Milkshake Hearts

Chapter 135: Just My Mother

Courtney gives a long sigh as she lies back on their sofa on Thursday evening, scrolling through Instagram on her phone. She reluctantly taps the text notification at the top of her screen, eyes rolling as she reads over the words.

"What's up?" Shayne asks, having heard her sigh from where he's sitting on the other sofa reading, Nutmeg curled up in the space beside him.

"Just my mother texting," Courtney brushes him off, as her eyes flick over the message.

"Hello Courtney! I've been thinking I might come over to Los Angeles sometime soon to visit you, Kari and the boys. You've mentioned you have a spare room at your house, right? And how does your schedule look in mid-late August?" the text reads.

"What's she saying?" Shayne asks, looking up from his bed, but Courtney shakes her head.

"Nothing much. Just being annoying."

She chooses not to reply to her mother, instead flicking back to Instagram to continue her mindless scrolling. She'll give herself a couple of days to come up with a reason to say no to her – work must have something, anyway.

She scrolls through her outlook calendar at work first thing the next morning, frowning when she gets to the latter half of August and finds it relatively free of major meetings – although, to be fair, that's partly because they don't really plan that far in advance. They have a relatively low-key day in the office, moving through one sketch shoot and a Games nasty sushi punishment shoot, and Courtney spends much of the downtimes between the shoots ruminating over what excuse to give her mother.

She could just lie and say they have a really busy work schedule, honestly, but her mother doesn't actually believe her job is a real job anyway, so who knows if she'd accept that.

Find a reason to be out of town? No, that doesn't work when her mother hadn't given specific dates.

She doesn't like having people over because it might trigger her migraines? No, her mother doesn't even know the migraines had been a thing, and to be fair, the medication she'd got after hospital had been working: she'd managed to kick the two that had tried to start since with one pill and ten minutes of mild pain.

Something about the cats? They're not fond of new people being around and it might be too stressful for them to have someone who they've never met before actually stay over?

"That could work," she mumbles, nodding to herself as she flicks through her phone again the next evening.

"Hm?" Shayne prompts, Courtney mentally cursing. She hadn't meant to say anything out loud – Shayne didn't need to know her mother had tried to invite herself to stay with them.

"Oh, just a dumb TikTok hack," she shrugs it off.

"Oh? Show me?" Shayne asks, tone brightening.

"Already scrolled on, sorry dude, it was not that great. I'll send you anything good, promise," she replies, Shayne laughing as she does.

"All good, all good. What do you want for dinner? I'm feeling takeaway Korean..."

"Deal," she agrees, genuine smile returning now that she knows she'd dodged the questioning successfully.

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Shayne and Courtney tend to do their fair share of hikes, but they often do them themselves. It had been Clarke and his partner Hannah's idea for a few of them to do one as a group that Saturday morning, though, and they meet up with Kari, Clarke and Conrad (and both their partners) in the car park at the base of the trail just on 9am.