Spanish Accent (The Accents #2)

Battle for life and death

I eyed Abi's finger as it made its way from the pillow resting in her lap to rest on my laptop's screen.

"I like this one." She said, pointing at a particular photo.

"You know, it's a slide show. You could just tell me you liked it without staining my precious screen with your sticky fingers." I told her.

She rolled her eyes but snatched her finger back.

"You're oversensitive."

How come I've already heard it from two different people during the past week?

"I'm not." I objected. "And the photo's overexposed."

Many of them were since the day I took them was quite sunny.

"How about this one?" Abi made a move, as if she wanted to touch the screen again but stopped herself midway. "It's pretty natural."

"And his face expression is priceless." I grinned.

The photo was one of those from the a-second-before-the-accident category. Max was standing in the middle, looking up at the stream of water falling down at him. During today's session, I had Abi climb up into the tree house and splash buckets of water on him from above. I set my camera to a big frequency, so that I could make many photos in a short time. As a result, I got a short story where single photos made a movie while scrolled very fast. Now I just had to choose the best ones for retouching. And because Abi was spending her evening at home tonight – still not having resolved her conflict with Dom, - I asked her to help me with it.

I threw the photo into the retouching folder and moved on to the next one.

"This one is exactly the same as the previous one." Abi complained.

"I always need three copies, in case the other two came out wrong."

"God." She kicked her feet up and dropped them next to mine on the coffee table. "Even photography requires responsibility. I couldn't even be a photographer."

"You can cook." I replied. "And your muffins change lives. I can just press a button and use a photoshop."

"At least you can do something beautiful. I lack the artistic gene. My cupcakes might taste amazing, but they look like shit."

I looked at her pointedly.

"I would starve if you left me alone for the weekend. I think I still win in the competition of uselessness."

Abi snorted.

"Whatever. At least we stick together. You won't starve, and I have some great pictures to frame and hang on my bedroom wall."

"About that..."

I quickly ended the slide show and scrolled down to the bottom of the folder, looking for a particular photo. When I found it, I clicked on it and bit my lip while waiting for the picture to load.

"I can't believe you were photographing us!" Abi exclaimed, jumping on the couch.

I laughed. We were looking at a photo representing Abi's and Dom's epic battle for the water balloons. It started when Abi threw the first balloon at him, wanting to piss him off. What she didn't predict, was that he was going to strike back and begin what had to be the most intense water balloon fight I've ever seen.

"I couldn't help myself. You were just too cute."

"Cute?" She raised a brow. "It was a fight for life and death!"

I put up a finger. "Wait. There's more of it." I clicked through a series of pictures showing different stages of their battle before stopping on my favorite one. I heard Abi gasp next to me and had to bite my lip to keep myself from laughing.