Just Like That

by Nicola Rendell

  After scarfing down my popsicle, but before my mom can start talking about her theory on the problem with male-centric porn, I grab Russ’ hand and drag him out of the house.

  “Don’t you want to meet Horace?” Mom asks as I’m pulling Russ over the threshold, yanking so hard that my rotator cuff aches.

  “I can chase him around with the weed whacker at my place, Mom. Thanks for the coffee. Love to Dennis.” I give her a rushed kiss on the cheek, shove Russ out the door, and pull the knob shut.

  Thank God. I take a deep breath in the silence and plunge my hand into my purse for my cucumber water.

  But then Mom reappears, opening the door a crack. “Pleasure to meet you, Russ. Hope to see you again soon. It’s nice to talk to a man who’s so comfortable with semi-deviant sexual…”

  “Mom!”

  “Pleasure to meet you, too, Alice,” Russ says warmly, and Mom closes the door.

  I squirt myself in the face over and over again and try to put myself together. It isn’t working. And I feel like I just fell into a Greek salad.

  Russ, meanwhile, is not even resisting the church-and-funeral laugh, but is overcome with tearful, silent, body-shaking laughter, rubbing at his sexy dark lashes and groaning. “Penny, she has no filter at all.”

  “Tell me about it!” I give him an elbow in the spleen as I drag him along toward the Suburban. “Be glad you’re not related to her! What if it’s hereditary?

  “Like the spanking?” he says, dissolving into snickers. He wipes a tear away and gets consumed in manly deep laughter all over again.

  I try to shove him on the chest, but he flips the tables on me, spinning me around like we’re ballroom dancing, and walking me backward until we’ve got some privacy behind the Suburban. All my awkward frustration gets inverted into a sort of speechless need. He presses me up against the fender, one hand to my hip, the other to my ass, shaking his head at me like I’m so, so cute. He drives his hips into my stomach and gives me that yummy, possessive flick of his chin. I’m expecting something sexy next, like, You’re cute when you’re flustered, or Goddamn it, I love when you blush. Something very Russ. But instead he says, “She gave us some valuable intel though. The fur could be the answer.”

  No, no, no. I give him a halfhearted shove, but he doesn’t budge. “I’ve been traumatized enough. Do you know how difficult this is going to make watching nature shows with Guppy? Or seeing mascots during football games? I’ll never recover from this. Ever!”

  But it seems no amount of protest or whining is going to get this plan out of his sights now. “It’s fucking perfect. Him in a moose costume, dry humping a lady in a bunny suit? That’s the stuff that the internet was made for.”

  I try to forget that image as soon as it takes shape in my head, along with all the rest, including my mom saying, A moose in the rut, ever seen one? “Sounds pretty sketchy. Messy. Hot.”

  Russ nods, pure confidence. “Exactly. All we really need to keep this place, this town, and the rest of your family Dickerson-free is something that’ll embarrass him. Something that we have, just us, that we can use as lasting, solid leverage.”

  Truthfully, I don’t much care how we get there, providing that at the end of it he’s ingloriously defamed, left to a lifetime of sweaty, second-hand velour tracksuits, and nights spent alone listening to Michael Bolton in some studio apartment on the wrong side of Tallahassee.

  Apparently, Russ can either read me like a book or he can hear my machinations from where he’s standing. “Edge of legal, Penny. I know you want to get him where it hurts, and I think this is it. I figure we can either catfish him, or we could honey trap him.”

  I squint up at him, blinking against the sun. “Are those actual verbs?”

  “God, you’re adorable.”

  54

  Russ

  The Paco’s Tacos truck is parked right behind the hardware store, and Paco knows Penny’s order by heart. In the corner of the menu, painted on the plywood, is a generic fish inside a big red circle and struck through with a diagonal red line. “Paco’s part of your tribe,” Penny explains.

  I give Paco my order and pay for our lunches, and we take a seat on a bench shaded by the angle of the building behind us. I pull my phone from my pocket, and I unlock it while Penny leans against me, so I feel the warmth of her bare arm against mine. The wind shifts, and I’m back in the fog again. “Why do you always smell so good?”

  She does this adorable thing, sort of sniffing around her face. “Do I?”

  “Christ. Yes.”

  “Mmm,” she says, leaning into me. “So do you.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t smell like fresh cookies.”

  She inhales deeper and more slowly. “Oh no, you smell better than that. And taste better, too. I should know.”

  It’s like there is nobody else on the planet. No Paco, no taco truck, no handfuls of people on their lunch break milling around and chatting. Just her. And me. And the purest fucking desire I’ve ever felt. What I wouldn’t give to lay her right down on this bench and fuck her until she comes with me inside her. “You’re making an animal of me.”

  She snickers. “And I’m not even wearing fur!”

  “Cute. So damned cute.”

  She gives me the Wi-Fi password for Visit Port Flamingo, and after about thirty seconds of searching, my phone moves from No Service to 1x Roaming… and back again.

  “Can I?” she asks, her fingers on each side of my phone. “It’s like using an Ouija board. Takes a special touch.”

  “All yours.”

  She takes a long gulp of her watermelon juice and then sets the cup down on the asphalt. Keeping my phone flat in her palm, she angles it just so—left, down, right—until we get two full bars. “Okay. If we stay exactly like this, we’ve got a shot of a whiff of Wi-Fi. What are we looking for?”

  “FetLife.”

  Her eyes dart up to me. “Oh, geez.”

  “You got a better idea to find out what Adolf is up to? Because if so, I’m all for it.”

  She swallows hard and stares at the screen, which glints in the sun. Paco thunders out of the truck with our tacos in two Styrofoam boxes, rubber banded together with plastic silverware and napkins on top.

  As he walks away, leaving us alone again, I crowd her space a little. “And don’t pretend to be a prude,” I growl into her ear. “I know what you like, and it doesn’t taste like vanilla.”

  * * *

  As it happens, browsing FetLife with the woman I’ve not only fallen for but also want to fuck until she forgets her own name isn’t the smartest thing to do in public.

  While our tacos sit waiting, we make a fake profile, using the same email I used for Tumblr and every single online purchase I’ve ever made. I leave the profile details to her, mostly, because it’s fucking sexy, watching her decide what she likes, and even sexier, getting confirmation that she knows what she likes. Rather than marking herself down as a submissive, she scrolls down to switch.

  “Good girl.” I adjust my position, because this hard-on is fucking serious.

  She presses her lips together and squeaks. I reach across her, grab her purse, and put it in my lap.

  “Smart,” she says, nodding.

  “Necessary. For the record, I want to take you into that alley behind us and give you everything I’ve got.”

  Penny sort of gulp-hiccups and falls back on the bench. “Okay.”

  “And if there wasn’t a guy back there breaking down boxes for recycling, that’s exactly what we’d do. We clear?”

  She lets me take her weight on my shoulder. “Yeah. Very, very clear.”

  “Good,” I tell her, and pull her a little closer on the bench. Together, we make short work of it. Just a matter of clicks and a few quick zip code searches reveals there’s a guy two zip codes over with the screen name PandaPaul1986. I zoom in on the avatar. It’s a guy in a full-head panda mask, but that year at the end of his handle… “Is that when your mom left him hanging? ’86?”
>
  “Yes!” Penny gasps.

  “Miss Havisham, right?”

  She gasps again. “Holy shit! Never even occurred to me.”

  “Hell, yeah. He’s frozen there. Probably still thinks the Berlin Wall is standing. The clothes, the glasses, the whole deal. You Darlings, you’re heartbreakers. Through and through.”

  Penny gives my arm a flat-handed smack and giggles.

  I zoom in tighter on the profile. “Male, 68. Entrepreneur. Interested in furmeets and yiffs. Always free to chat.”

  “Yiff?” Penny asks me, taking another big gulp of her watermelon juice.

  “You’ve got me.”

  “Okay, Google!” Penny says. “What’s a yiff?”

  Google answers, “A yiff is a type of room party at a furry convention where furries may engage in sexual intercourse with each other.”

  Man. Man. “I don’t know what to think about that, but I definitely know I don’t want to spend my last night with you at a furry convention.”

  “Seconded.”

  “So catfishing it’ll have to be…”

  Penny looks up at me and slurps a long gulp from her straw. “I have no idea what that means, Russ.”

  “You will soon.”

  55

  Penny

  An hour later, I step out of the dressing room at Masks and More in Coconut Cove. I’m in a sexy little fox costume—a furry leotard and a rubber muzzle mask that has the same smell as brand new rain boots.

  “Man,” Russ says, running his hand down over his stubble. “I’m not into this shit, but looking at you right now, I think I might get it.”

  I twirl around in front of the mirror, the fluffy fox tail swinging behind me. It’s not a full-body fur suit, but more of a Playboy bunny meets Grimm type thing, and not all together unflattering, much to my surprise. The ears are especially cute, and I adjust my headband for maximum effect. “You think this will work?”

  “Yeah, I do. You’re sure you’re game, though? I mean, you’ve known this guy your whole life, villain or not.”

  Looking hard at Russ in the mirror, I think it through. On one hand, I’d like to really nail Dick Dickerson in his surely sagging old-man scrotum. I’d like to divest Kindergarten Whatever The Hell Inc. of every single one of its shady holdings. But on the other hand, Dickerson was the man who once used half a jar of peanut butter to get a wad of Maisie’s gum unstuck from my hair when I was four years old. My mom was engaged to him for almost a year. He isn’t all bad. Or he wasn’t always. And the more I learn about him, the more pathetic and less villainous he seems.

  “How come you’ve got to be so logical?”

  He holds up his left palm and points to it. “Born that way.” And winks.

  While I do feel brave, Russ is right—the practicalities of this whole plan suddenly make me want to take a very hot, very long shower, with an extra scoop of salt scrub. I don’t even want to know the logistics of a yiff, let alone see one with my own eyeballs. And yet, we need to get Dickerson out of the picture as quickly as possible, for Port Flamingo’s sake. For my mom’s sake. For Omar the camel’s sake.

  “What’s our other option?” I ask him, adjusting my muzzle.

  He laughs a little, giving me a steamy stare. “Don’t know. You wouldn’t happen to know someone who’s got an almost pathological passion for vengeance, would you? Who’s your age, who’d fit into that costume, and who told me while I was assembling her IKEA dresser that she quote ‘wouldn’t mind giving Dickerson the mother of all metaphorical wedgies, but was still working on the deets’ end quote?”

  He’s got all the skills and all the answers. “Maisie!”

  Russ nods and plays with a rubber clown nose that he just took off a display rack. “Think she’d do it?”

  In my own personal thesaurus, Would Maisie like to bring down the man who is trying to destroy our town? is a very complicated way of saying Obviously! “Are you kidding? She’ll be giving herself eyeliner whiskers so fast, we won’t know what hit us.”

  “Perfect. Now, change out of that outfit before I can’t handle myself anymore,” he says with a smack of my slightly furry bottom.

  In the changing room, I strip down to my skivvies, and that’s when I hear his phone ring. We are in Coconut Cove, after all, one town over from Port Flamingo, which means that real life can encroach on you anytime and anywhere.

  “Yeah,” I hear him say, rough and gravelly. “This is Macklin.”

  I pull my ears off and my muzzle and peek through the curtain at him. He’s turning a collar over in his hand. Lord have mercy on my soul.

  “Hey, man, I know. I’ll be there at six sharp. My flight comes in at four. If I’m late getting into Logan, I’ll let you know.”

  It takes only one second for me to piece together that he’s talking about his flight back to Boston. His life. The end of this crazy, perfect dream.

  Though I’ve known it’s coming, hearing the confirmation shocks me. It shocks me in a way that I’m hardly ever shocked, and a wave of emotions overtakes me so that I’ve got to brace myself on the little chair in the corner.

  “That sounds great. I’m stoked, too.” Even though his tone is quiet, and unexcited, the words are still there. The next chapter of his life is in motion, and it doesn’t involve me.

  I sink down, sitting on my fox costume, as my headband pokes me in the leg. The air conditioning blows on my mostly naked body, and I suddenly feel very cold, and very small, and very, very naïve. You silly girl. He’d never give it all up for you. Ever.

  With that thought, the sadness really overtakes me. When I sniffle, Russ’ face appears in the gap next to the curtain. “You okay?”

  His phone is still to his ear, but it’s me he’s talking to. I try to nod but a sob shoots out of my mouth. He ends the call without even saying goodbye. Through my welling tears, I watch him fling back the curtain and close it behind him. He scoops me up off the chair. “It’s okay, Penny. We’re going to figure it out.”

  “But how?” I press my wet cheek into his chest and cling to him as hard as I can.

  He smooths my hair, and fills my left ear with a low stream of shhh, shhh, shhh, until I calm down a little. When the sadness eases up, he inches his face away from mine and asks, “If I go do something, really quick, will you stay here?”

  I wipe my tears away and nod. “Yes. I’ll be here.”

  “Five minutes. That’s all I need.”

  “Okay.”

  He gives me one more kiss, and leaves the dressing room, closing the red velvet curtain behind him as he goes.

  * * *

  He left his credit card with the guy at the front desk, and so when I come out, the costume is paid for. The clerk puts the outfit into a paper bag, using meticulous care to keep everything tidy and orderly, wrapping up the muzzle mask and the ear headband in tissue paper. But then something catches my eye. It’s an apron, and one I don’t have in my collection yet. It’s too skimpy to be useful, and that means it’s absolutely perfect. The French Maid.

  “I’ll buy that myself.”

  The clerk rings me up. “Same bag?”

  “Definitely. But hurry. I don’t want him to see it.”

  The clerk smiles to himself as he wraps it up quickly in a little tissue paper bundle, tucking it alongside the fox costume. I sign my receipt and tuck my card into my purse. Just as I’m taking the sack from the clerk, the door chime dings and Russ reappears. In his hand is a small paper bag. Russ leads me outside by the hand and stops in the shadow of a tree planted in a gap in the sidewalk.

  “It isn’t a ring,” he says, “but it’s something.”

  He hands the little sack over, and I open it up. There inside, I see it. Brilliant, sparkling brass.

  A freshly cut house key.

  “For your apartment?” I press the key to my chest, still warm from the key cutting machine. From his pocket he produces a keychain, which also looks brand new. Written on the little insert is his address in Boston.

>   He pulls me to him and presses a kiss to the top of my head. “We’ll get through it. I promise you.”

  All the way down into my soul I want to believe him. I need to believe him. And so I summon up my strength, suspend my worry, and try to hang onto the way his body feels against mine. I take comfort in the smell of him and the size of his hand on the small of my back. I try to find some peace in the sound of the palms swishing and the warmth of his breath on my cheek.

  “Let’s get this thing done, beautiful. First we take care of Panda Paul, and then the night belongs to you and me.”

  56

  Russ

  I pour Penny a glass of wine and turn on the burner under the pot of pasta water. She comes around the corner in a flowered sun dress, and I watch her tie a cute little French maid apron around her waist. Fuck me. I raise my beer to her. “To you and me. And saving Port Flamingo.”

  “To you and me especially.”

  “First and always.”

  But right as we take the first sip to celebrate our last night together for a while, I hear the clatter of the back gate.

  “You decent, lovebirds?” Maisie says.

  Penny puts her hand to her forehead. “This might be more than we bargained for, Russ. Maybe you should be the sexy fox. You’re very alluring. You’ve got a certain dark charm…”

  Not going to lie, it had occurred to me. Putting innocent women on the opposite end of an internet catfishing expedition isn’t exactly why I became a PI, but it’s the only way this time. “Pretty sure I’m not his type, and Maisie will do great. If it gets too weird, we’ll just close the laptop. That’ll be that.”

  Penny steadies herself with a gulp. “Okay. Yes. Deal.”

  Except it becomes pretty clear pretty quick, as Maisie walks in through the back door and Guppy leaps from the sofa, that there was a variable we didn’t consider in all this furry, Dickerson-undoing subterfuge. One quantity that we didn’t account for. The hundred-and-fifty-pound furry who lives here.