It's Like Rain (Orlando Bloom/OC)

Chapter 14: Woke Up, Fell Out of Bed

"When it rains, I remember how I used to love you
When it rains, I remember how I still do"

Cookie's POV

11:15 am a day after Edwin's rather generous offer, I sit in a tattoo parlor and watch Nora fret. She is pacing back and forth while waiting for her turn to get a tattoo. She's been fretting for good ten minutes now and if her turn won't come anytime soon, I'm pretty sure she'll bolt.

Yes, exactly, a tattoo, even if they are so 90s. And yet, up until last two minutes, I was considering to take one as well. I'm still not certain I don't want one.

I cough when she huffs yet again, and glances at the clock, and I cough again when she resumes pacing.

"Are you getting down with something?" she asks, absentmindedly of course, as she continues to pace back and forth.

"I don't think so," I gasp in between two severe fits of coughing. Probably am, though. It feels like I am, but I don't want to screw up Nora's vacation over a little cold.

"That doesn't sound like it, Boo," Nora says then, glaring at me like I'm road kill. Yeah, that's so very familiar. I am a road kill. I'm a squashed armadillo on the side of the road. But in this case, the armadillo would be the lucky one.

The whole 'let's get out of the house and go shopping' thing was pretty much Nora's idea. So, shopping we went. Right after we woke up and ate breakfast and got dressed all pretty and bushy tailed.

The whole morning has been all about sudden rainstorms and thunder. We've gotten wet roughly about a dozen times, which didn't do any good for my cough, or to the feeling that I had caught something more than just a little cold. If there was one thing I hated, it was being sick.

But never mind the rain. We shopped until we dropped. So to speak. We were running in between shops, so that might have enabled to the dropping part of our little expedition to the Canberra's shopping district.

The last shower of rain forced us to seek shelter underneath an awning that belonged to a tattoo parlor. There were six other people standing underneath the awning already and Nora decided that she didn't want to stand around with them. She had – quite unexpectedly – grabbed my arm and yanked me inside the tattoo parlor. That was her spontaneous moment of the day.

My idea of a shopping spree would have been something else altogether.

Well, sure, getting a tattoo was about paying for the service of being nearly legally tortured – by choice of course – in a chair with a big butch biker guy, named Horace, hacking away a needle with warp speed into your skin.

Not that there was anything wrong to get a tattoo, if the occasion or the desire called for it, but that wasn't my idea of what shopping was all about.

While inside, it took Nora for about fifteen minutes to flip through the folders of examples and pick out the most pink butterfly there was in the mountains of folders on display and that I had ever seen on a page. Not even my 8-year-old niece, Ben's kid, who was still in her 'pink and princess' phase, had ever drawn that colored butterflies, let alone be interested in one in a picture.

And right now, having to wait for a little while longer, she was nervous. Not because of her choice, but because she had started to fear it might hurt.

The needle, that is.

"Does it hurt a lot?" she asks, for the hundredth time in two minutes.