***Rolling in the Deep***

Twenty minutes or so after we left the bathroom, I am lying peacefully in bed and I can hear Diana singing along to The Weekend’s Save Your Tears playing on low volume from the kitchen. What a sweet-sweet voice she has, but I cannot believe she disconnected my cell phone from my Bluetooth home theatre system and connected hers. Women! They want to run everything, or some would say they want to ruin everything, I do not know.

After a while, I can hear some footsteps (Diana’s morning shoes screeching on my wooden floor), and the sweet-sweet voice coming towards my bedroom. I am sure she is done with whatever she was doing in the kitchen. She just said she wanted to fix a quick remedy that would detox me, so my guess is she is bringing it now.

“Come to papa!” I think to myself, and then turn underneath the covers and lay facing her direction.

“Come on, now,” Diana says as she approaches my bed with a mug full of boiled garlic and ginger. “Sit up straight, please.”

“Do I have to?” I ask, frowning and feeling tired of getting ordered around, which is something that a guy like me hates very much. I am the one who does the ordering, not her.

She frowns too and shoots back. “Yes, you have to. It’s the only way of drinking this stuff without burning yourself, unless you want to burn yourself?”

Instead of responding, I quickly examine the mug in her left hand and, surely, it seems quite hot, so I bite my lip and begin to pull myself up in silence.

“Exactly what I thought,” Diana utters triumphantly.

“Damn!” I think to myself as I groan and sit on the edge of the king-size devil. My back is to the wall, and I am a little embarrassed that she is still seeing me in y shorts. My Sponge Bob shorts.

“Let’s have it then,” I say with false confidence.

She draws closer and extends the hand holding the mug to me. “Be careful, Teekay. Do not burn yourself,” she says. “Please.”

I simply nod in response and relieve her of the mug. She then interestingly watches me as I blow a little air over the hot liquid inside the cup in my hands. I almost take a gulp, but I then halt as I feel a pair of painstaking eyes pressing on me. I then frown again.

“What?” she asks. She looks too eager to know, yet it seems like she already has the answer to her question.

I lift my head up and face her, and it dawns on me that I have literally face-timed her more than I often do, which is the reason why I’m now finding her extraordinarily cute. Very cute. Like a puppy. I then realise that I really need to start looking at her more and more often.

Awed by my consecutive failure to utter a word, she asks again. “What’s going on with you, Teekay? Why did you stop? You were about to take your first sip then you just froze. Is everything okay? Do you dread the taste of garlic and ginger?”

“No … that is not the matter,” I say bluntly.

“What could it be then?” she asks.

“It’s fairly simple, I just want you to tell me how you expect a man to drink this stuff freely when you’re puncturing him with your evil eyes?” I respond, and she laughs in response.

“Evil eyes?” she asks.

“Yes, they’re so evil,” I respond.

“No, they are not, come on,” she cries out. “Teekay, you’re so mean! If I knew it all along, I would have let you suffer, and you would have spent the whole day with your head dipped inside a toilet chamber. I shouldn’t have helped you.”

We both laugh.

“I’m just being honest, those eyes are so demanding!” I say.

“OMG! Really?” she responds, covering her face with her hands shyly. “You could have just said that right away rather than to throw a diss at me.”

She then uncovers her face and stares at me while smiling and blushing. I do not utter a word in response because I am too busy battling my thoughts.

Her face flickers. “Aren’t you going to say something?” she asks.

“Something?” I ask offhandedly.

“Yes, like you are sorry. You know, that sort of stuff. Ladies love it when it’s said by a guy,” she says, winking.

“That’s corny,” I think to myself, sighing a long and boring-ass sigh. “Okay, I’m sorry, Diana. I should not have said your eyes are evil,” I finally say. “Actually, they are charming. Now, I want you to shut them very tight for me. I do not want to feel charmed when I drink this remedy you made. Come on now, it’s getting cold.”

“Of course, your highness,” she says, smiling. She then bows playfully and closes her eyes.

Before she knows it, I have already gulped the whole stuff. I kind of quiver from the bitterness and stick out my tongue like a dog. “God! This is bitter,” I cry out. “Why would you trick me? Why would you want to kill the king?”

Her mouth drops open. “Excuse me, your highness?!”

“Yes, you wanted to poison me,” I say.

She giggles. “Never, you’re the king, a very handsome king,” she says. “Why would I want to take your life, my king? I’m just trying to make it a lot better.”

We both laugh.

Tell us: What do you think is going to happen next?