✏️ Under One Roof

14. One Excuse

Tegan took a deep breath and tried not to panic. If she cried out now, someone was bound to come to check on her, and she didn't know how she could deflect all their questions. She looked down at herself, trying to gauge the scale of the problem. The problem, clearly enough, was that her jeans were soaked with pee and she was standing in a puddle in the middle of the bathroom floor. What could she do about that?

The first thing she could do was lock the door. At least she had her wits about her enough to think of that, but it really didn't make her feel that much better. She ran over, closed the door, and then locked it. Just in time, as she heard someone else coming up the stairs. But they would want to do the whole routine with washing and brushing teeth before bed, so she couldn't stay in here more than a minute or two before someone started asking questions, and that didn't give her any ideas about how to clean up. If she'd been wearing a skirt today, she might have had a chance. But she couldn't go out wearing soaked jeans, and she certainly couldn't walk out of the room without them. They would all be waiting for the bathroom soon, so there was no chance of getting to her bedroom unseen. And a quick glance around the room, unsurprisingly, didn't locate an unexpected change of clothes. Just the usual stuff you'd expect to see in any bathroom.

And there was her salvation. She could wrap a towel around herself; there was a stack behind the door, just in case someone took the one hanging on the rail and failed to return it. Of course, that would probably attract more questions. It wasn't normal to be wearing just a towel, after all. But she was sure she could come up with some excuse if she had a few minutes to think. And if she said she was heading straight to bed, she might be able to put off any awkward questions until the morning. And then she was hot by a stroke of genius; although a real genius would probably have thought of it right away, rather than panicking. She could take a shower; and then wearing a towel would be completely normal. It would hopefully wash away the disgust of pee-soaked clothes clinging to her skin as well. And the noise of the shower running would cover any sounds of her pacing anxiously around the bathroom and trying to get everything cleared up.

Ten seconds later, she had a clear plan in mind. She would turn the shower on and let it run. Nobody would try talking to her then, or knocking on the door. She was sure they wouldn't expect her to hear, and would put off their questions until she emerged. Then she would do her best to deal with the puddle on the floor. Maybe mop it up with one of the other towels, or something. She'd use her dad's Berthoud Green shower gel today, and Logan's Cedar Mist shampoo. Too strong-smelling and too chemical for Tegan normally; she liked the scents but found them a little overpowering. But they would leave a miasma filling the bathroom and drifting out onto the landing for hours, which would hopefully be enough to mask the distinctive odour of fresh pee. And once she was clean and smelling like some middle-aged marketing exec's lumberjack fantasies, there would hopefully be plenty of time before morning to think of a rational excuse for her behaviour.

She turned the shower on, and adjusted the temperature until steam started to billow out above the curtain to fill the room. And then she turned back to the puddle on the floor, wondering what she could do. There didn't seem to be too many options; which was to say she couldn't see any. But she grabbed a couple of extra towels and pressed them into the puddle, hoping that would help. It seemed to soak up more liquid than she would have expected, but there was still some remaining. However, there was still a lot of steam in the air, so nobody would be surprised by puddles on the floor in ten minutes. The only problem was that this particular puddle smelled quite bad, and there was no way that whoever finished cleaning it up would fail to notice.

She tried to put the stress to the back of her mind, and just to focus on cleaning up. She wrang the sodden towels out over the sink, and ran some more water to wash the scent away. But that just left the towels smelling as well. With no other option, she held them under the running water until the temperature became uncomfortable for her hands, and wrung them out again. Then she used them to mop the floor, and repeated. Maybe, just maybe, that would get all the pee off the floor and replace it with normal water, enough to suggest that she'd just had a long shower and not paid attention to the water collecting on the floor or the condensation on the tiles.