I gazed around at the gleaming counters and cabinets. He’d even installed a mosaic on the backsplash behind the stove. Rob had real talent and passion for his work. I grinned, thinking of the slacker kid I knew back in the day, who never wanted to be anything except “good at video games.”
Yet another “pro” for Rob: having a guy around who could fix things in the house. Though I already knew about his business, it didn’t hurt to see actual evidence of his prowess in this area.
“See the door there?”
I squinted into the house. “Yeah.”
“It leads to a big-ass pantry,” he said with a gleam in his eye.
“That’s the dream,” I said.
“That is the dream.” He leaned in and touched his lips to mine, on the deck of some stranger’s house. His lips tasted pleasantly malty and sweet, but I could barely enjoy the kiss because I kept expecting some security personnel to show up and bust us for trespassing or Ellen to come zipping around the corner to make fun of me for kissing Rob Casey.
Old wounds persisted.
After a moment, Rob pulled away, patted me on the arm, and said, “I’d better get back to that brisket.”
In a fog, I followed him out of the yard and back to the Millers’ house.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Teenage Mutant Ninja Trivia
Very early the next morning, I kept replaying the events of the Fourth of July in my mind, relaying my thoughts as they occurred to me to Joanne as I walked her through the neighborhood.
“It was an odd day, Joanne,” I told her as she stopped to pee on someone’s parkway.
She glanced back at me as if to say, Don’t bother me when I’m doing my business.
“Sorry,” I said, “but you’re the only person I can talk to about this.”
Joanne and I continued on her walk. She had let me take her as far as four blocks yesterday. I was determined to hit five today.
“Rob kissed me.”
Joanne didn’t care.
“And I kissed him back, I think. I don’t remember. It all happened so fast.” I’d been distracted, too. Some people’s libido went zoom in dangerous situations, like breaking and entering, but I guessed I wasn’t one of those people. I liked safe and private. I preferred a venue in which I wasn’t breaking any laws. “I think that’s why it was a little lackluster.”
She sniffed a tree.
And then, after the kiss, Rob went back to the brisket, and I returned to the women in the backyard. “It honestly wasn’t bad,” I told Joanne. “Everyone was very nice to me. It’s just going to take some time for me to learn their language.”
Joanne looked back at me.
I chuckled. “They spoke English, Joanne. But they’ve known one another for so long, they have a shorthand. And they all know the same people, and they talk about them like I should know them, too, even though I haven’t lived in that neighborhood for twenty years, and even back then I wasn’t really part of the crowd.”
I clamped my mouth shut as a car headed my way. The driver did not need to witness me chatting about my love life with a dog. Though, honestly, with all the tiny earphones and whatnots, people could really get away with muttering to themselves all day long. It was the same philosophy I used when I was belting out some old Gwen Stefani songs in the car.
But back to Rob. I thought I got him now—understood where he was coming from. Later on in the evening, after dinner had been served, we were sitting together in a couple lawn chairs, under a tree, and one of his friends showed up drunk and angry. Rob had pulled the guy aside to talk him through what was going on.
“He’s obviously a great friend,” I told Joanne. “He’d do anything for the people he cares about.”
He’d dropped everything—including me—to help his friend for two whole hours.
“But his friend needed him in that moment. He would’ve done the same for me, if I’d been in trouble, and I would’ve done the same for Kelly or Yessi.”
Still, even though I knew he was being a good pal, something bugged me. Eric and the other guys had gone to help Rob with the drunk dude, too, but they all came back quickly to hang out with their wives.
Only Rob had gone long-haul with the friend. And he hadn’t come back to check on me once, not even to tell me it’d be a bit longer. He never even texted.
During sophomore year of high school, a new girl moved to town from New York (I couldn’t help comparing her to Stacey McGill from The Baby-Sitters Club), and the two of us got along great. We liked the same music and were in most of the same classes. By the end of the first trimester, I was ready to declare it: she was my best friend. But she’d always talk about her own, real best friend back home, and I got the sense that I was a placeholder—a stopgap friend until she could get back to New York and her real BFF.
That was how I felt with Rob last night. He had his real friends, and then there was me. I’d never truly measure up, and he’d always set me aside for them.
“Eventually I just…left…because I was all alone and I had no idea where Rob had gone.”
Joanne paused, ignoring me, her back ramrod straight, as she sniffed the air. The leash tightened in my hand.
“What is it?” I asked.
A second later, she let out one low warning growl and made a mad dash toward the house nearest to us, nearly pulling my arm out of its socket. Along the side of the house, she barked again and then froze. I almost fell over my own feet.
“Come on, Joanne.” I tried to pull her away from her quarry, but she ignored me, staring deep into the bushes, at two glowing eyes reflected against the streetlights.
My heart beat faster, and I opened my mouth to say, “Let’s go,” but then a small black-and-white animal stalked out from the hedge, and the next thing I knew, Joanne and I were covered in skunk skank.
Perfect.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Smells Like Team Spirit
“Shit, shit, shit,” I kept saying as I dragged Joanne the four blocks back to our house. On the way, still holding on tight to her leash, I pulled out my phone and furiously googled “what the hell do I do if my dog and I get sprayed by a fucking skunk?”
The answer came back: don’t bring your clothes or the dog inside and mix up a concoction of hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and dish detergent.
“Well,” I told Joanne, who appeared fazed not at all by her now-overwhelming stench, “this is going to be a DIY de-skunking.”
I led her into my small backyard and shut the gate behind us. It was only just now six o’clock in the morning, and the street around us was still quiet and dark. “At least it’s July,” I told her. “Trying to give you a bath outdoors would be an even bigger disaster if you’d pulled this nonsense in October or March.” I tied her leash around the pole at the base of my back deck. “You’re not going anywhere, my friend. I don’t want you getting covered in dirt, too.”
She didn’t fight it. Joanne sat serenely in the flower bed, the picture of innocence.
Though the ingredients for the anti-skunk funk solution were inside my house, I went into the garage first to see if I could find anything to use as a tub. Right away, I spotted an old baby pool I’d bought a few years ago when my brother came up from Texas with my niece. I dragged the plastic Dora the Explorer tub out onto the grass and set the nozzle of the garden hose inside it.
“Now for the other stuff.” I peered into my neighbors’ yards. Dark. Quiet.
Joanne watched me as I slipped out of my clothes, down to my underwear, dropping my shirt and shorts in a puddle on the sidewalk. I smelled my bra. Not too bad. My T-shirt had taken the brunt of the spray. I scurried up the steps to the sliding glass door on the deck. Locked.
Crud.
I’d have to go in the front door. I saluted Joanne, slipped out the front gate, locked it, and made a mad dash around
the side of the house and up the front steps. A light hit me, and I turned to see a cab idling in front of my house. He honked and flashed his lights at me. I flipped off the driver and yanked open my front door.
Panting hard, I shut the door behind me (and locked it to keep out the lecherous cabbie) and tiptoed upstairs, trying not to wake Dax. Up in my room, I changed into my bathing suit—a navy blue bikini covered in a neon feather pattern—and chucked my underwear out the back window and down onto the deck. I checked on Joanne—still just hanging out. She’d given up on sitting and had curled up in my hostas.
I grabbed a few towels and the ingredients for the shampoo. After I’d mixed up the concoction in an old pitcher, I let myself out the back door onto the deck. “Joanne, what the heck are you doing?” She was on her back, happily wriggling in the dirt and, no doubt, rabbit feces.
“Let’s get you cleaned up.” I turned on the hose and then untied Joanne, leading her on her leash over to the pool. Once she figured out where I was taking her, she froze. I yanked her leash. “Come on, girl. There’s no way out of this.”
She would not budge.
“Joanne,” I told her. “You smell like ass, and you’re not going inside again until we rectify that.”
She flopped down in the grass, growing limp.
“Okay, then.”
I was a medical doctor. I had gone through years and years of school and training, but nothing had prepared me for trying to bathe a stubborn ninety-pound beast made of solid muscle.
I tried reasoning with her. “We’ll get this over with so quickly you won’t even know it’s happening, and then I’ll give you a treat.”
Her ears perked up at that momentarily, until she realized I didn’t actually have said treat on me.
Damn it. She was too smart for her own good.
“Joanne.” I stood firm, hands on hips. “Get in the pool.”
She licked her undercarriage.
“Fine.” One hand still holding the leash, I pulled the hose toward me. “We’ll have to do this the hard way.”
She jumped up and attempted to drag me up the back steps.
“Joanne, no! Relax!”
“What’s going on?” Dax, in a T-shirt and athletic shorts, appeared along the side of the house, just beyond the back basement steps. He scratched the top of his head, making his bedhead more pronounced.
“We got sprayed by a skunk.”
“Oh no.” He rushed over, reaching for his dog’s leash. “Damn it, Joanne. Are you okay, Annie?”
“It just got on my clothes, I think,” I said. “Joanne took the brunt of it. Have you ever dealt with this before?”
He shook his head.
“Google says we have to bathe her with that concoction over there.” I gestured toward the pitcher I’d set near the pool.
“Joanne’s terrified of water.” Dax wrinkled his nose as he caught a whiff of his dog’s current eau de parfum.
“So I gathered.” I paused. This was his pet, after all. I should let him take the lead. “What do we do?”
“She’ll just have to bear through it.” He appraised his dog. “I can’t remember the last time I gave her a bath on my own. Usually I just trick her into going to the groomer at the pet store once in a while.” After a moment, he turned to me, eyes determined. “I’ll hold her down. You scrub.”
I got to work prepping our instruments—the shampoo, a big sponge, a few towels—as Dax carried his beast over to the pool. Joanne seemed calmer in his arms. She even gave him a quick lick on the cheek, as if to say all was forgiven.
“Okay,” Dax said. “Here we go.” His grip tight around her torso, he stepped over the lip of the pool and then lowered her into the water. She squirmed as soon as her feet hit the cold bath, but Dax held her there. “Try to avoid her face as much as possible.”
“But she probably got sprayed there.”
He leaned in and sniffed her head, wrinkling up his nose. “Yup. Definitely did.” He turned his nose away from his malodorous dog. “Let’s save that for last, then; start with something less traumatic. Get the rest of her body first.”
I gingerly hit Joanne’s back with the hose. She flinched, and Dax grabbed on tighter.
“That’s it,” he said calmly. “Nice and easy.”
After I’d wetted most of her body, I grabbed the pitcher and poured the concoction over her back. Smiling sheepishly, I knelt down next to Dax and started scrubbing Joanne’s fur with the sponge.
“Good girl,” he kept whispering in her ear as her body tightened, ready to flee. I couldn’t help smiling, watching him soothe his dog with such tenderness.
Like playing a stinky game of Twister, I tried to wash every bit of Joanne’s body without invading Dax’s personal space and without falling over. “Sorry,” I said as my arm grazed his.
“It’s okay,” he said softly. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or if that was meant for Joanne.
When I moved around to Joanne’s front, Dax and I were suddenly face-to-face. I softly and gently soaped up Joanne’s head. “Good,” he said, “easy.” His warm breath hit my cheek, sending waves of heat to my core. Carried away by my body’s response to his calming whispers, I kept rubbing and rubbing and rubbing the top of her head.
“I think you got it,” Dax said.
I straightened up. “Right. Yup. I think that’s it.” I pressed my legs together in an attempt to stanch the flow of blood to that area.
“You need to rinse her off first.”
“Of course.” A task. I grabbed the hose, trying to ignore the flush rising up the back of my neck. I aimed the hose at Joanne, and she flinched again, now struggling harder against Dax’s grip.
“Get closer,” he said. “Make sure you wash off all that peroxide.”
I aimed the stream at her back, and Dax wiped away the soap as much as he could. Joanne bucked hard against him, finally breaking loose and sending him flying, onto his back, into the pool. His feet kicked my legs out from underneath me, and I landed flat on top of him, my palms pressed into his chest. The two of us burst out laughing.
“Sorry.” The top of my bare foot rubbed against his, and I realized quickly that his hands were gripping my hips and his eyes were locked on mine. The laughter had stopped as quickly as it began.
“Um, Joanne,” I said breathily.
“Shit, you’re right. She probably just undid all our hard work.” He struggled under me, so I rolled off him and stood. I offered him a hand to help him up.
“Thanks.” He grabbed his dog’s leash and led her away from the bushes where she was now hiding. “Maybe I’ll just try rinsing her off in the shower with me. If that’s okay.”
“It’s fine.”
I watched him, tight white T-shirt, see-through and clinging to his back muscles, walking his dog down the basement steps and out of sight.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Gryffindorks
I approached the guard at the security desk. “Hi,” I said. “I’m here to see Darius Carver.”
“ID?”
I showed her my driver’s license, and she handed me a clipboard. “Sign your name on there, and someone will be down soon to get you.”
“Thank you.” I stepped away from the desk and over to a wall of black-and-white photographs of practically every famous person who ever lived in Chicago—Oprah Winfrey, President Obama, Harry Caray, Svengoolie…
A door opened to my left, and out came Darius, grinning big. He waved a hand down his body. “Perks of doing radio: relaxed dress code.” And sure enough, for the first time since I met him, he was not wearing a suit. He’d paired perfect, pristine blue jeans with a button-down shirt and a sweater tied across his shoulders. He looked like a J.Crew ad.
Darius took my hand and pulled me in for a quick kiss on the cheek, sending a shiver of excitement through my bo
dy. He smelled woody and masculine and clean. I couldn’t hide my giddy grin. Darius Carver just kissed me in public.
He led me through the door he’d just come out of and pressed an elevator button going up. “I’m so sorry about this,” he said.
“It’s no problem. I’m breezy.” We’d planned on getting dinner together tonight, but the Cubs game got canceled, and the radio station needed someone to jump on and do a show. For some reason not completely clear to me yet, that person was Darius.
“Well, thank you for being so understanding about changing our date’s venue tonight.” We stepped on the elevator, and he hit the button for nine. “When duty calls, I have to answer.”
“But you’re a TV newsperson?” I said.
“That’s my main job, yes, but I also fill in on WTS Radio when they need me. It’s a sweet gig, really.” He flashed his smile. “I’m hoping, if I play my cards right, to get my own permanent slot—late in the evenings or on the weekends, at least to start. It’d get me closer to my next career goal.”
“Which is?”
“To be the premier entertainment voice in Chicago.”
“Wow,” I said.
He counted on his fingers. “Food, music, theater, TV, movies—you name it.” He sighed. “But in order to do that, I have to be like a shark and keep swimming. It’s always about the hustle. You get it. You have your own business.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I suppose I do.”
“And you’ll see even more when your big segment airs on the news this week!” He made an excited face. “Your name is about to become synonymous with ‘concierge doctor.’ These days, you can’t just do your job and expect to get anywhere. It’s all about branding and carving out your own space, making yourself indispensable. That’s what I’m trying to do. When a Chicagoan wonders, ‘Should I see that play or eat in that restaurant?’ I want them to immediately think, ‘Let’s see what Darius has to say about it.’”
The elevator door opened, and Darius and I stepped off. “I ordered food from the same restaurant we’d planned to visit tonight.” He motioned for me to follow him. A bag of takeout sat on his desk. He handed me one of the cartons.
It's Raining Men Page 13