Shawn's Law (4 page)

By the time I had it in the bag and tied off, Shawn had changed positions and my dick was no longer rock hard.

After that day, I put off speaking to Shawn for fear of going hard while trying to ask him on a date with the memory of his butt in the air. It turned out to be a good thing, because I usually found him in the garden doing something on his hands and knees—weeding, planting, digging—all with that wonderful butt sticking out. I was nearly at the stage of being enough under control to introduce myself, when he launched himself into outer space using a Target catalog. He was lying there hurting, and all I could think of was us having our own little dance together—under the sprinkler without our clothes.

It was extremely difficult to keep a straight face (and other things) when he turned and walked back up the steps to the house, rubbing that part of his body that I was already having trouble with not thinking about. I scuttled away like a scared little boy. Even the stupid nickname of Hippy-Hotpants didn’t put me off. It was adorable that he’d thought of me enough to give me a name.

I vowed to be a man the next time I saw him—which unhappily was as they were taking him to hospital. I swear my heart stopped beating. I hate hospitals. I completely loathe them. Hospitals have nurses in squeaky shoes walking around in white like they’re angels, only to stab you with sharp, pointy needles when you least expect it. I listened with horror to the story Shawn told me about chasing the snake around the backyard.

A freakin’ dugite, of all things. They’re one of the world’s most venomous snakes and common in Perth—although getting bitten is rare, since they’re not known to be aggressive. I went home afterward and googled it, only to find that yes, people do die from dugite bites. I thought he was dying right then in the ambulance when he started vomiting and shaking. The paramedic gave her partner a significant look and they hustled to get Shawn set so they could take off. She turned to me and asked, “Are you a friend?”

What else could I say? Of course I was a friend, or I guess, more accurately, I was hoping to become a very close friend. So the next thing I knew, I was in charge of Shawn’s forgetful mother and Shawn had been carted off in an ambulance. Not exactly how I hoped the day would end. Greg—who I would come to know quite well—glared at me and said, “Ring Shawn’s sister.” Not a lot to go on there, but I’m good at improvising. I had Shawn’s name, I had his address, how hard could it be?

So it was with only a little bit of trepidation that I approached the house. The last time I’d seen Shawn’s mother, she wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing. This was something I would usually heartily condone and agree with—someone’s right to be naked whenever they wanted—but now that I was “in charge” of the woman, I sincerely hoped to find her clothed.

She was, although it looked like she had three shirts on. She had to be hot, since it was summer. She looked at me with a cheerful smile as I walked unannounced into her home.

“Are you my date for the dance?” she asked with a wide smile that deepened all the wrinkles in her face.

I stopped. I remembered about the Alzheimer’s but had no clue how to react. I decided to play along. “Ahh. Yes. Umm, yes I am. What was your name again?”

“Estelle.” Her eyes sparkled like the stars she was named for, and I was charmed.

“Ahh. Beautiful. I’m Harley, do you remember me? I’m here to take you to the dance. Are you ready?”

She giggled nervously behind a delicate hand. “No. Did my father give you permission to take me out tonight?”

I hoped so, because I really didn’t want to run into the man. “Yes. Yes, of course. How about you run off and get ready now. I just have to make a phone call.”

Estelle trotted to the bedrooms, and I looked around with interest. The telephone hung on the wall in the kitchen, and I browsed through the eight labeled preprogrammed numbers. The first was “Lisa,” and the next three were all doctors. How sad. With a hopeful sigh, I picked up the phone and pressed Lisa’s button.

It rang three times. “Hello?” The female voice on the other end of the line sounded harried but young. Hopefully this was the sister.

“Hi. Umm, Lisa?”

“Yes?” Her tone changed to wary.

“I’m sorry to ask such a silly question, but are you Shawn’s sister?”

“Yes,” she answered surprised. “Who is this?”

“My name’s Harley Lawson, and I’m a friend of Shawn’s. I was just walking my dogs past his place, and they were loading him into an ambulance. So now I’m apparently on babysitting duties.”

“Oh, my God,” Lisa screeched in my ear. “You’re Hippy-Hotpants.”

I looked at the phone in disbelief. I’d just told the woman her brother was put in an ambulance, and she was excited about my nickname?

“Yes,” I confirmed. “Now about your mother—”

“Oh, my God.” This time I had to pull the phone away from my ear because it was ringing from the volume of Lisa’s voice. I only just managed to understand the second part of her sentence. “Shawn? Ambulance? Mother? Holy crap. What happened? No, don’t bother telling me. Are you with my mother? Is she okay? I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. I’ll have to ring my husband. Oh, my God. I’ll have to bring the kids. Brendan will just have to come and get them. And my mother. Oh, my God. He’s going to kill me. I’ll have to go to the hospital. Maybe…? Holy crap. I’ll see you in a minute.”

She slammed the phone down without me even answering. That was my introduction to Lisa. Don’t get me wrong—I adore the woman. She’s loving and beautiful and so goddamn caring about everyone, but she’s also completely unorganized and so ditzy that it’s sometimes hard to remember which person has the mental degeneration in her family.

Then I met Steve. In all the fuss, everyone had forgotten about him. The backdoor slammed behind me, and I spun around to see a man in a brown uniform holding a plastic tub and a long pole with a hook on the end. We had a bit of a staring contest before Steve hoisted the tub up and said, “Steve Jeffries. Snake catcher and ambulance caller.”

I nodded. “Harley Lawson. Family informer and babysitter until someone comes to relieve me.”

The side of his mouth quirked at that. I looked at the tub he held. “Did you get the snake?”

“Yes. Two of ’em. I had a bit of a scout around and found another. With your friend’s luck, he’d get bitten by the other one the day after he gets out of hospital.”

“Uh.” I didn’t have a reply to this because I really didn’t know Shawn all that well. But I would learn.

“So,” Steve continued. “I’ll just take these two away and release them down the lake. Okay? Good luck with the mother. She told me she wanted me to take her to some sort of dance tonight. I don’t think that woman is all there.”

“Alzheimer’s,” I explained, feeling sorry for Shawn already. Is this what he had to put up with, all day, every day?

“Ah, that would do it,” Steve said and took his snakes away.

I still had at least another ten minutes before Lisa arrived, so I knocked on Estelle’s door to check on her. She opened the door and was standing in her bathing suit, holding a beach towel.

“Arthur,” she exclaimed. “I’m ready to go swimming.”

I smiled at her. “Sorry, Estelle. Change of plans. We’re going dancing now. So how about you find a pretty dress and slap on some makeup while I wait out here?”

She smiled back at me. “Did my father give you permission to take me out tonight?”

“Oh, yes,” I lied again. “So take your time and get changed.”

She shut the door in my face, and I decided to have a sticky beak into the other rooms. When asking a guy out on a date, it’s good to know a little bit about him, not just that he has a lovely, curvy arse.

The door next to Estelle’s was firmly shut, but curiosity couldn’t be contained. I opened the door and found Shawn’s painting room. The smell hit me first. Then I focused on the paintings on the wall and gasped in amazement.

Shawn hates his paintings. It’s so adorable, the way he hides that part of his personality. He paints and draws almost on a daily basis, yet he never opens his mouth about it. I guess I understand. But if I had a tenth of his talent, I’d be showing everyone. He has an artistic ability to draw the human body with amazing accuracy. He blushes and stammers and tells me he’s only taken a couple of courses, so he’s only an amateur, but his products are anything but amateurish.

It took me a while to get my head around how he makes money from the paintings, but I think I have it. Shawn can take a photo and recreate it on paper in amazing likeness. One of my favorites is a picture he painted for Lisa. He copied a photo of their father that was taken at someone’s birthday celebration, then he painted in his twin nephews from another photo. It looked like his father was holding the babies, even though the man died two years before they were born.

I guess it’s photoshopping with paints.

Through word of mouth, he brings in a bit of money doing this for others. He paints photos of people the way they
want
to be remembered, whether it be someone in front of the Eiffel Tower, or three sisters who have never had a photo taken all together. He has a good reputation and can make any photo into a painting. The one he just finished yesterday is of four brothers—one of whom died ten years ago. He based it on a photo of three brothers, and painted in the fourth.

From that, he branched out into romance book covers. You know the ones? A big, bare-chested, longhaired man wearing a kilt is grasping a woman with her clothes falling off while his horse rears in front of a medieval castle? Did you really think that was real? It’s not
that I thought it was, it’s just that I’d never stopped to consider how they managed to get the woman to balance on the rearing horse with the man looking so fierce. I never stopped to consider romance books at all. He has four authors who send him a collection of photos with odd requests: Can you please paint this guy standing like that, but with blue eyes and blond hair, wearing brown trousers like the guy in this photo, holding a sword that looks like this, with this girl’s body, and this girl’s head?

I never like the requests he gets from people who ask for their image to be altered. “Can you paint this picture of me, but make me thin?” “Can you redo this painting of my daughter at her school ball, but make her prettier?” People really need to learn how to love themselves how they really are.

So, on that day, I checked out Shawn’s paintings, alternating from gasping in amazement at some of his more raunchy projects, to giggling with amusement at the men in kilts holding bad-arsed swords. It took Shawn another six weeks to even mention them to me, and that was only because he wanted me to model in the buff. Who am I to deny the man anything?

A car door slammed outside, and I quickly backed out of the room and met Lisa for the first time. If a man can survive Shawn, he can survive Lisa.

Just.

Shawn

Penthrox is great. Snakebites are not. Where I make a first date with Harley and you find out about Amber, Kris, and Rory.

D
ID
I
mention that Penthrox is great? I’m the funniest guy in the room when I’m on that stuff. It was a pity that I was also throwing up and groaning in agony as the stomach cramps hit me.

In between puking and regretting that I ate carrots for lunch, I made sure I told anyone who would listen to me to keep away from snakes. Snakes can mean snakebites. And man, that sucks.

The doctors told me I was lucky the bite was on my ankle, because it was as far away from my internal organs as it could get. In the same breath they called me stupid for not coming sooner to emergency.

Four hours later I was hooked up to my second vial of antivenom when my sister arrived. I was worried that she hadn’t found me, and I thought that might mean that Mum was alone in the house. Greg told me they had some guy looking after her, but he didn’t tell me who before he left me with the doctors at the hospital. And Shawn’s Law was still in play, because Greg had picked up my mobile phone, but it was flat. I managed to get a very busy nurse to call my house, but she told me the line was busy. I couldn’t remember Lisa’s number in my foggy haze, because I could barely remember it on a good day, so there was nobody I could ring. Who needs to memorize a number that’s in your phone?

The cramping had died down and I was finally getting some sleep when Lisa arrived.

“Shawn?”

I blinked and smiled at her. They’d taken my glasses away after they fell off every time I chucked, so my sister was a blurry figure in blue. But I knew her voice and turned in her direction with a groggy smile. “Lisa? Where have you been? What time is it?”

She bustled in and pulled the plastic chair up to my bed. “Sorry. It’s about eight thirty. I had a bit of trouble with Mum, and it took me a while to sort it out.”

“Crud. Is she okay?”

“Yes. She’s fine. Your Hippy-Hotpants was there to help me out when she locked herself in her room and pushed the drawers in front of her door.”

I groaned. She’d done that twice before. I was going to have to bolt the furniture to the wall so she couldn’t move it. “So everything is—Holy cow. Who did you say helped you?” I was a bit slow. My heart was laboring to bring oxygen to my brain because of the snakebite. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.