Tiny Glitches: A Magical Contemporary Romance

by Chastain, Rebecca

I ran my finger along the spines of books on the single slender bookcase while I towel-dried my hair. Sofie saved titles she thought I would like, and I snagged a copy of Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself, holding the book up to catch the setting sun’s rays so I could read the back cover. I turned at the scrabble of nails on rock in time to see Dali race past the sliding glass doors and across the lawn after a ball. Kyoko trotted in his wake, trunk and tail up, sounding like . . . well, like a herd of elephants running past.

  Nope, only one, I thought, then grinned. The whole situation was absurd, made no less so by my aunt’s calm acceptance. She stood in the middle of the yard throwing the ball for Dali and Kyoko as if elephant visitors were an everyday occurrence. The sunset highlighted her auburn hair and glowed in her dark eyes. The soft light washed away a dozen years, and not for the first time, I wished she had been the pregnant teen to give birth to me.

  Dali dropped the ball at her feet, but Sofie sidestepped when Kyoko barreled up behind him and snatched the ball with her trunk. Curling her trunk over her head, she flung the ball. It landed a few feet in front of her, but Dali tore after it like she’d launched it across the yard. He returned the ball to Kyoko this time, not Sofie, and my aunt burst out laughing. Seeing me watching, she came up to the pool house and let herself inside.

  “I’ve been replaced.”

  “Who can compete with an elephant?” I said.

  “Dali is going to be so upset when his new companion has to go.”

  “Yeah. About that. Thank you for being so easygoing about me showing up with a baby elephant.”

  She smiled. “That wasn’t all you showed up with.”

  I flattened my lips and gave her a stern look, which she ignored.

  “When are you going to stop dawdling and come over to the house so you can tell me how you met Hudson”—she raised her hands when I opened my mouth—“and how you got Kyoko?”

  I rolled my eyes. Only my aunt would be more interested in Hudson than a baby elephant. Of course, she was right; I was stalling. I needed distance between myself and Hudson to see if I was reading my emotions correctly—and to cool my hormones. If we were going to figure out how to find Jenny and return Kyoko, I needed to think with my head, not my libido. Plus, I wanted to look nice when I emerged from the pool house. I’d frightened myself when I’d gotten a good look in the mirror before my shower. My pride needed a pick-me-up.

  “I’ll be right there,” I said. Sofie arched a brow at me. When she turned to leave, paintbrushes stuck out of her back pocket. Paint covered the ends, so I knew they were a divination. Sofie was content. That wouldn’t stop her from meddling, though.

  I placed the book on the nightstand, then hung my towel in the bathroom. My hair had dried enough to have wave again. I fluffed it over my shoulder and stared at myself. I was pale, with pale auburn eyebrows and pale pink lips. Only my eyes were dark. I reached for my makeup bag, then returned it to my satchel. I wasn’t going on a date or a consultation. I was going to sit in my aunt’s house and have dinner and talk about my day’s criminal activities. With a man who made my pulse race with one quirk of his sexy lips.

  “Hopefully he likes pale redheads.” The fact that I cared proved my dawdling hadn’t lessened my attraction to Hudson.

  Kyoko and Dali were back in the pool, splashing in the shallow end. I crossed the far side of the yard and darted up the patio steps and inside before Dali sprinted up the stairs behind me. I slammed the sliding glass door closed and stopped short.

  The vision that was Hudson sitting at the kitchen bar, Sofie’s laptop in front of him, shocked me motionless: Green, paint-stained sweats rode up his calves like cropped pants and a pink and blue V-neck Getty T-shirt strained across his shoulders and strangled his armpits.

  “Are you wearing my aunt’s clothes?” I asked.

  Hudson looked up, and a blush tinted his cheeks. “She stole my clothes while I was in the shower.”

  “I didn’t steal them. I put them in the laundry,” Sofie said from where she stood at the stove. “They’re almost done. Those sweats were the only pants I had that would fit you. I thought you’d prefer them to a wraparound skirt.”

  “Fit isn’t the term I would have used,” Hudson grumbled, tugging at the tight collar of the T-shirt.

  I bit my lip to contain my laughter.

  “Yeah, yeah. Yuck it up,” Hudson said. His eyes snagged on my bare feet when I kicked off my flip-flops. I grinned and turned toward the living room.

  The open floor plan of the living room, kitchen, and dining room made a large L, with the kitchen at the center, visible from both rooms. Sofie had a gas stove so we could cook together, but the refrigerator and microwave were both electric. I curled up on the sofa cushion farthest from the kitchen. If it had been just the two of us, I would have helped Sofie, neither of us concerned with the fridge shutting down for a few hours. Now I hated the useless feeling of sitting idle while my aunt did all the work, but it was that or explain yet another electronic malfunction to Hudson.

  “It says here that baby elephants take up to ten years to be fully weaned,” Hudson said, pointing at the laptop screen. Yet another good reason for me to be across the room. “Where are we going to get elephant milk?”

  A rectangular object floated a few inches off his right bicep. It was green, with small black and silver and gold squares perched on it like a bizarre futuristic miniature city. I couldn’t figure out what it was, let alone what to make of it, so I did what I usually did with apparitions: I ignored it.

  “She seems to like carrots well enough,” I said. “Maybe she’s already partially weaned.”

  “What do they eat as adults?” Sofie asked.

  “Grass, if she’s an Asian elephant, which I think she is, judging from the size of her ears and the shape of her head.”

  I rose and walked to the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the backyard, pool, and the ocean views beyond.

  “Good guess.”

  Hudson came over to stand beside me. We watched Kyoko use the end of her trunk to twist hunks of grass out of Sofie’s lawn and shove them into her mouth.

  “Jenny somehow found a baby elephant who was already weaned,” Hudson said.

  “How old do you think she is?”

  “She’s barely larger than the site says elephants are when they’re born.”

  I couldn’t prevent my gaze from dropping to examine Hudson up close. The sweats were baggy, but not baggy enough to conceal that he was going commando. I jerked my eyes front and center again, turning my head so Hudson couldn’t see the flush staining my cheeks. What was I? Sixteen?

  A muffled beep emanated from the hallway.

  “Dryer’s done,” Sofie announced.

  Hudson moved before she spoke. I turned to watch him, admiring the clench of his ass beneath the soft material and silently laughing at how gangly he looked in the too-short sweats. My laughter died when he peeled off the tight shirt. He waited until he was beyond the kitchen, in the gloomy hallway and out of Sofie’s sight. Had I gone back to my seat on the couch, I would have missed the show, too. As it was, I wished he’d flipped the hallway light on. What the dim lighting revealed made my mouth water.

  And now let’s see the front, I thought, admiring the play of muscles across his back. As if he heard me, just before he slipped into the washroom, he turned his head and met my eyes. He gave me a slow grin as he looped his thumbs into the waistband of the sweats and tugged them down a tantalizing three inches to reveal the upper swell of his white ass before he stepped out of sight. I blinked and took a step in his direction.

  “Close your mouth, dear,” Sofie said, softly enough for only me to hear.

  I clicked my mouth shut and blushed to the roots of my hair. Sofie cackled. I pretended acute interest in Kyoko.

  * * *

  Hudson and I took turns telling Sofie our bizarre tale while we devoured several helpings of her famous enchiladas. By the end of dinner, we’d caught my aunt up on the ent
irety of our predicament.

  “She claims to have gone to school with me, and she must have, because she remembered all those blackouts and Byron’s car battery problems,” I said.

  Sofie’s dark gaze pinned me. Thorny vines slithered around her midriff. She understood the unspoken importance of Jenny connecting those incidents to me.

  “I didn’t want to get you involved, too,” I said, “but I couldn’t think of anywhere else to take Kyoko.”

  “You did the right thing, Eva. But now what?”

  “Our plan is pretty simple,” Hudson said. Dressed again in his jeans and blue T-shirt, minus his socks and shoes, he relaxed against the back of his chair. Though we’d met only that morning, he didn’t look out of place at my aunt’s dinner table. “I didn’t find a report of a missing elephant on any news feed. Somehow Jenny got her hands on an unclaimed baby elephant. So, we need to find Jenny and sort this out before anyone finds us with Kyoko.”

  “What if Jenny doesn’t want her back?” Sofie asked as I topped off everyone’s margarita glasses. None of us were eager to rush from the table.

  “I don’t think she intends to give Kyoko to me for good,” I said. “She seemed nervous, like she thought she was being followed. I think she wants me to keep Kyoko safe for a while.”

  “And if that was only the insanity talking?” Sofie pressed.

  “Then we contact the authorities and convince them of our innocence,” I said. My stomach tightened at the thought.

  “I’m more concerned right now about the bad luck that elephant carries with her,” Hudson said.

  “The cars breaking down?” Sofie guessed. I didn’t say anything, and Sofie didn’t look at me.

  “Yeah. And the phones. It’s more than a string of bad luck.”

  “You don’t honestly believe that, do you?” I asked. “A cursed elephant?”

  “Exactly. It’s cursed.” A foot-tall marble winged cherub flapped lazy stone wings off his left shoulder. I eyed it, then Sofie. If I could see the divination, she could, too, along with a whole lot more. But if she understood what it meant, she didn’t clue me in.

  “Plus we’ve got that trashed Suburban to fix.” Hudson gestured toward the carport. “Normally I would call up the rental company and have them send us a new car, but I can’t. Not with all the water damage. Somehow we’ve got to get it cleaned up before we can report that it broke down. That’s going to take time I’d rather spend finding Jenny and getting ourselves out of this mess.”

  “Perhaps the car will be working by tomorrow,” Sofie said, eyes innocently wide.

  I calculated the distance from the pool house to the carport. Far enough. Ten hours was plenty of time for a vehicle to recover from my company.

  Hudson shook his head. “I’ve never known a vehicle to spontaneously repair itself. Plus, I can’t impose on you. I really should be getting home and working on finding Jenny.”

  “I thought you said your coworkers were doing that,” Sofie said.

  “They are, but this whole thing is a mess, and the sooner we can get it straightened out, the better. God, the back of that Suburban . . . I don’t think we’re ever going to get it clean.”

  “It will all look better in the morning,” Sofie said. “There’s no sense in you rushing home tonight when I’ve got a perfectly good spare bedroom. And Eva can stay in the guesthouse, like always.” She raised a hand to cut Hudson off when he started to protest. “Plus, tomorrow you can have a professional detailer tackle that mess.”

  Hudson looked at me, raising his eyebrows in silent question.

  “I’m more than happy to spend the night and start fresh tomorrow. But I have a change of clothes here and you don’t,” I said, giving him an out.

  He glanced at his wristwatch—thankfully mechanical, not digital—then at me. Finally, he shrugged. “Starting tomorrow does sound better. Today has been a massive string of bad luck. I’m afraid if I get into another car—Kyoko present or not—the damn thing will break down, too.” The cherub disappeared. Twin bananas hung from his shoulders, each dripping rotten slices down his chest. I tried not to stare.

  “Your day wasn’t all bad, was it?” Sofie asked.

  I did a mental eye roll. I didn’t need to look to know her finger puppets were back. “The day did begin with your artwork being stolen,” I said, hoping to distract her and bypass any awkwardness.

  “Exactly! Isn’t that fabulous?”

  “No, it’s not. Art you made—pieces you spent time and money on and were planning to sell—was taken by an imbecile. Where’s the good in that?”

  “I told you, Eva. Artists wait a lifetime to become famous enough to be forged or stolen and sold in some seedy black-market transaction. In my twenty-five-year career, this is the best thing that has ever happened to me.” Sofie got up and grabbed several pieces of paper from the edge of the kitchen island. “This is a list of people who called today to interview me for local papers and magazines,” she said, handing me a paper with five names on it. “This is a list of the national presses picking up the story.” Three more names. “Two art blogs and an auction house blog have requested interviews, too. And”—she paused before presenting the final paper with a flourish—“this is the list of sales I made online today.” Twelve names and addresses filled the paper.

  I fanned the pages. “Really? Just today?” A good month’s online sales meant two prints or maybe an original. Most of Sofie’s work was commission-based, with sales at gallery shows augmenting her income.

  “Just today. And the hits on my site are . . . Well, I won’t bore you with the details, but they’ve been fantastic. I also made two appointments for commissioned work, and one is an office that wants at least five pieces.”

  Grinning, Sofie plopped back into her seat. She raised her half-full glass to us. “A toast: To whoever stole my paintings, may they be as blessed as I am.” We clinked glasses and I sipped my margarita.

  People amazed me. My aunt oozed talent. Her artwork had shown around the world, a testament to her talent and her dedication to making a name for herself in the art community. But it took a thief to bring her to the attention of the general public. Some unknown individual had proclaimed they valued S. Sterling’s artwork enough to risk imprisonment to obtain it, and now everyone else jumped on the same bandwagon, afraid to miss out.

  Shaking my head, I began to clear the dishes. Hudson immediately rose to help. Together we filled the dishwasher and wiped down the kitchen. We worked together easily, like we’d shared domestic chores all our lives. He didn’t talk, and I was content to say nothing. Even this camaraderie was seductive. Plus, what’s not sexy about a man who pitches in with chores without hesitation? Hudson had the manners of a modern-day gentleman. The damn man was making it difficult to maintain my distance, even with Jenny’s threat looming in the back of my mind.

  Sofie swooped in as we finished, shooing us out of the kitchen before Hudson could attempt to start the dishwasher. It wouldn’t have complied, having died over an hour earlier. She pulled frozen cream puffs from the freezer, arranged them on a platter, and drizzled stove-warmed hot fudge over the top. I uncorked a caramel-colored dessert wine and poured three slender glasses for us. Hudson made minimal protests about Sofie going to too much trouble, but she assured him it was no less than she would have done if she’d been home alone. It was the truth, too. My aunt had taught me early on to enjoy the simple pleasures in life.

  We settled into cushy chairs in the living room, and Sofie switched on the gas fireplace to disguise the fact that the living room lights were out of commission. I sat with my feet tucked under me and savored a partially thawed cream puff.

  “You have a beautiful home,” Hudson said after the silence had settled around us. “It’s very inviting.”

  “That’s all Eva.” A large wolf appeared at Sofie’s feet, curled up against the front of the couch, but I eyed the fairy wand resting in her right hand with more trepidation. Black wood with a sculpted white quartz
handle and tipped with blunt silver, the wand was one step up from finger puppets. Sofie had decided to influence Hudson based on the divinations she saw.

  “She’s positively gifted when it comes to interior design,” my aunt continued. “And I’ve never met a more talented feng shui consultant. If I were left to my own devices, the walls would have art, but everything else would be a mishmash. And I know for a fact that Bernie wouldn’t be in my life.” Sofie pointed to a picture on the mantel of her and Bernie kissing.

  Bernie was Sofie’s boyfriend of eight months. They’d met after we’d removed the enormous watercolor of a lonely woman from Sofie’s romance and relationship bagua and replaced it with a painting of two intertwined trees. I’d done a few enhancements in the relationship sections of each room—a matched pair of swan salt and pepper shakers for the kitchen, a candle with two wicks for the front room, a full-leafed plant in her studio—and Sofie had purchased new bedsheets with the intention of sharing them with someone special. A month later, Sofie met Bernie through a mutual friend, and they’d been dating happily since.

  “So you think that because the things in your house were placed a certain way, it brought you romance?” Hudson asked. The bananas were back, rotten cores and all.

  “Oh, definitely, though that’s rather simplistic. You explain, Eva.”

  It had been at Sofie’s urging that I’d tried my hand at feng shui as a teenager. We’d already discovered I had more decorating skills than Sofie, and I liked doing it a great deal more. Plus, Sofie’s suggestion had been motivated as much by love as desperation. As graduation loomed ever closer, I’d grown increasingly despondent. While my friends raced toward futures of endless opportunity, I trudged toward adulthood, dread hobbling every step. Living and working in the “real world” meant battering myself against a culture in which my biological curse fated me to fail time after time. Traditional schooling had already set up the pattern, and the life beyond my seventeen-year-old tunnel vision had looked downright depressing.

  “You only get one life, baby girl,” Sofie had told me, rubbing my back while I sobbed my despair into a pillow. “If you don’t make sure you’re having fun while you live it, no one else will.” She had placed a book on feng shui in my hands. “You’re happiest when you’re puttering around here. Start there.”