by Jenn Hughes
Richard dropped his fork, and it clanged against the oil pan. “It may not be any of my business, but it’s sure as hell Preston’s. I’m trying to look out for you. Sam may be fun, but he’s not worth losing your career over. You’ll regret getting involved with him.”
“And why is that?”
“Because Sam will be your dream guy for about another three weeks. Then he’ll be off to greener, younger pastures. He can’t help himself. Do you even know why Sam goes to the horror festival at The Electric in December?”
“I don’t care why.”
“Yes, you do. He calls the holidays his off-season. Sam never gets involved with anyone from Thanksgiving until New Year’s because the relationship gets too serious, too fast. Something about Christmas speeding up the natural process of things. Anyway, he distracts himself until after New Year’s by gaming or watching movies, and then once we enter a new year he resumes his regularly scheduled dating marathon.”
The tears suddenly trying to escape from her eyes stung. They wanted out, but no way was she letting that happen. Lillian swallowed, took a deep breath, and then crammed those tears back down into that emotional abyss inside.
It shouldn’t have hurt to hear something she already knew, but it did. She’d allowed herself to dream. To imagine she might be different to Sam. And the shame of it hit her squarely in the chest with a resounding thud. Seared every inch of her skin like a hot brand. Lillian had almost made the same mistake once again.
But she wasn’t the girl who believed in the dream anymore. Everything she’d felt was just a momentary lapse. Lillian knew the truth. A few movies here or there and then once the ball dropped in Times Square, Sam would kick her to the curb and move on to a younger model. Literally.
Lillian picked up her napkin from her lap, wiped the corner of her mouth, and then dropped it onto her cold pasta. “Well, Richard, this really has been sooo much fun, but I think it’s time for me to—”
Richard reached across the table and grabbed her hand. “You may know me, but I know you, too. You want one guy and white-picket fences for the rest of your life. You did back in college, too, and now I don’t blame you one bit. It sucks getting older. Sucks even more to get older without someone to love. That’s why I want Emily back. And that’s why you shouldn’t pin your hopes on a guy like Sam Owens. He’ll let you down.”
The sharp cut of emotions slowly faded away into a strange sort of numbness and a crystal-clear confirmation—Richard never knew her. Never really saw her. And now he only saw a pathetic woman desperate for a man and ready to fall head over heels for precisely the wrong one.
Fuck that. And fuck white-picket fences.
Strangely, she was happy. Glad to feel the break separating her from what she thought she wanted all those years ago. Lillian thanked her lucky stars Richard Bryant chose Emily Bradshaw. They deserved one another. And she deserved someone amazing. Or no one at all—because she was pretty damn amazing all by herself.
Lillian boiled. Her sweaty thighs felt like two big slippery eels choking to death underneath her constricting underwear. She wanted to go home. Undress and lie around in pajamas and eat everything . . .
But as the urge to jump up and run out of the restaurant nearly overtook her, a happy thought popped up. Locked and loaded and aimed straight at Richard.
“You know, the best thing about this evening is that I now have absolutely no appetite. Maybe I’ll lose a little weight and never need another hell-corset smoothing my curves. So wasting my time trying to help you wasn’t a complete loss.” Lillian smiled, jerked her hand from his grasp, and then stood up from the table. “Enjoy your meal.”
“C’mon, Lillian . . .”
“Oh, and here’s some free advice—if you ever get the chance to take Emily to dinner again, please take her somewhere with food on fucking plates. Her attitude might improve exponentially.”
She spun around, her dress twirling like a starlet’s in an old musical, and then stormed toward the exit. As she walked away, her heels crunching the sawdust strewn across the barn wood floor, she heard Richard groan.
“Where are you going? It’s not like I can’t ask for a plate!”
Lillian ignored him and marched straight into the coat check at the front of the restaurant, grabbed her coat, and then pushed her way through a waiting crowd of clueless customers to the exit. Out on the sidewalk, she stood starving and irritated and with no clue which way to turn. Downtown traffic whooshed by, blowing cold, exhaust-filled air and flurries into her face. But something caught her eye. A big something.
A gigantic neon chicken in a suit of armor beckoned from down the street. Lillian headed that way, guided by the glowing gold chicken smiling back at her in the night.
“I’ll take dinner with a knighted chicken over Richard any night of the week. Maybe a bucket of Sir Cluck’s extra crispy drumsticks and a quart of mashed potatoes can salvage this night,” she mumbled.
At least it couldn’t hurt.
Chapter 11
Sir Clucked-Up
Three-quarters of a bucket of Sir Cluck’s chicken and a half of a quart of mashed potatoes when eaten at eleven o’clock at night hurt. A lot.
But, lying in bed the next evening, Lillian placed most of the blame behind her night of miserable stomach cramps squarely on the pasta primavera and lousy company at From Farm.
Golden beams of setting sunlight pierced puffy pink clouds and poured through the bay window in her bedroom, spotlighting a few personal items she’d added to the room’s deliberate decor. The Winslow Homer-esque oil painting of a sailboat at sea, her first expensive purchase after accepting a job at Mythos, gleamed on the far wall. A twinkle on the nightstand caught her eye, and she focused on the silver-framed photo of her family. Everyone smiling. Everyone happy.
But happiness eluded her that evening, driven away by one nagging question—who in the hell does Richard Bryant think he is?
Suddenly playing big brother and trying to protect her from town stud Sam Owens suited Richard about as well as a tube top. He hadn’t thought twice about dumping her like yesterday’s chicken, so genuine concern couldn’t be the culprit. What she did with Sam had nothing to do with Richard, and remaining friends with someone who stuck his long nose into her business felt like a bad idea. Regardless of the fact he was most likely . . .
Lillian shuddered. It hurt to think it.
Fine. R-r-r-right. Richard might be . . . ugh, right.
She’d read the tabloid stories in the checkout line at the grocery store. Sam’s face featured predominately on the covers—along with that of his latest fling. He’d apparently slept with every woman in the northern hemisphere except her.
So Richard’s bombshell hadn’t been a complete shock. The revelation Sam had some immature off-season to avoid commitment struck Lillian as less surprising and more . . . stinging. A scalpel-bladed embarrassment, cutting precisely to the bone. She’d been careful since college not to get swept away by good looks and charm. Her ability to keep men at arm’s length rivaled any superpower. But in the span of a few days, she’d seriously considered risking her job to throw herself at a man with the maturity level of a pogo stick.
Walls had to be built. Big, thick, reinforced Sam-repelling walls. No problem at all.
Lillian flopped over on the bed and stared at the closet door. On the handle hung the perfect outfit, ready to go. Before her disaster-fest at From Farm the night before, she’d chosen dark jeans and a burgundy tunic top after nearly an hour’s consideration. The time allowance had nothing to do with impressing anyone. Nothing.
She sighed. It seemed like such a shame to miss a Christmas movie about mutant toads. And she looked so good in burgundy. If she saw Sam Owens at The Electric, it didn’t matter. She didn’t care about him. Not at all.
Two hours later, Lillian shuf
fled over to her usual seat in The Electric and then dropped down into it, sinking in comfortably. Not caring. It helped there was a larger-than-usual crowd. She focused on the other moviegoers, studying each one while waiting for the start of Mistletoad. One man walked down the center aisle wearing a hideous Christmas sweater with LED lights embroidered all over it.
“There had better be an off button on that . . . ” Lillian said.
Aloud. To no one but herself. Sam would have appreciated the comment. He probably would have made a goofy joke about it, and having someone like that around was fun.
So why the hell isn’t he around?
The movie finally started. Lillian fumbled with her 3-D glasses, situating them on her nose at the exact moment a slimy tongue lashed out from the screen during the opening credits. She jerked back and then smiled at the sight of the five-story mutant toad hopping down New York City’s Fifth Avenue. Seconds later, it crushed a snow globe float in the middle of a Christmas parade.
Sadly, the opening was the highlight of the movie. From there, the CGI effects and 3-D stunts barely covered the mediocre plot. Lillian reminded herself to keep her expectations low, considering she’d paid to watch a movie about a mutated, weaponized toad terrorizing New York on Christmas Eve. Not exactly up for any best picture awards.
But she groaned when a smart-ass Air Force pilot cracked a line about getting ready to have a ‘hopping good time’ as he aimed his missiles at the toad.
She barely moved when the toad tossed a cop car out into the audience.
She only sighed when its gigantic tadpoles slithered through Manhattan’s streets.
Forty-five minutes in and the only toad on her mind happened to be a missing one who should have been sitting next to her. She hated to admit it, but Sam “Off-season” Owens made movies at The Electric fun. Without him, Lillian felt . . . wrong. She pulled out her phone and found Cedric’s text containing all of Sam’s contact information. There had to be a good reason for him to miss Mistletoad.
What if something happened? What if he’s sick? I should drop by. Check up on him.
Not caring. Nothing more than common human politeness. She scrolled down and found an address. Two addresses.
Fifteen minutes later, Lillian walked along Charlotte Street, an upscale downtown neighborhood. Sam’s first address was a ritzy apartment building dwarfing those surrounding it. The glass and metal facade, flanked by massive concrete blocks at the corners rising up like castle pillars, looked about as welcoming as an exam room on an alien spacecraft.
Luckily, Sam hadn’t been to his fancy Charlotte Street apartment in weeks. The doorman briskly informed her of that—right before he escorted her out and then wiped the entry door handles with hand sanitizer. Irritated, Lillian stood outside for a few seconds and considered coughing all over the door. But that felt a little juvenile.
So instead, she tipped over a small modern art sculpture at the entrance and then ran off into the night toward the next address. Very eighties teen angst. Sam was a bad influence.
Sam’s second address on Baker Boulevard, a sleepy street east of downtown, struck her as being a little different than the city center—as in not exactly high-end. Lined with neat two-story homes and ornate cast-iron lampposts festooned with evergreen boughs and big red ribbons, Baker Boulevard looked like it had been painted there by Norman Rockwell.
Snowmen guarded most of the homes’ lawns. Snow shovels leaned on porch posts and at the end of cleared walks. Children’s overturned sleds peppered the yards. Although perfect for soccer moms and family men, Baker Boulevard definitely did not fit her image of the location of Sam Owens’s second residence.
Where are the butlers and limos and champagne fountains and pushy doormen?
When she finally arrived at 385 Baker Boulevard, Lillian studied the exterior and decided she definitely preferred the quaint, four-story brownstone to the cool, clinical apartment building on Charlotte Street. Number 385 looked lived in and comfortable. A child’s bicycle leaned inside the open vestibule next to the mailboxes, and someone had decorated a small evergreen bush in the front yard with colorful Christmas lights. From the top floor apartment, flashes of red and gold flickered through the windows. It reminded her of an arcade.
Gotcha.
She walked up the steps and found the building’s call box in the vestibule. Her finger hovered over a column of unlabeled silver buttons next to the door. Finally, she pressed the top button and a loud mechanical ring echoed out into the night. After a few seconds, the entry door buzzed and unlocked with a click.
The jog up four flights of stairs left her heart pounding. Again, not caring. Just slightly out of shape. At the top, Lillian entered a narrow hallway with two doors, one at either end. The lights had flooded through the windows of the apartment on the left, so she walked over to the worn wooden door of 4A. Lillian knocked quietly and waited, her heart lodged in her throat after leapfrogging its way up from her chest. But nothing happened.
And then she cringed.
What in the hell am I doing?
She remembered her job, the one she could lose for merely standing in Sam’s apartment building.
She remembered Richard’s warnings about Sam, especially the one about his stupid off-season.
And then she remembered she had absolutely no valid reason for showing up at Sam Owens’s apartment in the middle of the night.
Lillian made it halfway down the hall before the sound of a doorknob clicking froze her in her tracks. She felt the pull of air as the door opened and then . . .
Silence. Oh, God . . .
“Lillian?” Sam asked from behind her. “Doesn’t Preston pay you enough? Are you moonlighting delivering Chinese takeout now?”
She turned. Then she blinked several times. She’d expected to find Sam Owens in 4A. The Sam Owens she thought she knew. But the impeccably dressed, fashion-forward man from Old Henry’s and The Electric and every tech magazine on Earth had disappeared.
The Sam who stood in the doorway had wavy, tousled hair dangling across his forehead. The glow from red headphones wrapped crookedly around his neck gave him a strangely ominous look. His wide, sky-blue eyes stared through wire-rimmed glasses, a pair last in fashion sometime in the nineties.
Beneath a Quasar Crusades-licensed, furry brown Koowiee character bathrobe with a gray fabric gun belt dangling from loops at the sides, he wore an old pair of navy sweatpants and a green T-shirt that read Trust Me. I’m The Doctor. One hand held a gaming controller. The other a wad of cash.
While her brain worked at warp speed to align the Bizarro and Business Sams, Lillian suddenly remembered he’d asked her a question.
“No,” she blurted out. “I . . . I . . . You missed the toad.”
Chapter 12
Firespawn and Chill
Blank.
That’s all Sam drew when he saw Lillian’s face at his front door. No other relevant thoughts. Not the fact the theme from Firespawn blared from the gaming headset around his neck. Not the realization he wasn’t wearing a tailored, pressed suit or color-coordinated business casual ensemble.
The first coherent thought had nothing to do with any of that.
Lillian Walker, you are gorgeous.
Some irrelevant thoughts tumbled out. Random ones, like how she wasn’t the usual delivery guy from House of Luck. Or that his late-night takeout hadn’t arrived. Then it finally hit him.
He remembered he looked like a slob in a hairy brown Koowiee robe. In front of gorgeous Lillian Walker. And then his stomach decided to growl from hunger like a warg-bear in Dawn of Man. Shock quickly faded away to complete and utter humiliation.
They stood in the hallway staring at one another forever. Footsteps suddenly echoed up from the bottom of the stairwell. Someone moved behind Lillian. Someone with a red cap embroidere
d with a big gold lotus.
“Hey, Sam. Here you go. Total comes to sixteen-fifty. And before you ask, yes, I checked and, yes, the egg rolls are in there.”
Sam heard Kevin talking. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the guy’s lips moving and knew Kevin held a big bag of great-smelling Chinese food. But Sam couldn’t stop staring at Lillian. The Firespawn theme music died down in his headphones. Kevin cleared his throat. Lillian tilted her head in Kevin’s direction and raised an eyebrow.
Sam stuck his handful of wadded cash out to Kevin and managed to mumble, “Thanks, Kev. Egg rolls, yes. Keep the change, yes.”
Kevin disappeared. Sam heard a word of thanks and shoes stomping back downstairs. Lillian now wore a little grin on her face. The patronizing kind. The kind making Sam feel as stupid as he knew he looked.
“Do you realize you tipped that delivery guy at least two hundred dollars?” she asked.
“Uh . . . yeah. Of course.” He didn’t know but thought he covered well. Then he gestured behind him. “Guess you’d better come in.”
“Are you asking, or telling?”
“Asking. We need to talk, and I order more takeout than I can eat. There’s plenty if you’re hungry.”
Sam backed against the door until it hit the wall behind. Lillian accepted his invitation, brushing past him as she entered the apartment. The scent of popcorn and perfume wafted up to his nose, relaxing and turning him on at the same time. No small feat. Two hours of vanquishing a hell troll horde on his last level of Firespawn had officially fried his nerves.
He closed the door and watched Lillian inspect his living room. The place had a particular kind of charm—the old, lead-paint kind. But he loved it. From the eighties movie posters on the powder-blue plaster walls to the out-of-place antique oak curio protecting his collection of Bakufū-Tech action figures, it screamed him. And while Lillian took a look around, eying everything in that unreadable way of hers, Sam screamed, too. Internally.