it, they decided to take a biopsy of it. Came back okay, but scared the shit out of me.”
I was fairly sure that Hurst wouldn’t survive without Linda and vice versa. They were the kind of couple who were so perfect for each other that their hearts beat for the other person. If one stopped, the other would stop.
For all of her joking and pranks when he had heart surgery two years ago, something changed in Linda the day Hurst collapsed and almost died. The color drained from her face, and what was left behind was a pale woman putting on a smile for her loved ones and the rest of the world.
She didn’t get her color back for months after it, and even now she seemed to be slightly more fragile than before—like she’d lost the ability to be truly carefree.
“Fuck, Hurst,” DB rasped, moving to stand in front of him with his own cup of coffee. “I had no idea.”
“She didn’t want anyone to know. Jose had her stuff going on, and our family always has shit going on… There’s never a good time to share news like that, you know? So she said we wouldn’t unless we had to.”