Twelve Nights

Chapter 3: Day Two

I crawled tighter into a ball and then blinked several times, no matter how hard I tried getting back to sleep my body was too used to waking up at six o'clock sharp.

I yawned quietly and then slowly got out of bed, shivering with the shock of feeling the cold morning air hitting my skin. I always had loved just laying in bed but if it meant spending less time looking at my son then I always chose getting out of bed.

I walked to the white cot, Archie was led on his back with his fingers outstretched, his eyes flickering as he slept. His tiny baby fingers clenched into little balls and then unclenched wide, a small smile appeard on his cheeky face and his eyes opened wide almost as if he could sense me watching him.

A smile spread to my own lips and I made a little cooing noise to hopefully stop him from crying but in Archie's world, hoping wasn't good enough.

His cry pierced my ear drums and I straight away put my hands in the crib, scooped him up and then rocked him back and forth in my arms, walking towards the kitchen to prepare him some milk if he were hungry.

He twisted in my arms as I waited for it to be the right temperature and then put it in his bottle, he wriggled around making me knock over a jug which fell to the ground and clattered into hundreds of pieces.

I bit my tongue, not wanting to say anything even remotely close to swearing for fear of Archie hearing it.

"What's going on? Sounds like a burgular!" Paul, my step mothers son hissed from the sofa.

I spun around to look at him, his hair was a complete mess and he looked very very hung over.

"Aww...Drink to much did you?" I asked him as he got up, stretching and then picking up the pillows that lay on the floor around him.

He was twenty one years old, young face that the girls adored, full head of mess dark blonde hair, muscular body and very arrogant with it too.

"It's called having fun." he yawned and then put his hands to his head as if to sooth a headache.

"Well whatever you call it, I can't wait to see the latest pictures of what you got up to, I'm sure there will be the token slut in the mix somewhere." I muttered as I put Archie in a rocker so that I could pick up the mess of the broken jug.

"Oh believe me, there were loads of sluts there last night." he smirked and then looked into the distance, smiling even more, "Although there is one thing that was strange last night."

"What was that? Somebody said no to you for once or even stranger, you said no to somebody else?" 

"There was no declining of anything on the table. What I mean is that last night, I'm pretty sure I saw an ambulance headed the direction of Butlers house." Paul raked a hand through his hair and then went to Archie, waving at him and pulling a funny face.

I looked away from Paul who was waiting for an answer and just froze for a couple of seconds, could something of actually happened to Mr Butler? Who cared anyway, he was an asshole, right?

"Well that could have been anybody." I said under my breath, dumping the remenants of the jug in the nearest bin.

"I doubt it unless somebody else lives in his house with him that neither of us know about, I saw the ambulance drive right up to the front door-"

"What were you doing in his garden again? I thought after the last time that you would have learnt that it's trespassing and that you will have to spend hard time in prison if you do trespass!"

My cheeks beamed red as I remembered the last time Paul was caught in his garden, drunk and high in the sky. It was the last time he used drugs although it obviously wasn't the last time he acted like a child and went to terrorize the neighbourhood. I'd had to sacrifice a week of holiday to stop Paul from getting sent to jail.