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“Bas—” I remembered Zeta was here. “Man.”
Toss.
When I put her down, Gravity hugged my leg, staring up at me with her enormous dark blue eyes, her lower lip curled down to stop herself from crying.
“What’s going on?” I ruffled her hair.
Where the hell was Dylan? Why wasn’t she coming out? She must’ve heard me walking in.
“Uncle Rhyrand, I got a boo-boo cutting sugar dough.” She extended her arm toward me.
“Let’s see.” I kneeled down on one knee and examined her arm. She was bullshitting me. Her pudgy forearm was pristine, with no scratch in sight.
Zeta chuckled above Gravity’s head.
“Where is it, exactly?” I clasped her little wrist, turning it from side to side.
“Right here.” A chubby finger pointed to a tiny beauty mark.
“Eh, I see.” I nodded gravely. “Looks pretty bad.”
“It hurts.” Another pout.
“Gotta be honest, I don’t know if you’ll make it out of this.”
That earned me a slap on the back of my neck with a kitchen towel from Zeta. I stifled a laugh.
“Go get the Band-Aids and markers. We’ll fix you up.”
Gravity nodded, dashing back to her room.
I stood up to find Zeta grinning big at me. I raised a hand. “Trust me, I’m hating every minute of it.”
“Mio caro, you’re growing up. You’ll be a great dad one day.”
“Is your daughter coming or what? We’re going to be late to a meeting downstairs.” I ignored her observation. I assumed Zeta didn’t know about our fake relationship, so there was no point in explaining my existence in Gravity’s life would be temporary.
“Oh yes. She jumped in the shower. She should be out any minute now.”
“Can you go tell her to hurry up?”
“No. And neither can you. She’s a lady. She needs time to prepare before going out.”
I rolled my tongue along my inner cheek. Gravity returned, clutching a small tin with Band-Aids and her marker box. I got down on one knee, snatching both.
“Where is it again?”
The kid pointed to a beauty mark on a completely different arm. I did appreciate how committed she was to the lie. A lawyer in the making.
“There.”
I opened the tin and grabbed a Band-Aid. I flattened it out on the uninjured spot, smoothing it over her skin. “Ink?”
“A giraffe eating a donut.”
“Random, but I’ll allow.” I grabbed the markers and started doodling on her Band-Aid.
It all started when Gravity got a paper cut one day when I was babysitting her. She insisted I put a Band-Aid on it, but when she realized they’d run out of colorful, themed Band-Aids, she threw a fit. This resulted in me giving her a TED Talk about the decay of moral society through consumerism and the pink tax before concluding that anyway, it was best to buy plain Band-Aids and just draw what you wanted on them. We’d been patching her completely unblemished body ever since. I doubted Michelangelo was ever as busy as I was these days.