More Than a Kiss

by Layce Gardner

  She looked at the half-painted walls and wondered when Edison would ever get around to finishing them. It seemed like the whole house was always only half-way done. Edison had steadily worked on projects but was always sidetracked by her brainchildren - the inventions that she was forever tinkering with. As a result, the new dishwasher sat in the middle of the kitchen floor, the guest room toilet was in the hallway, sheets of drywall were stacked in the living room and not a single wall in the whole place was fully painted.

  Jordan decided to be proactive. She jimmied open a can of paint with a screwdriver, grabbed a brush and dipped it into the blue paint. It was cerulean blue and her favorite color. It was supposed to be for her bedroom walls, but Edison stored most of the paint up here in her studio so that when it came time to paint a room she’d know where, in the mess of remodeling, she had stored the paint.

  Jordan slapped the paint on the wall with one hand and sipped her wine with the other. Well, she tried to sip her wine. She couldn't hold the mug in her left hand because of the stitches and bandages. And pain. She located a roll of Duct tape, which wasn't too hard because Edison bought the stuff by the case and left it lying all over the house. Using her teeth, her knees and her good right hand, Jordan taped the mug of wine to her left hand. She gave it a trial run by raising it to her lips and drinking. It worked beautifully. Jordan thought that Edison should invent something like this. Maybe a paint holder that had a sippy cup attached to it. She could market it to the depressed artist. And weren’t all artists depressed?

  Jordan picked up the brush and smeared some of the blue paint on the wall. She drank. She painted. She let her mind wander.

  Jordan thought about Amy. She thought about Amy's face. She was beautiful in an unassuming, unpretentious way. Jordan thought about using Amy's face in one of her illustrations. She might be perfect for her book-in-progress. Jordan had been working on her children's book for the past year. She drew picture after picture but was never satisfied with the end result. Using Amy's face might give her the inspiration she needed.

  Jordan had a photographic memory. She could recall in startling detail every face she'd ever seen. That talent came in quite handy in art school when she never finished a drawing class by the time the bell rang. She'd simply go home, finish from memory and hand it in the next day. This talent would also come in handy if she were ever mugged or kidnapped or a victim of a senseless crime. Which hadn't happened, thank God, but if it did she'd be able to draw her own police sketch.

  While she painted the wall, she thought about Amy's eyes. They were beautiful, sure, but so were a million other eyes Jordan had seen. The thing that made Amy's eyes different was that what was behind them leaked out. Okay, leaking wasn't the best word choice. What she meant was Amy had eyes with a depth past the ordinary blue. They were a blue so deep that they seemed to get darker near the center and swallow her up. And her lips. Perfect bow-shaped lips. Teeth that showed when she smiled. She had one tooth in the front that was a tiny bit crooked. Just enough to not be perfect. Cheeks with just a hint of color. A dimple in her right cheek. Not in her left. Just her right. Her hair wasn't long, wasn't short, wasn't straight, wasn't curly. It defied description. It was perfect.

  Jordan's thoughts were interrupted by a whirring noise. She turned and saw the little remote control car roll into the room, travel across the floor and stop about a foot from her feet. There was a manila envelope Duct taped to the top of the car. Written on the envelope in Edison's scrawl were the words Dossier of Dr. Amy Stewart.

  Jordan peeled the envelope off the car and opened it. Inside were several pages of paper and photos.

  "What's all this?" Jordan called out. She knew Edison had to be somewhere close by.

  Edison leaned in the doorway with the monitor sunglasses perched on top of her head. She froze when she looked at the wall. "A better question is, what is that?" she said, jabbing a finger at the wall.

  Jordan followed Edison's stare and gasped. She had painted Amy. A large blue portrait of Amy on the wall. She hadn't even realized what she'd been doing. She raised her left hand and took a gulp of wine. She choked. “It’s an illustration I’m working on.”

  “Uh huh,” Edison said. “It looks like a blue Amy if you ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you.” Jordan waved the papers in the air. “You googled her?”

  “I found out a bunch of stuff."

  "Oh?" Jordan tried to act only mildly interested while her heart pounded inside.

  Edison looked at Jordan's mug taped to her hand. "Ingenious."

  "I know, right?"

  Edison took another coffee cup off Jordan's drawing table, poured the dregs of Jordan’s early morning coffee into an old paint can and filled it to the brim with wine.

  Unable to look at the dossier herself, Jordan put the envelope on her desk. "Are you going to tell me what you found out? She’s a murderer? A black widow? An angel of death? A Lorena Bobbit?" Jordan asked.

  Edison took a drink, then said, "About what you'd expect really. She's thirty years-old, you were right on the nose. Grew up here. Got her medical degree in San Diego, interned in Phoenix, practiced two years back in San Diego and then came here. She graduated at the top of her class, has some awards of excellence that I couldn't understand what they were for, medical mumbo-jumbo of some sort. Get this - she volunteers at the free clinic downtown. She works for free. That’s like sick and wrong.”

  "Wow."

  "Yeah, wow. She sounds too good to be true, huh?"

  Jordan drank. "What do you mean?"

  Edison eyed the painting on the wall, walking from one side of the room to the other. "Spooky. It's like her eyes are following me everywhere I walk."

  Jordan drank, nervously waiting for Edison to drop the bomb.

  Edison took another drink. "A person can't be that good, you know. There has to be a skeleton or two in the closet."

  "I suppose you've found out what these skeletons are?

  "I did find out that she's living with another doctor."

  "Living with?"

  "It's a guy. A damn good-looking guy, too." Edison extracted a printed photo from the dossier and showed it to Jordan, saying, "Here's a picture of them together. They went to some formal gala together a couple of months ago. His name is Dr. Jeremy Blevins."

  Jordan recognized him right away. "I ran into him."

  "When?"

  "At the hospital as I was walking out the door. I literally ran into him as he was coming in."

  "Well, I'm afraid your romance with the doc was short-lived. She's already taken." Edison did not look sorry or afraid. She looked gloating.

  Jordan picked the brush back up. She had her back to Edison, but she could hear the smile in her voice as she said, "You'll have to Killz that first or it'll bleed through."

  Too bad I can't Killz her face from my mind, Jordan thought. She took a drink and stared at Amy's blue face and didn't hear when Edison left the room. Jordan decided not to take Edison’s advice about the Killz to paint out Amy’s face. Instead, she killzed the bottle of wine and left the portrait on the wall. Blue Amy staring down at her would serve as a reminder. A reminder not to ever again allow herself to fall for the true love myth.

  Banana Peel

  "Hey, sexy lady,” a smarmy voice said.

  Amy looked up from her desk and quickly closed her laptop. Her heart sank when she saw who was leaning in the doorway of her office.

  Meet Chad Dorring. Ladies man extraordinaire. Suave, sexy and single. Metrosexual. He was the heartthrob of the hospital. If he hadn’t chosen to be a doctor he would have made an excellent soap opera actor.

  Chad stood in the doorway of Amy's office with a leer on his face. Or maybe it was a smile, not a leer, Amy thought. Maybe his smile only resembled a leer. Either way, it was creepy. Like how chimpanzees show you their teeth and you think they're smiling and so cute, then suddenly they're attacking you.

  Chad raised one eyebrow in a suggestive manner and asked,
"What're you doing later?"

  Amy assumed the eyebrow raising was supposed to suggest that he was doing her later. The thought of it made her want to gag.

  "Are you okay?" he asked. He walked uninvited into her office and plopped down in a chair. He stretched his long legs out in front of him. He looked like a cat who was toying with a mouse - like he could sit for hours in front of the cabinet waiting for the mouse to innocently poke its head out so he could rip it off. "You look a little sick."

  "Hello, Chad, won't you come in? Have a seat, make yourself right at home," she said with ultimate sarcasm. "And, no, I'm not sick. You just surprised me is all." She drummed her fingers on the desk, hoping her gesture conveyed her impatience and he would excuse himself and walk away never to come anywhere near her again. Well, the never again part might require something more extreme than tapping her fingers.

  It didn't happen. Chad smiled instead. He made sure to give her his toothiest smile - the one with the high-wattage bling factor. When he did that to the nurses, Amy swore she could smell sex pheromones emanating from every pair of panties in a two block radius.

  And then as if to compound matters, there was that cleft chin. Amy abhorred that cleft in Chad’s chin. All the nurses drooled over that cleft, but Amy thought it made his chin look like a tiny little butt on the end of his face. She must be the only woman in the world immune to his cleft and good looks. She'd seen all the nurses fan their faces and pat their hearts when he walked by. Amy wrinkled her nose like she smelled something stinky anytime he was near. To tell the truth, she was sick of Chad and tired of all good-looking male doctors. What she wouldn't give to work with a measley, shrimpy, ugly doctor with a wart on his chin instead of a cleft.

  Chad gestured to her closed laptop. "Did I catch you looking at porn?"

  "What? No," she said quickly. Maybe too quickly. Saying it quickly like that made her look guilty.

  Chad laughed. She hated his laugh. It wasn't genuine. It was sounded like the canned laughter in a sit-com. She knew Chad had probably carefully cultivated the tenor and rhythm of his laugh. It was designed to charm a woman out of her panties. Well, it wasn't going to work on her. Not again.

  Amy had been with Chad once before. Once. It was when she was new at the hospital, and didn't know any better. Chad had shown her lots of attention those first two weeks. He showered her with his cleft, his laugh, his toothsome bling. He asked her out for a drink and she tried to say no, but he made it impossible. And, maybe the truth was that she might have been a little bit lonely. Okay, a lot lonely. She met him for one drink that turned into four or five or who the hell's counting and next thing she knew she was too drunk to drive and they were sharing a cab and sharing his bed.

  The sex was unremarkable – at least the parts she remembered. Not that she was all that well-versed in this particular human diversion, but she didn't have an orgasm that was for sure. Why did she keep chasing that elusive orgasm? She knew it wasn't something physically wrong with her – she could give herself one. Was it a mental deficiency on her part? Or perhaps emotional? Maybe it was due to the poor performance of the man.

  When Chad was kaput, he rolled off her. She jumped up and grabbed her clothes on the floor. She dashed for the bathroom, but it was dark, and she was still half-drunk and she didn't see the used condom he had thrown on the floor until it was too late and when she stepped on it, she slipped, fell and conked her head on the hard wood floors. While she was unconscious, Chad rushed her to the emergency room and when she came to she was wearing only a T-shirt and her undies. Why the hell didn't he dress her in proper clothing first?

  The doctor, she didn't know him, thank God, asked her what happened and she told him the first thing that came to mind: She had slipped on a banana peel. Oh, she could kill herself for saying that. Who slipped on a banana peel outside of a Three Stooges movie? It didn't take long for the rumor to circulate around the hospital that she had hooked up with Chad and slipped on a “banana peel.”

  This all happened months ago but the rumor still hadn't died completely. Was it still called a rumor if it was mostly true? She had become a running joke of the hospital. She kept finding banana peels in the trash can in her office and nurses giggled at her over the tables in the lunch room while they exaggeratedly peeled a banana. Once in the cafeteria she had walked away from her table to get a sweet 'n low and when she came back there was a banana peel on her tray.

  Then Chad had suddenly appeared at her side. He pinched the peel between his thumb and forefinger, held it up like it was contaminated and said loudly, "Be careful, doctor. I've heard these can be very dangerous." The whole cafeteria busted a gut laughing.

  And the worst thing about the whole banana debacle? Chad now thought it meant they were dating. He acted like he owned her or something. Like they were an item. She even heard him refer to them as “Chamy” as if they were a power couple like “Brangelina.”

  That was why she hated Dr. Butt Chin Banana Man Chad Dorring.

  "I'm shopping for a birthday present for my nephew," she lied.

  "And here I thought you weren't the maternal type," he said.

  "Shows how much you know me," she retorted. She didn't know why she said that. She really wasn't all that maternal and she didn’t have a nephew. But she didn't want Chad to know that.

  Chad shrugged, like it didn’t matter either way. "I dropped by to give you a heads up. I'm having dinner with you tonight."

  "Wrong," Amy said. "I'm having dinner with my roommates tonight." What Amy couldn’t figure out about Chad was that the meaner she was to him, the more he liked it. Was he a masochist? And did that make her a sadist?

  "So am I," he said. "Jeremy invited me."

  He stood and stretched his arms over his head in a calculated move so she could admire his sculpted abs as his scrub top rose up. Gross. The last thing she wanted to see was his hairy belly.

  She opened her laptop and looked at that instead. Chad placed both hands on the edge of her desk and leaned his face in close to hers. He said, "Just thought I'd warn you so you can be sure to get all gussied up for me." He winked and strode out the door.

  Gussied up? What the hell kind of word was that? Women hadn't been getting gussied up since the turn of the century.

  Amy looked back at her computer. Staring at her from the screen was a smiling picture of Jordan March. It was her author profile page on Amazon. Jordan had written three children’s books and all of them had great reviews. She not only wrote the books, she illustrated them as well. She was beautiful and smart and talented and had a hairless belly. It didn’t get any better than that. Maybe those drunken kisses with her college dorm mate were a precursor. Like little seismic shakes right before the big earthquake.

  Amy chose the boxed set of Jordan's books, clicked on the 'add to cart' button and selected expedited service. Maybe she could get Jordan to autograph them for her.

  Ch…Ch…Ch…Changes

  Amy pulled her gray Nissan Sentra into the driveway and parked behind Jeremy’s enormous gas-guzzling Buick. She turned off the car but didn't turn off the radio. She sat for a moment, listening to NPR. She looked at the house. She looked at her car. She looked at her clothes. She looked at her fingernails with the clear nail polish. She looked in the rear view mirror at her lightly applied make-up.

  She didn't recognize this woman, the one she had become. When did she turn into this person? The Amy of old used to be daring - she’d gotten a tattoo after all. Admittedly, she was a weekend rebel - one didn’t get through med school without a concerted effort, but she went to Nirvana concerts, wore high heels, a leather bomber jacket and groovy sunglasses. When did she morph into this person who lived in the burbs, drove a sensible car, had a sensible job, wore sensible clothes and sensible make-up? She even listened to NPR! And now her exciting Friday night was coming home to a dinner cooked by her best friend and after dinner she would force herself to pretzel her body through a yoga video, then curl up in bed with a book. And now
she wasn’t even going to get to do that because her boyfriend she didn’t like was coming over to see her all gussied up. Was this how women ended up getting married? They settled or were bullied into the matrimonial state?

  If that was her future, Amy didn’t want anything to do with it.

  Amy opened the front door and was assaulted by smells coming from the kitchen. She didn't realize how hungry she was until her mouth began to water. Then so did her eyes.

  Meet Isabel Craig. Amy’s other roommate. Isabel is the product of an upper middle class family. She is a middle child and used to being ignored - not in a bad way, but in the way of middle children who don’t cause trouble. Her parents have no aspirations for her other than “being happy.”

  But happiness is elusive. It is especially elusive when the person seeking it isn’t particularly good at any one thing. Isabel had, by her own count, held over seventy three jobs in the last ten years. Right now, she was training to be an Extreme Chef.

  Extreme cheffing is a relatively new occupation. It involves creating absolutely never before seen or smelled recipes. There is a lot of trial and error and guinea pigs are necessary, not the cute furry rodent kind, but the human kind. This is the reason the independently wealthy Isabel has roommates when she could afford her own apartment.

  Amy entered the kitchen. Isabel looked up from the stove and smiled. Isabel even looked like an aspiring chef. She was short, round, pleasant, and bubbly. She had dark hair cut in a no nonsense bob tucked behind her ears, glasses that were always fogged up from steam off the stove, and cheeks always red from the heat of the oven. Amy even thought of Isabel's body in terms of food: Her breasts were plump dinner rolls, her butt was pork tenderloin and her stomach was pudding.

  Isabel and Amy had been best friends for three years. They had met when they showed up at the same time in answer to an ad Jeremy had placed in the paper for a roommate. They had all three hit it off immediately – in a Three's Company sort of way – and Jeremy had rented out a bedroom to them both.