"You ass!"

Chad felt a fist land on his side, causing him to spring into a fetal position, which meant he could no longer fit on the sofa where he'd insisted on sleeping the night before, despite there being a perfectly good bed in the guest room that used to be Jo's. His mum had turned his room into a craft room, which always stung him a little.

He hit shoulder on the coffee table on his way down and heard his own wretched scream all before he'd opened his eyes.

He looked up, cocooned between the sofa and the table, nursing his shoulder. It was Jo, standing like an angry bull with her hands on her hips. "How could you?"

He sat up, leaning against the sofa. "Why are you yelling and assaulting me so early in the morning? Any assaulting has to wait until after coffee." He could see his sister's jaw clench and unclench. He smiled.

"First, dad's back in town and mum tells me you're okay with that? And then you tell her you're in love with some June girl, all the while you've had me believe you were still getting over Setal?"

Chad tried to protest. This was news to him. The whole being in love with June business, at least? "Hang on..."

"I'm not done!" Jo glared. "On top of all this, I have Setal calling me up asking what's the deal with the housemate of yours, who happens to be called June? What the hell, Chad. I thought you and I told each other everything before anyone else, but I'm the last one to know all this?"

Chad barely saw her take a breath in between all the words. She ended up drawing a lengthy one afterward, which sent him laughing. He reached an arm out to her and she hauled him up. "What?"

"Are you pregnant?" he asked, stretching out his stiff limbs. Perhaps the sofa hadn't been the best idea.

"What?"

"I had a dream you were."

"How is this related to anything I said?" Jo looked baffled.

"It's not, but I wanted to make sure this was truly you and not some hormone-charged woman."

Jo squared her shoulders for round two. "So who is June?"

"My flatmate." He headed for the kitchen where, to his surprise, their mum sat sipping her morning tea. "You let her assault me so you can find out who June is?"

She shrugged, cupping her teacup to her mouth. "Would you lower your voice? I have a splitting headache."

Chad fished out two ancient mugs from the cupboard where they had always sat for twenty-five years. These thick, ugly brown mugs from bygone eras "Didn't I give you a new set of China last Christmas?" he asked, looking at them in disgust.

Marjorie shrugged. "They were your grandmothers."

Jo slipped into the room behind Chad, intently scrawling the call log on Chad's phone. "I don't see a June here."

"Give me that!" He snatched his phone out of her hands.

"Why don't you have your roommate's number on your phone?"

"Flatmate."

"Whatever," Marjorie interjected. "Answer the damn question."

Chad chucked a filthy look at his mother. "Because," he started carefully, "she won't let me buy one, and she hasn't got one herself."

The two women narrowed their eyes at him. "Why would you need to buy her one?" they asked in unison. Chad hated when they did that.

He hadn't thought this through. He couldn't very well tell them the truth, and he wasn't going to. "She doesn't know which one to get and I'm the last person to tell her what's good out there."

"Yeah, true that." Jo's eyes glinted in laughter and she eyed his old phone. The phone bucked current trends, and Chad was happy to have it fixed till it was too obsolete to fix. "Is she a foreigner?" she asked.

Chad shook his head.

His mum cracked a big mischievous grin, winking at him sickly. "Maybe you both should go shopping together."

"Don't wink, mum," Chad whined, dilly-dallying with the mugs still in hand. "It's disturbing on you."

"For heaven's sake, are you going to make a cuppa or stand there obviously not having a crush on this girl?" She slipped off her chair in a huff and stomped to the kettle, shoving him out of the way to get to the tap to fill it.

"I don't have a crush on any girl," he stammered.

"Fine, June, then." His mother spat, unable to hide her annoyance, no doubt thanks to the river of wine they had consumed the night before. She placed the kettle to boil and snatched the mugs out of his hands, going about making tea. "I'll be dead before I see either of you married, let alone grandkids."

"Chad almost got married, if that counts?" Jo laughed.

Marjorie threw her daughter a look, looking her up and down. "When are you getting pregnant? Tick Tock."

Jo frowned. "Not everyone can rush into things like you two, and whatever happened to your generation frowning on a child out of wedlock?"

"Answer the questions. When are you having kids?" Chad added with a grin. He loved it when their mother focused on Jo's multiple, fleeting relationships and not his meager attempts to hold on to one. A cloudy memory of Setal walking away from him at the restaurant flashed in his mind, making him cringe.

"If you must know," Jo was saying with a hint of I'll-get-you-for-this in her voice. "No, Tom and I aren't pregnant, yet."

"Hope Tom's not pregnant. That'd be awkward!" Chad laughed, causing Jo to throw a dishtowel at him. She missed.

"You've been together forever." Their mother plunked their tea in front of them. Cranky or hung-over, they couldn't tell these days.

"Ten years of friendship doesn't count as dating, mum. Can we please get back to the point here?" Jo's eyes hinted at Chad. "The reason you called me over this morning."

Chad's sense of flight took a hold on him. "What?" but it was too late. They both turned on him, in sync.

"We want details," Jo demanded.

"How, when, what. Everything. Spill!" Marjorie closed in on him.

Chad eyed one woman, then the other. "I just got out of a long-term relationship. What do you think I am? A flake?"

"You could hardly call that a relationship." His mother's gaze locked on him. He could swear there was a hint of distress in her eyes. She'd never liked Setal.

"Three years." He fumbled for a reasonable defence.

"Admit it, Chad, it wasn't the best three years of your life," Jo added. "We barely saw you or heard from you in those years because you were too busy living life as she wanted." Again, he could hear the hurt in his sister's voice.

"You're the one who set me up with her in the first place," he accused. He never thought he'd stoop that low, but there it was. He was accusing his sister for his failed manhood.

"Didn't mean I wanted you to stick it out if it was rotten."

"She wanted you to have some fun," his mother added to his astonishment. "That girl wasn't sticking around. Anybody could have told you that. Even old Quinton next door could have, and he's blind as a bat."

"Then why didn't you two say something?" he stooped further.

"Uh... what part of we-could-barely-talk-to-you-without-Setal-attached-to-you-like-lichen-on-trees didn't you get?"

Chad stared at Jo. Really? Lichen on trees? He felt an urge to tell her that combination was a healthy symbiosis and did not support the point she was trying to make. "Can we get back to the point here?"

He deflected, pulling his tea to his lips, only to notice a tiny cockroach flaying on the hot surface. "You need to do something about your pest problem," he mumbled, draining the tea in the sink.

"Which one? The roaches or your father?" Marjorie almost snorted her tea out her nose.

Chad shrugged, looked at his watch, which had unfortunately stopped. He couldn't quite recall if it had ever been working in the first place when he'd put in on before heading over yesterday. "I gotta go." He pushed off the cabinets, ready to weasel past the two if needed.

"June!" Jo demanded. Chad had to rethink his push-past-them strategy. In the time he had spent writing short stories and entering writing competitions, Jo had been taking extracurricular activities such as karate and kickboxing. She had been an angry teen. He did not want to see her practice those skills, however rusty, on him.

He bit the bullet. A little white lie would hurt no one. "June is a new flatmate," he began. "She's been with me for a month, or maybe a little longer." The brows on the women rose, and he realised how that must have sounded. "Living in my house," he corrected. "And, yes, she is a nice girl. I won't lie."

"But..." Jo coaxed.

"But, nothing. We're friends. That's all. Besides, she's much too young for me." He squared his shoulders, getting ready to face the barrage of questions, but none came. "What?"

Marjorie and Jo did something that made him panic instead. They looked at each other with purpose and grinned before turning back to him. He knew what was coming before they even said it. He was already shaking his head in protest.

"We want to meet her," there was that eerie unison echo again.

"And soon," Marjorie added.

"But."

"Either you plan it, what, when, where and how," Jo threatened. "Or we will turn up at your house unannounced."

"Take your pick," Marjorie growled.

Chad felt forced to concede. Declare defeat. He even put his arms up in a gesture of surrender. "Fine, give me some time." The women relaxed and released him. Before dashing for the door, and before any more questions or demands were made, Chad added, "And no one interrogates her, or mentions anything of last night, or today. Get it?"

"How about a barbecue this Saturday at mine?" Jo grinned and nodded. "Bring her along."

Chad sighed. It was best not to make June uncomfortable in their own space. "Fine, I'll see if she is free. Now, can I go?" They nodded and Chad headed for the door.

"Oh, and your dad might pop by sometime," his mother called out as he reached for the doorknob. "He asked for your addresses."

"And you gave it to him?" Jo moaned.

"He's your father!" Chad heard his mother retorting as he let the door slam behind him. So much for coming over on a research mission for his memoir disguised as a romance novel. He had not received the coddling he had secretly wished for. Instead, his mum had laughed at the very idea.

Scarp it. The thought intruded as he reversed the car out of the steep driveway. Chad couldn't recall the number of times he had stumbled down the very hill when he was younger. He chalked the events of the morning as another stumble and peeled off down the road.

How was he going to tell June about the barbecue and his family wanting to meet her without sounding like a creep? He sighed, rolling down the window to help cool his flushed cheeks. Were his mother and Jo correct in assuming he had a crush, however small? The thought both made him smile and worry at the same time. What if this was it? His thoughts derailed. What if she was it and I'm not even trying?

"Stop it!" he yelled at himself, turning up the radio to drown out the voice.

(Image by Gerd Altmann on Pixabay)