The Rusty Old Minivan

Chapter 18

"She should be home in about fifteen," Louis said to the group.

To their luck Lottie had stayed the night at Chace's so Harry and Louis had had the time to run to the shops and get her a cheap present.

Now, everyone was sitting on the big bed, waiting for Lottie to arrive home from school; Fizzy, the twin girls, the toddlers, Freddie and Harry. Louis had managed to track down Chace's mum's phone number, called her up to get a hold of Chace and then convinced him to come to their local all-you-can-eat buffet at six pm to celebrate Lottie. Not that it'd been easy; it'd taken just about all Louis had in him not to lose his saccharine sugar-voice and shout at Chace to 'pull his boney arse together' and 'stop moaning about having to do something for his girlfriend when he should be happy he even had one to begin with!'. In the end, though, Chace had agreed, and now all seemed to have fallen into place.

"And you wrapped the present, right Fiz?"

"Yeah," Fizzy said, pointing to the kitchen table where the square box stood, rolled up in curly tinfoil-paper.

Louis bit back a snappy 'you had one job' and got up to find some proper wrapping paper, or at least just straighten out the tinfoil if he couldn't.

Before he managed, the door-handle was pulled. "Shit, Lottie's home! Fuck!" Louis shouted, shoving the tinfoil-wrapped gift in behind the microwave.

The door opened and Lottie looked at the bunch on the big bed, then at Louis, quirking an eyebrow. "You know I can hear you from outside, right?" she said, dumping her schoolbag on the floor and unzipping her coat with a snort, "lovely to hear how happy you all are to have me home."

"Oh, don't be such a sourpuss. It's your birthday," Louis cooed, running up to give her a hug, which she quickly wriggled herself out of.

"I can cry if I want to," she replied simply, then plopped down between the others on the big bed. "So. What've you gotten me? That pony that I wanted?"

"Darnit!" Harry exclaimed, "I knew I should've gotten you that instead of the Ferrari I bought. God, I'm such a moron, now I might as well just drive it in the river."

Lottie laughed. Louis laughed too, watching her. It occurred to him then that it'd been a while since he'd heard the sound of her laugh. He wrote himself a mental note to give Harry a blowjob for that later.

They spent the afternoon hanging out and playing Monopoly. Within an hour, Fizzy was basically running the entire town like some power-sick dictator/bank-manager, while Harry was trying to keep Doris from eating the tokens, Lottie was clinging to jail to keep from losing her last money and Louis was surviving solely on snatching money from the bank whenever Fizzy looked the other way. In the end he was caught, and by true Tomlinson-tradition, it ended in a massive row.

Lottie ended it, pulling the 'it's my birthday'-card, and then it was time to get ready to go for dinner, thank fuck.

Louis and Harry dressed the toddlers, which meant actually putting shoes on them for once. Harry tried to gel Ernest's hair down for him, which resulted in Harry getting a big lump of gel smudged down the side of his face.

"Yeah, we don't really do fancy here in the fam," Louis told him as he guided him down on a chair and grabbed a piece of tissue to wipe his face. "I mean, unless you consider remembering zip your fly fancy."

"I don't," Harry said, then reached forward and yanked at Louis' zipper to make him buck backwards with a screech.

Harry barked a laugh and dragged him close again and Louis slapped him lightly over the cheek.