It was warm despite the breeze blowing around, but then again, the area around the Enchanted Lake was always warm. The small stone grotto that encroached into it however was cool to the touch, making the perfect place for an afternoon lunch. Jay lay back on the stones, one arm folded behind his head, supporting his it while he looked up at the cloudless sky. The other was wrapped around the shoulders of Auradon Prep's reigning pink princess as she rested her head along his shoulder and traced a manicured nail along his chest.
"What are you thinking about?" Audrey asked him as she noticed the faraway look on his face.
"Where are the clouds?" Audrey tilted her head to look up at him, the look on her face telling him that she was definitely trying to hold back laughter. "What? You asked?" he said.
Audrey shook her head and let out a giggle as she laid her head back down on him. "Let me get this straight; you are on a date, with the hottest girl at Auradon Prep, if I may so," she began. Jay let out a chuckle as he heard Audrey blatantly brag about herself. "And instead of filling me with compliments, or doing everything in your power to remind me that I made the right choice about saying yes to going out with a VK, something I swore I would never do by the way," she continued, her voice taking on a satirical tone, "You're thinking about, of all things – clouds?"
"Back on the Isle, it's overcast all the time. No breaks, just gloomy. And I'm pretty sure when we left the school, there were lots of clouds. Now? None."
"Wow, I must really be losing my touch if I can't keep a boy's attention on me instead of on the clouds," she laughed.
Jay smiled and leaned his head off his arm to look down at Audrey. "Foxy, you always got my attention."
Audrey smiled and lifted herself up enough to close the distance so she was face to face with him. She leaned in until she was practically on top of him and once again smiled. This time her smile was full of supreme confidence. Jay returned her smile with his own cocky grin. "I better always have it," she told him teasingly before leaning down and pressing her lips to his.
The kiss grew in intensity until the two teenagers were in locked in a full-on make out session. After a couple of minutes Audrey broke the kiss and held herself over Jay.
"You know what comes to my mind when we're out here?" Audrey smiled as she gazed down at Jay. She had a playful, yet slightly mischievous smirk curling her lips.
"What?" Jay asked as he folded one arm back behind his head again, his other hand resting on her hip, and looked up at the beautiful princess.
"Wake up," she said melodically.
"Wake – huh?"
"Wake up," she repeated, this time much more normally. "Wake up, Jay"
"What are you –"
"Wake up. Jay, wake up," she kept repeating, her voice becoming higher in pitch, and if he didn't know better, it was starting to echo. "Wake up! Wake up! Wake…"
"…up, Jay," came the voices of two eleven year olds, shattering Jay's slumber. His eyes shot open and he tried to sit up in bed, but found that the bed itself was shaking too much. When he finally got enough of his bearings, he realized that Shawn and Mark were jumping on his bed, screaming at him.
"What the hell?" he yelled at them.
"Mom and Dad said you need to get up for breakfast," Mark answered.
"Good, I could use a meal after I get you two," Jay told them. The twins then started laughing as they jumped off his bed and started running out of his room. "I hate when they do that?" he said as he let himself fall back onto the bed. He turned and looked over toward Carlos' bed and saw it was empty. How the hell can he get up so early," he thought.
He closed his eyes and tried to go back to sleep. But, like most mornings, he'd found that the twins had done too good of a job of waking him, and no matter hard he tried, sleep was just out of his reach. He entertained the idea of getting out of bed, especially since he could hear Liz in the kitchen and feel his stomach start to growl.
"Another Audrey dream?" he heard Carlos ask him as he reentered the room.
"No. Now shut it, it's too early."
"Really, because you had the same lopsided grin on your face from when you met her outside the school; and after the coronation right before you two wandered off," he said. Jay could practically feel the stupid smirk on Carlos' face.
Jay smiled as he thought back to that night.
"That's the grin," Carlos said excitedly. Jay reached behind his head and grabbed his pillow. Without opening his eyes, he pulled the pillow out from under him and threw it in the general direction of Carlos' bed. Since he couldn't actually see him, he just hoped the pillow at least went near him, though hitting him with it would definitely brighten his morning after his wake-up call. He laughed as he heard Carlos scream from what he was pretty sure the pillow hitting him.
Now that he was finally without his pillow, he decided to actually make the attempt to get out of bed. He looked over and saw that Carlos was already showered and dressed. "How the hell can you get up so early?" he asked the younger teen.
"Early? Jay, it's like almost noon," Carlos answered as he threw the pillow back over to Jay's bed. "Come on, Liz told me to tell you to hurry up, that breakfast was almost ready.
"Fine," he groaned as he forced himself out of bed and in the direction of the bathroom.
Twenty minutes later, he was walking into the kitchen, the sleep having been washed away in the shower. His nose was practically assaulted by the smell of eggs, bacon, pancakes, and what looked like some cut up fruit. He smiled as he felt his mouth start to water from the sight. Carlos, Coach, and the twins were already seated and eating. Every now and then Carlos would lean over and slip a piece of bacon under the table to Dude when he thought Liz wasn't looking.
"I saw that," Liz said from the stove as she finished plating the last of the bacon before setting it on the table.
"Uh, I…I wasn't doing anything," Carlos sais nervously.
"Uh-huh," Liz smiled as she ruffled Carlos' hair. "Bacon's not good for dogs," she told him as she looked down at Dude. Upon being seen, Dude laid down and gave out a small whimper. "You know where your bowl is, I've already put in some food out for you too," she smiled as Dude got up and scurried off.
"They did it again," Jay said as he sat down.
"Who's they? And what did they do?" Coach asked as he read the morning news off his tablet.
"The twins," Jay answered, "they gave me their personal wakeup call again."
"Boys, didn't we tell you not to jump on Jay's bed to wake him up?" Coach asked.
"Yes," they answered in unison.
"So why did you jump on his bed?"
"Because Carlos told us to," they answered, again in unison. Jay would be lying to himself if he didn't find that just a tad creepy every now and then.
Liz looked over at Carlos who had frozen in place from being ratted out, his fork actually hovering just outside his mouth. "Really?" she asked.
"Jay's a heavy sleeper?" Carlos said anxiously.
"From now on, if we ever need Jay woken up," Liz began, a stern, yet almost comical look on her face, "you will be the one to do it, alright honey."
Carlos didn't know if the sound of him gulping was real, or only in his head as he heard that news. The sound of the twins laughing at him though, that was real. So was the smile and eye wink Liz gave Jay after her delivery of her, let's call it, compromise. Carlos looked over at Jay and saw the practically evil grin his older friend was giving him. I'm dead, he thought to himself, next time I have to wake him, I'm dead.
"Why do they even listen to him?" Jay asked as he began plating some bacon to go along with the eggs and pancakes Liz had already laid in front of him.
"Because he spends more time with them," Coach Jenkins answered with a soft chuckle.
"He's the one closest to their age," Jay said.
"Doesn't matter, all they see is Carlos looking out for them, and you…"
"Looking for time to talk to Audrey," Carlos joked.
"Carlos," Coach said, again smiling at finally seeing Carlos giving instead of getting when it came to Jay. Carlos raised his hands in surrender.
"You should try and spend time with them," Liz told him.
"Got any ideas," Jay answered, doing his best to not roll his eyes.
"Well, since it is Saturday, and me and Liz need to go into the city for some errands," Coach started, his face looking like the gears in his mind were turning. "Hey boys," he said to Mark and Shawn, "How would you like for Jay to teach you two how to play tourney better?"
"Yeah," they said, turning toward Jay, expectant smiles on their faces. Jay looked over at them, and saw that, apparently, they were looking forward to their Dad's suggestion.
"Fine, I guess. But Carlos has to come with me," he relented. When Liz and Coach looked at him, he knew what their reactions were going to be. "There's two of them, there should be two of us. Besides, since my little buddy over there knows how to control them, he'll be the perfect back-up," he said, turning his voice sickly sweet.
"Works for me," Coach said.
A little over an hour later, Jay, Carlos, and the twins were walking onto Auadon Prep's tourney field. Coach had given them the keys and called ahead to let security know that they'd be there. The twins ran ahead of the two older boys, chasing each other around, pretending that they were playing in an actual match while Jay checked his phone. "Seriously dude?" Carlos asked, the frustration in his voice.
"What?"
"Can you go five minutes without seeing if she texted you?"
"I let her know when we left that I'd be out here, and that I'd be busy. I just wanted to make sure she let me know she got the message."
"If I see her show up here…"
"You'll what?" Jay asked, his voice more serious. He wasn't threatening Carlos, and hoped Carlos knew that, but he wasn't about to let the younger boy forget who was the tougher of the two of them.
To his credit, Carlos did know that Jay wasn't considering harming him, for the most part. But for the first time, he wasn't just going to roll over because Jay got in his face. Not this time.
"If I see Audrey here, I'm gonna make sure that Coach and Liz know you ditched the twins. And I'll make sure that they wake you up every morning by jumping on your bed."
Oh my God, did I just say that, Carlos thought. His nervousness intensified when he saw the blank, serious glare that Jay was giving him.
"You'd rat me out? Me? After all we've been through?"
Carlos swallowed hard, and mustering what courage he had, decided that he wasn't going to be backed into silence.
"We've got a good thing here, Jay. Coach, Liz, the twins; they've been good to us. And I'm trying, even if you're not. And I don't know if it's because you're scared or you have at least one good memory about your home life back home, but I don't," he ranted. "Maybe your Dad was able to find a way to treat you like you were his kid, but mine didn't. My mother treated me like a slave. As long I did whatever stupid, or mean, or humiliating thing she ordered me to do, she didn't care what happened to me. She didn't care if I was sick, or hurt; and remember, I have the scars to prove that. So you'll excuse me if I don't want to mess this up," he finished as he started to walk off.
"I'm not scared," Jay told him. Carlos turned back and looked at his friend. "Not…not really." He walked toward Carlos, looking around, making sure the twins were out of earshot. "Back home, my Dad would start to loosen up, and things would start to feel better. I'd let my guard down because of it, and, the next thing I know, he's on my case because he's saying I'm going soft, and that the only way he'd let me prove I was worth keeping around was to make sure I scored enough junk for the shop"
Carlos stared back at Jay, definitely surprised at what he'd just been told. After Evie, he'd always assumed that Jay's home life was the most stable. Hell, anything had to be more stable than my own, he thought. Jay, to his own shock, was surprised that he'd let Carlos know what he was dealing with.
"I might not have been treated like a slave, but I wasn't always treated like a son."
"You're afraid that's gonna happen here aren't you?" Jay did answer, but Carlos knew anyway. "We're not gonna get thrown out, or away, or anything, man. Well, they won't as long as we don't start acting like Mal and Jane, barely speaking to each other. But you gotta start acting like you want to be here, because Coach and Liz can tell. That's why they want you to hang with Pain and Panic over there," Carlos told him. Jay laughed at the nicknames Carlos had just given the boys.
'I'm making the attempt aren't I?" he asked with a wave of his hand toward the twins and the field.
"Yet still checking your phone."
At that comment, Jay pulled his phone out of his pocket and began scrolling through the functions. After a few seconds, he handed the cell over to Carlos. Carlos looked at the screen and saw that it was messages between him and Audrey.
Me: Coach asking me to show the twins to play tourney. Cant talk 2 u till later
Foxy: Awwww look u trying 2 act like big brother
Me: Not mad?
Foxy: No. call me when ur done. Bye babe
Carlos looked up from the phone and back at Jay.
"See?" Carlos just kept staring at him, and it was starting to freak him out. "What?"
"Babe?" he asked, the smile on his face a mixture of appreciation, and the attempt to fight back the overwhelming urge to begin making fun of Jay.
"Shut it," Jay told him forcefully, yanking his phone back from his friend. "And not a word of that to anyone, especially Mal and Evie," he ordered as he began walking toward the twins.
I can't wait to tell Jane then, Carlos thought with a smile.
