Otterly Scorched

by Tara Sivec

  And splashing around in the children’s wading pool is an adorable little river otter, who suddenly sits up on his hind legs and cocks his wet head to the side as he looks at me.

  “Which one is that?” my dad asks as I ever so slowly open the door a little wider and take a few tentative steps into the room before stopping.

  “It’s a hell beast! Who cares which one it is?” Martin whispers loudly from out in the hall.

  I take a couple more slow, easy steps into the large room before stopping again.

  “That would be Lincoln,” I say softly with a smile, lowering my body down into a crouch as slowly as possible while Lincoln continues to study me from his pool, and I reach into my front pocket.

  “I’ve been with them for weeks, and I still have no idea which one is which,” Martin complains from not far behind me, not quite as scared now that I’m in front of him, putting my life on the line for him.

  “Otterham Lincoln got his name—” I pause, pulling my hand out of my pocket and gently shaking my fist. Lincoln immediately splashes out of the pool, and I hold my breath as he scurries across the room toward me, flinging water everywhere as soon as I jingle the handful of pennies in my hand. “—because he’s obsessed with pennies.”

  I smile, finally let out the breath I was holding when the “hell beast” Martin has been having a nervous breakdown over grabs my penny-holding hand with both of his paws and starts squeaking, chirping, and freaking out as he paws at my hand and tries to get me to open my fist. Sprinkling the pennies in a pile on the floor next to a rubber duck, I stand back up and leave Lincoln batting pennies around the hardwood and making such a commotion that Martin covers his ears again.

  “Where’s Chris?” I ask, looking back over my shoulder at him.

  I feel a little calmer now that I know one of Dax’s otters is alive and seems to be doing just fine, but it’s a little strange Chris didn’t come running out when he heard me come in here. Christotterpher Columbus got his name because he’s highly obsessed with exploring out of all the otters, and I’m assuming he’s mostly responsible for the disaster that is now this house.

  “Oh, you’ll probably have to go get him. My guess is he’s stuck again between the wall and the couch,” Nanci tells me, her smile disappearing to look a little worried again as she points over to the couple feet of space between the couch and one corner of the wall.

  “It’s not my fault!” Martin suddenly shouts when I get over to the couch.

  It’s not until I squat down and look between the space that I see why the two of them were suddenly so nervous.

  “What the hell did you do to him?” I shout, diving to my knees to get a closer look at Chris.

  Or the otter who ate Chris.

  “Jesus, even his fat rolls have fat rolls,” my dad mutters, coming up to stand over me while I slowly reach out and run my hand down the widest back I’ve ever seen on an otter. “You could fit an entire place setting on that back.”

  Chris squeaks as he looks up at me and sniffs my hand.

  “We call him Fat Back now.” Nanci chuckles, immediately sobering and clearing her throat when I glare at her over my shoulder before looking back down at poor, extremely obese Chris, who is easily three times the size he was when he went missing.

  “He just never stops eating,” Martin complains. “If I don’t feed him, he makes me bleed!”

  Martin holds up both of his bloody, gauze-wrapped hands and waves them around.

  “How in the hell can he make you bleed, when it looks like he can’t even roll over?” my dad questions him as Chris continues to chirp and squeak.

  But he’s so fat they sound more like squeaky wheezes, and it’s really hard not to laugh when he waddles and rolls his body back and forth from side to side, trying to squeeze himself out of the spot he’s gotten wedged between the legs of the couch and the wall.

  Everyone in the room starts lightly chuckling behind me, and I decide to wait until I can pull Chris out of here before I start going off on all of them again. Besides, I’m too happy right now that I’ve recovered both of Dax’s otters to be mad, and I can’t wait to hear him say—

  “Your note said you had a work emergency.”

  That’s definitely not it.

  My hands freeze midair, reaching for one of Chris’s fat, meaty legs, when I hear Dax’s voice from the doorway.

  Oh shit… of course Dax would decide to pop by his dad’s house for a visit bright and early after the wonderful night they shared talking last night.

  All the laughter in the room is immediately cut off, and I slowly turn around as Lincoln starts screeching even louder than before, abandoning his pennies to race over to Dax standing in the doorway. The infuriated look he has aimed at me momentarily disappears when he drops to the ground to scoop Lincoln up as soon as the otter gets to him.

  “Oh my God! Oh thank God you’re okay!” Dax exclaims to his missing otter, trying to hug an impossibly squirmy Lincoln as he squeaks, chirps, and climbs all over him, beyond excited to see his daddy again.

  My heart fills with joy watching Dax reunite with Lincoln, holding him up high in front of him with a big smile on his face and then bringing him close to his chest to pepper his head with kisses.

  My heart immediately loses that joy when Dax finally puts Lincoln back on the ground and directs him to the pile of pennies then stands back up and looks at me, no trace of a smile.

  “Your note said you had a work emergency.” He repeats the same words he said when he walked in here and found all of us yucking it up with the otters he’s been distraught over for more than a month. The words come out just as low and serious as they did the first time. He has every right to be pissed. Here he was coming over to his dad’s house to probably share a nice breakfast, and he finds me here, with his otters, when I’m supposed to be at work. Finding his otters in the home of his father is also enough to make the poor man’s head explode right now.

  “Don’t be mad at her. I’m the one—”

  “I’m not talking to you,” Dax cuts Nanci off. “I’ll deal with you later.”

  His angry eyes never leave mine, and I swallow nervously.

  “I mean, finding your otters is for work, and your dad does have a television currently smoking in one of his rooms, so I’d say that’s a verified emergency.” I smile at him sweetly, hoping it will calm him down a little.

  “You really gonna try and be cute right now?” Dax just glares at me, a muscle ticking in his cheek telling me I am, in fact, not being cute at all. This isn’t like the annoyed glares he gives me when I call him on his shit, either. He’s looking at me so… seriously. Like he’s suddenly back to being gruff, angry Dax, like the day I first saw him again at The Backyard.

  Oh this is not good.

  “I brought you breakfast.” Dax’s voice is still quietly fuming as he bends down and grabs a plastic bag by his feet I didn’t notice he must have dropped when he saw Lincoln. When he stands back up, he tosses the bag across the room to me without a word. I catch it easily, my eyes filling with stupid tears when I see what he brought me for breakfast.

  “You got me an entire one-pound bag of nothing but Lucky Charms marshmallows?” I ask in awe.

  I’m feeling like the biggest shit in the world that he was so thoughtful that I’m not even putting it together he wouldn’t have brought the marshmallows here to his dad’s if he didn’t know I would be here ahead of time.

  “Funny thing happened this morning after you raced out of the house so early, leaving me alone in your bed. Naked.” He glares at me even harder, and I start to fidget where I’m still kneeling next to the one other thing that is really going to piss him off when he sees it.

  “Oooh… this just got interesting,” Nanci muses, Dax and I both shooting her aggravated looks until she wipes the smile off her face again.

  “I figured my girlfriend would probably be starving, since she had such an emergency at five in the morning,” Dax continues, bringing his hea
ted gaze back to me. “So I hopped in my car and went over to Claws and Effect to leave behind the bag of marshmallows I specially ordered for her. On her desk.”

  Oh shit. Ohhh no! He didn’t just randomly show up at his dad’s house. He knew I’d be here. Fuuuck this is so much worse for me!

  “On her desk,” Dax continues, while I die a little more on the inside, “right on top of the open file for Chris and Lincoln, with the map Ryan drew of my fucking habitat, and the schedule for my fucking otters, with the address for my fucking father’s house pulled up on her computer screen.”

  Dammit! Why did I leave those things out when I stopped by this morning to get his dad’s address?

  Dax isn’t shouting like he was that day at The Backyard when he was confronting his father in his office, or like the first day I saw him again when he was screaming at his employees. He’s speaking everything in a low, clipped voice that is so much worse than a shouting, angry one. This one is just filled with disappointment and hurt, because of me. He’s not even bothering with his dad or Nanci. I’m the one he never expected in a million years would keep something from him, lie to him, and go behind his back, and this is so much worse than when he did it to try to break into Ryan’s house, and we both know that.

  “When did you know?”

  I don’t have to ask what he means, because I know damn well what.

  “I had an idea after my interview with Ryan. But I knew for sure at the dinner party,” I whisper.

  A little pathetic whimper comes out of me at the devastation that comes over Dax’s face as he looks at me. I know exactly what’s going through his mind right now and that he’s thinking about what I said to him right after the party and probably thinking I didn’t mean it, like I was afraid of. He just needs to give me a second to explain everything to him.

  I quickly scramble up from the ground and take a step in his direction.

  “Dax, let me—”

  “You’re done talking now,” he cuts me off, looking at his father while I try not to break down in tears in front of everyone.

  “Where is my other fucking otter?”

  Everyone silently points back to where I’m still standing next to the couch, all of them too afraid to speak. With a sigh, I tuck the bag of marshmallows under my arm, turn around, and bend over, reaching between the wall and the couch. Grabbing both of Chris’s girthy front legs from where he’s still hidden and fell asleep during all this, I grunt and tug as hard as I can to get him unstuck. Chris wakes up and lets out a loud squeak, and then he pops loose, sliding across the hardwood floor on his belly from the force of my tugging until he stops a few feet away.

  “Son of a bitch!” Dax shouts when his now portly otter looks up at him and chirps.

  Dax quickly bends down and hefts Chris up in his arms, hugging his beefy body tightly to him and whispering apologies in the animal’s ear.

  “I didn’t know they ate so much,” Martin mutters quietly.

  “Of course they fucking eat a lot!” Dax rages. “They normally eat up to twenty-five percent of their body weight every day, but when they’re stressed, they will constantly eat instead of only eating only what they need!”

  “Again, brand new information that would have been nice to have!” Martin looks pointedly at Nanci, crossing his bloody arms in front of him in a huff. “Maybe someone should have told me I shouldn’t have let Chris have twenty-four-hour access to the food supply.”

  “Maybe someone should have read all the literature I gave him and watched all the videos I emailed, instead of calling me at all hours of the night, crying because he’s a big baby who can’t handle a few scratches!” she fires back.

  “I no longer have the tip of my pinky finger!” Martin wails.

  “Well, at least now you’ll have a fun just the tip joke to tell at parties.” My dad laughs.

  Dax is too busy wrangling Lincoln from the floor and scooping him up in his arms along with Chris to bother with the idiots arguing in the room. He’s almost out the door with both of them by the time I make it to him, grabbing onto the back of his shirt and tugging him to a stop.

  “Dax, I—”

  “I said you’re done talking,” her interrupts me again, not even looking back at me as he hefts the otters up higher in his arms, and my hand slowly lets go of his shirt. “I need to take my boys to the vet.”

  With that, he disappears out of the office door and down the hall, his boys squealing and chirping with happiness the entire way.

  “I didn’t even get to use one of the grenades,” my dad complains as I hug my bag of marshmallows to my chest.

  “My pool house is a complete loss now after I put them out there for two days. Wanna go blow that up?” Martin asks.

  My dad thinks about it for a second and then shrugs.

  “Why the hell not. Harley, wanna go blow some shit up? It’ll make you feel better.”

  With a sniffle and a swipe at the dumb tear falling down my cheek, knowing I probably just lost the best thing that will ever happen to me, I turn around and look at the two men while Nanci starts cleaning up the shredded mess of the leather couch.

  “Why the hell not.” I sigh.

  CHAPTER 24

  Lucky Charm

  Harley

  “…and I knew he had a crush on you back then, even though he never admitted it, so I thought if I snuck away an otter or two, and Claws and Effect came to the rescue, you two would be reunited, and Dax could live happily ever after with the woman he’s always wanted. I still keep in touch with all my exes, so they didn’t mind helping me out with the postcards, so Dax would at least stop worrying they had been harmed,” Nanci finishes, folding her hands together in her lap and smiling.

  I continue glaring at her, tapping my fingers on the arm of the Adirondack chair I’ve been sitting in for the last half hour on the front porch of The Backyard, while Nanci finally gave me the full story about why she and Martin kidnapped Chris and Lincoln.

  The only reason I even agreed to come over here this morning and hear her out is because she promised Dax wouldn’t be home, because he’s still out of town at the otter specialist with Chris and Lincoln.

  The rat bastard.

  And since his car wasn’t here when I pulled in, I was confident Nanci was finally finished lying about everything.

  After blowing up a pool house, which actually really does make a person feel a whole hell of a lot better for a little while, and Captain DJ Taylor and a few of his men had to stop by and put out a teensy, tiny little tree fire, I was too sad and too exhausted to let Nanci and Martin try to explain things to me that night. I went to my dad’s house, and I spent the next twenty-four hours after Dax walked out, crying off and on and feeling like complete shit that I hurt him.

  And then, I just got pissed. I am Harley fucking Blake, and I am not about to spend days crying over a man, no matter how much I love him or how much he has made my life better. That son of a bitch didn’t even give me a chance to explain. It’s been four days, and he hasn’t even had the decency to return the texts and voicemails I left him after the tree fire had been extinguished, begging him to talk to me.

  Fuck. Him.

  “And Martin and I have already apologized profusely and explained everything to Dax. He’s still a little salty with me, which I deserve, but I’m just happy he’s not going to hold a grudge with Martin,” Nanci continues, pissing me off even more that Dax talked to them in the last four days. “The only reason I even convinced Martin to hold onto the otters is because I promised him it would bring Dax back to him. He’s been trying to find a way for years to mend fences with his son, and when I told him we could kill two birds with one stone and also find Dax love, well… it kind of got a little out of hand, until it was just too late at that point to come clean without everyone being mad, so we just let you guys figure it out on your own and hoped you’d be in love by then. Because love fixes everything! And it worked!”

  I scoff and roll my eyes at her.


  It doesn’t matter that I’ve been staying at my dad’s place for the last four days, because I can’t stand the thought of walking into my house that Dax made into a home, when he’s not there to share it with me and might never be again.

  “Love doesn’t fix everything. This is why I’m thirty-eight years old and have avoided love all this time. And why you’ve had seven husbands, Nanci. Because it’s bullshit and just makes things worse. It shows you all the perfect, and wonderful, and amazing things you could experience, and the delicious food you could eat, and how blissfully happy you could be with a sectional, and then it just walks away and never returns a goddamn text!”

  Fuck. He’s ghosting me. Just like I did to all the boyfriends before him that I didn’t even know were boyfriends. Well, this sucks even worse now.

  “All right, good talk,” I say, smacking my palms on the arms of the chair twice before quickly getting up.

  I’ve had just about enough of being the bigger person and giving Nanci a chance to apologize and explain. If I don’t get out of here right now, all the anger I’ve been clutching tightly to the last few days is going to slip from my grasp, and I’m going to start blubbering like a baby again. I told him my biggest fear was that I was easily forgettable to him, and look at that—four days. He can remember to call Nanci and his dad, but he can’t remember me.

  “If you think for one minute that I could ever, ever forget about you, Harley Blake, you have lost your goddamn mind.”

  Dax’s words from our first date ring through my head, and right when I make it to the porch steps and I’m almost choking to death over the lump in my throat, a loud shout from behind the farmhouse makes me pause on the top step.

  “You lazy motherfuckers couldn’t even do your goddamn jobs!”

  My heart starts beating faster in my chest, and that stupid voice I hear shouting from the distance has the same effect on me it did the first time I heard it again after five years. It makes me want to punch the porch railing I’m gripping to tightly and hump it at the same time.