Beauty and the Beat

Beauty and the Beat (16)

“Drop the cookie.”

“Not gonna happen.”

I glowered at Ethan as he waved the cookie in front of me. I leapt for it, but he simply moved it out of the way and I fell into the table and collapsed onto the floor.

He stuck his tongue out at me and ate half of the cookie in one bite. “Smooth move.”

I scowled at him before pulling myself up into another seat around the table. “Your mom made those for me,” I couldn't help but argue.

Ethan rolled his eyes and looked back down at the tests he was grading. I couldn't help but wonder which one was mine. “But I was hungry,” was all he said back to me.

I humphed. I was having a great time without him here after school, but then he got home. Since he was a teacher, he had to stay later than I did. So at least I got some time without him.

He threw the other half of the cookie at me. “Here.”

I had been there for a week already, and luckily no one knew that I was actually living with my teacher. I only told Bennett, and I made sure to tell him not to tell Maxxon no matter what. I didn’t even tell Freya, because there was a huge chance that she would freak the heck out over nothing.

Just like I thought, living with Ethan was nowhere near easy. We fought even more than we used to, considering we spent so much time together now. Steve worked a lot, and so did Brianna, so they weren’t home nearly as much as I wished they were. Even Riley had gotten a job so he was gone every once in a while.

We fought even more now that we lived in the same house. It made me wonder how it was going to be once Ethan got married. Was he going to be rude and annoying toward the girl he loved? Seemed like it.

“I still don’t know why you still live with your parents,” I would mutter after every argument.

He would then say, “Free food, and my mother does my laundry. Why wouldn’t I live here?”

For someone who was supposedly so smart, he sure acted like a child. Which I just didn’t understand. When he was around his sister-in-law, he acted like a child more than I had ever seen before. But even when she wasn’t around, he still had childish tendencies.

Especially when he was sleepy. In the mornings and at night, he was more like a little kid than ever. If we were in the living room, he would curl up into a ball on the couch and fall asleep. One night, his head even dropped onto my shoulder while I was watching TV. I didn’t push him off because I would have felt guilty if I did.

Then there was one morning, the first school morning I was there. We had to share a bathroom, and since we both got up at the same time, we were in there at the same time. Ethan must have forgotten that I was there, because he stumbled into the bathroom and lowered the front of his pants so he could pee.

He might have been facing toward the toilet and away from me, but this was still too much. I practically screamed and ran right out of the bathroom. He hadn’t even noticed that I had been there until he saw how red my face was later at breakfast.

I wasn’t about to admit this out loud, but he was actually kind of cute when he was sleepy. It almost reminded me of when we were kids, but he even tortured me back then as well. If only he had been like that when we were little. Had he been just as cute when he was tired when he was little?

“I’m so hungry,” I whined, sinking down into my seat. There was no point in me being there anymore, since the cookies were gone, but since he had been the one to eat them all, I was going to annoy him as much as I could. “You ate my last cookie.”