Home Free

by Sonnjea Blackwell

  I shoved my chair back and stood up. “Enjoy the muffins. I won’t bother you again.” I felt numb, physically and emotionally, and I shuffled to the front door, wondering if I could stay in Minter with him despising me. I opened the door, but it slammed it shut, and Danny spun me around to face him. His eyes were flashing, and I could see he was trying hard not to raise his voice.

  “Goddammit, Lex, I was doing fine without you. I slept, I ate, I worked, I had decent sex on occasion, and sometimes I could go a couple days in a row without thinking about you. And then you show up here, out of the blue, and fuck everything up. You piss me off, you make me laugh, you turn me on, and half the time you do all three in the same conversation. I don’t know what to do with you.” He was leaning forward, holding the door closed with one arm and looking down at me, his voice gravelly, sexy as hell. I could smell his soap, and I felt my eyes flutter down to his bare chest for a second or two, and I stuffed my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t start unbuttoning his pants, and I felt the numbness ebb. The new sensation was much more enjoyable.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he growled. “But there’s something you need to know.”

  “Do I need to know it right now?” I asked, giving in and unbuttoning his pants, then sliding the zipper down, slowly, watching his chest as he did the sharp inhale. I bent down and kissed his stomach and shoved the jeans towards the floor.

  “Yeah. Right now.”

  “Okay.” I straightened and slid my t-shirt over my head and undid my bra. He still hadn’t changed position, but his breathing was ragged and his eyes had turned dark and liquid and were moving deliberately over my body. I dropped the bra next to the shirt on the floor. He pulled his eyes away from my chest.

  “There are two things I wouldn’t be able to forgive you for. Ever.”

  I pulled the drawstring on my board shorts and let them fall in a heap, then stepped out of them. I stretched up, kissing his neck. “Mmmm-hmmm. Two things.”

  “If you get yourself killed,” he whispered as my tongue made its way to his earlobe.

  “Right. No dying.” I let my hand wander down his chest, flattening it against his fucking amazing abs, hovering near the waistband of his blue and white boxers.

  “And if you ever bring me decaffeinated coffee again.” The beating of his heart was louder than his voice. His eyes were dilated black and he clenched his fist to keep from reaching for me as my hand meandered further south, inside the boxers, hesitating at the last possible moment.

  “Right. No decaf,” I breathed into his chest.

  I lifted my eyes to his, and they locked and held, and for a split second nobody moved, nobody breathed. Then he caught my hand, shaking his head no. With his other hand, he tilted my face up to his, thisclose to his mouth. I licked my lips involuntarily, and he smiled a slow, wicked smile.

  “Remember the kissing booth?” he asked.

  Like it was yesterday. “Vaguely,” I lied.

  “You never told me what you thought would’ve happened if your brother hadn’t walked up when he did.” He angled his head closer, lips parted, and I reached to meet him, but he pulled away again. Dammit.

  “And we weren’t at school, surrounded by people?”

  He reached behind me and threw the deadbolt, never taking his eyes off mine. “Yeah.” God, that voice.

  I tilted my head up at him and flashed him what I hoped was my most irresistible smile. “Maybe I should show you.”

  ###

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Once again, I’ll endeavor to thank only those people who had something to do with the creation of this book, rather than all the people who’ve had something to do with, you know, keeping me sane or helping me drink wine when writing gets tedious.

  Thank you to my family – Sheila Elliott, Steve Elliott and Diane Nelson, and Sara and Dave Vizcaino – for encouraging me, reading countless drafts and encouraging me some more. You guys are the best.

  Thank you to Darren Held, Lisa Limm and Nate Alexander for offering specific ideas and solutions to various problems. And for making me laugh. All. The. Time.

  And thank you to my husband, Scott Keller, for thinking I can do anything I want. Sometimes that kind of thinking is contagious.

  About Sonnjea Blackwell

  I was born in Fremont, California, the oldest of three children. I, of course, was mature and responsible. My brother and sister were brats who purposely annoyed me by looking at me and breathing too loud.

  When I was three, we moved to Minter, a small central California town nobody’s ever heard of unless they got a speeding ticket there on the way to, well, anywhere else. I spent my time reading and making up stories. In my stories, the heroine was always an only child.

  I grew up thinking I'd be a writer someday. I spent a lot of time not being a writer while I waited for someday to arrive. Finally, on the plane ride home from New York after my sister’s wedding, I decided it was time to start writing. I waited till we landed, then went to work as a “real” writer.

  Turns out, being a real writer comes with petty annoyances like real writer’s block and a perpetual lack of real financial security. So I started writing web content to deal with the financial security issue. And I discovered improv comedy in an effort to alleviate the writer’s block. Now it’s hard to say which is more important to me, writing or improv, but it doesn’t matter anymore because in my world one can’t exist without the other.

  I’ve been happily married to my husband, Scott, forever. He’s got degrees in math and physics and engineering and is a pretty swell guy. We live in Long Beach, California with our Jindo, Koji, in a house that’s a perpetual work-in-progress. The brats (and their spouses) are now some of my best friends, in large part because they quit looking at me and learned to breathe normally. My favorite food is sushi, my favorite color is orange, my dream car is a ’63 Corvette. And if I could have any job in the world, I would be a writer. Or an improv performer.

  Hey. I’m already both of those things. How friggin’ cool is that?

  Check out more information about me, Destiny and other cool stuff at http://www.sonnjea.com

  Read Killer Fate by Sonnjea Blackwell

  CHAPTER ONE

  My name is Destiny DeGraff. DeGraff is Dutch. Destiny is evidently the result of recreational marijuana use and existential thought. It’s not a bad name, especially since my parents once told me if I’d been a boy, they would have named me Thor. Sometimes I still wonder what it would be like to be a male porn star. Nevertheless, I’m not really a “Destiny” kind of girl. I don’t buy into the idea of fate and all that crap. If I had to define my philosophy about life, I’d say I’m one part free-will and about six parts Murphy’s Law. If something can go wrong, it will, often at the worst possible time. My younger sister’s name is Avonleigh, no doubt the result of recreational marijuana use and romance-novel-reading. Fortunately, I couldn’t pronounce Avonleigh when I was little, and I shortened it to A.V. She didn’t like the initials, so when she learned to write, she made it Avie. She calls me Destiny unless she’s feeling bitchy. Then she calls me Thor.

  “...happy birthday, dear Destiny, happy birthday to you!” Avie sang into the phone, off-key and flat, at seven a.m. “I didn’t wake you, did I?”

  I yawned and stretched as I walked down the hall with the cordless, ignoring the pissed-off, thrashing lump in the guestroom who was muttering assorted colorful swear words, bitching about the phone ringing at the crack of dawn and complaining about the daylight as if he were a vampire about to burst into flames. Now that would be a birthday present.

  “Nope,” I said. “But I think you interrupted Dickhead’s beauty rest.” I wondered if the other metrosexuals would kick him out of the club if he had puffy eyes from not getting the requisite eight uninterrupted hours of sleep. Probably he’d have to go for a manicure to draw attention away from the bags.

  Avie snorted. “Dickhead’s beautiful enough. He doesn’t need beauty rest.
What he needs is personality rest. Anyway, I’ll pick you up at two. We’ll have a late lunch.”

  This would be her attempt to distract me while the not-such-a-surprise-after-all party got underway. I agreeably played along, then I hung up and shuffled into the bathroom in my flannel Scooby-Doo pj’s, checking for wrinkles and gray hairs while I waited for the water in the shower to heat up. I’m not as vain as Dickhead, which is a good thing since I don’t have as much to be vain about, but turning thirty had me in a bit of a state. I was okay in the hair department, lots of long brown curls with nary a gray in the bunch. But the black circles under my brown eyes were a frightening development. I could’ve sworn I didn’t have black circles when I was twenty-nine. I gave serious thought to squeezing in a manicure.

  “Goddammit, Destiny, hurry up!” Dickhead hollered from the other side of the locked bathroom door twenty minutes later. We lived in a 1920s two-bedroom Spanish-style, which I realize isn’t that old if you’re from the East Coast, but for California we’re talking ancient. The architectural details included closets smaller than porta-potties, creaky floors, drafty windows and a single bathroom nearly large enough for one adult. But it also had beautiful arched windows, mahogany crown moulding and real copper plumbing. And the dinky bathroom gave me an opportunity to annoy Dickhead on a daily basis. It was a good trade.

  “I’m almost done,” I chirped, giving up on Dickhead’s eye-bag-concealer and doing the hair thing instead. Then I threw on clothes and dashed outside to trim the deadheads off the rosebushes, rake the debris from under the lavender and fill the birdfeeder hanging from the birch tree before heading to work.

  Futzing around with the concealer had put me behind schedule, and I sped into the parking lot of Diedrich’s Coffeehouse, not because I cared about being late to the office, but because if I didn’t get in line by eight-fourteen, all of the cranberry muffins would be gone. I hate it when that happens. I jumped out of my imported gray SUV, beeped it locked and speed-walked inside with thirty-eight seconds to spare.

  A tall guy in a khaki policeman’s uniform was in line ahead of me. Definitely not a regular. He had a really nice ass and great biceps and he smelled good, like the woods or something, and I didn’t mind waiting behind him. I usually ended up behind a fat bald guy who always ordered the exact same thing and never had a clue how much it was going to cost. Officer Biceps was a nice change of pace, and I was thinking turning thirty didn’t seem so bad after all.

  The cop paid and stepped aside with his little white Diedrich’s bag to wait for his drink while I placed my usual order, a large mocha and a cranberry muffin.

  “Sorry, Destiny, that dude just got, like, the last cranberry muffin,” Tobey the order-taker told me.

  “Well, crap,” I muttered. “I really wanted that stupid muffin. It’s my birthday, for crying out loud.”

  “You always throw a hissy fit when you don’t get a cranberry muffin,” he pointed out with a lopsided grin. “If it wasn’t your birthday, you’d be like, ‘I really wanted that muffin. It’s, like, Flag Day, for crying out loud.’” He said it real nasally and whiny, not like me at all. Really. I sneered. “Hey, dude!” Tobey hollered over the hiss of the milk steamer. “Officer!”

  The cop looked over. He was gorgeous from the front as well. I tried to make myself disappear before Tobey could embarrass us all.

  “Shut up,” I snarled at Tobey, who cheerfully ignored me.

  “It’s her birthday, bro, and she was really jonesing for a cranberry muffin, and you got, like, the last one. I’ll give you a refund and any pastry you want if you give her the muffin so I don’t have to listen to her bitch about it every day for, like, the next month.”

  The cop looked at me and smiled, which made him even more attractive, and I focused on willing the ground to swallow me up. “What if it’s my birthday, and I really want the muffin?” the cop asked Tobey.

  Oh, please, I thought. But Tobey seemed to buy it. Good thing he wasn’t a girl. He’d probably fall for the of course that outfit doesn’t make your ass look fat line.

  “Wow, that’s some wild coincidence, dude! Maybe you should split the muffin.” He thought a moment. “You ordered the same coffee drinks, too. Triple-shot mochas. Yeah, you should definitely split the muffin.”

  The cop shrugged. “Works for me,” he said, still smiling.

  “Can I get my half to go?” I grumbled.

  “No way, dude,” Tobey chimed in, bringing our drinks to a table and pulling out two chairs. “It’s, like, fate.”

  Half a cranberry muffin was definitely better than no cranberry muffin, so I sighed and sat down across from Officer Biceps, who was carefully splitting the muffin.

  “Happy birthday,” he said, casually glancing at my hands. I looked down, too, realizing I’d left my damn wedding ring somewhere again. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen the stupid thing, but I drew a blank. Maybe the silverware drawer? Oh well. He wasn’t wearing a ring either, though obviously that didn’t mean much.

  “Thanks,” I said, inhaling half of my half of the muffin and washing it down with a less than dainty gulp of mocha. “Happy birthday to you, too,” I added politely, although I seriously doubted it was his birthday.

  “Thanks. I’m thirty-two. Something else we have in common, I guess.” He smirked.

  Jackass, I thought, mentally making a note to stop at the mall for some heavy-duty concealer after the manicure. “I’m not thirty-two,” I snarled.

  This got me a genuine smile, and as much as I didn’t want to, I smiled back. Jeez, he was smokin’. His uniform was crisp and neatly pressed, but he was attractive in an easy, completely casual way, not in the trying-too-hard way that Dickhead favored. His espresso-colored hair was in need of a trim and fell in careless waves, framing a square-jawed face. His eyes were a cool gray, but warm when the sexy smile reached them. Then there were the biceps. He was wearing a badge, and there was some sort of insignia on his sleeve, but the blood had left my brain and I couldn’t make out the words. I focused on my muffin and tried not to drool.

  “I’m Jake. I’m here on business.” He was dunking his muffin in his coffee, which seemed like an extra step to me. I popped in a bite of muffin, then added some coffee and smushed it all together in my mouth. This way, I wouldn’t drop soggy muffin in my lap along the way.

  “I’m Destiny,” I mumbled. “I work over there.” I gestured in the general direction of the office, flinging some crumbs in the process. At least they weren’t soggy.

  “Destiny? That’s an interesting name.”

  “It’s better than Thor. Is it really your birthday?”

  “Thor? Never mind, forget I asked. And yes, it’s really my birthday. Want to see my ID?”

  That’s not what I’d like to see most, I thought, feeling a little warm. “I’ll pass. What kind of cop are you?”

  “What are my choices?”

  “You know, vice, homicide, traffic, truant officer...”

  “That’s it, I’m a truant officer.”

  I sighed and swallowed the last bite of muffin. “You’re a smartass, and I’m late for work. Thanks for the muffin. Enjoy your stay in Long Beach.” I stood and methodically gathered my things, giving myself an extra couple seconds to look at him so I’d have a good mental image. You know, for later. Jake watched with an amused expression.

  “Six-one,” he said, gray eyes gleaming.

  I’d guessed an even six feet. “Excuse me?” I snapped, embarrassed that I was so obvious and annoyed that he was so cocky. Mostly annoyed.

  “You were thinking six feet. I’m actually six-one.”

  I gave him a bored expression. “That’s fascinating, but I was thinking it looks like rain and I forgot my umbrella.”

  He grinned. “Liar.”

  I rolled my eyes and turned to leave.

  “You’re leaving?” Tobey wailed from behind the counter. “What about fate?”

  “I don’t believe in fate,” I said.

  “
Me, neither,” Jake added.

  “See?” Tobey pleaded. “That’s, like, something else you dudes have in common.”

  I wanted to listen to Doctor Cavannaugh’s whiny complaints about the IRS for the umpteenth time about as much as I wanted to have a root canal or take up knitting. Maybe slightly more than the root canal and slightly less than the knitting, but it was really too close to call. Besides, she was interrupting my somewhat pornographic Jake fantasy. Probably just as well. If I kept it up, I’d have to go for a run to work off the lust, and I hadn’t brought any exercise clothes to the office with me today. Still, I couldn’t bring myself to take the call.

  “Transfer her to Evangeline. She likes sucking up,” I said to the intercom on my desk, and I went back to doodling on my oversized desk blotter. I could’ve gone back to calculating allowable profit sharing plan contributions for any number of clients waiting for just that information, except that, in her unending quest to suck up, Evangeline had managed to overload the computer system, crashing it and bringing all non-doodling-related capabilities to a screeching halt. The tech wasn’t due until close to five.

  When I got bored with doodling, I switched to watching Mystic Mary on some weird cable channel. Mary wore lots of long flowy gowns and new-agey crystal jewelry, and she was explaining how the universe, in its infinite wisdom, could arrange seemingly random situations – what those of us who had failed to reach enlightenment ignorantly referred to as coincidences – so that two people who were meant to be together would find each other, no matter what the odds against that might be. Some of her examples were bizarre. One couple, married for five years now, had met when the woman ran a red light in her SUV and mowed the guy down in the crosswalk. He nearly died, but when he came out of the coma ten months later, he couldn’t get her face out of his mind. I could understand that. I’d want to hunt her down, too, if she’d flattened me with her damn Hummer. He got her name off the police report, and the rest was history.