Unzipped?

by Karen Kendall

“Then tomorrow afternoon would be lovely, Miss Shane. Your wish is my command.”

  “Now you’re talking,” she said.

  SHANNON’S RIGHT BOOT squished into the wet car carpet every time she shifted the beemer’s gears on the way to Hal’s house. The whole vehicle smelled musty, and it was her own damn fault. She doubted the leather seats would ever recover from the soaking they’d gotten yesterday, during her wild drive in the rain. Stupid, stupid, stupid. What got into her sometimes? She honestly didn’t know. But it hadn’t seemed right that the rest of Farmington should go on existing peacefully when her whole world had been kicked off-kilter by her mother’s revelation. She’d needed to shake up the place, snap herself out of her daze, shock a few placid souls on their way to the ATM or the supermarket or the elementary school. Judging by the stares sent her way, she’d accomplished her goal.

  To the detriment of her car, this car that seemed all wrong for her. Too expensive, too shiny, too exclusive, too status-conscious. Was that the kind of person she’d grown into? Or did the car just represent the best of German engineering, natural elegance and quality?

  She heard the wet squish again as she downshifted, exiting the highway to get to Hal’s house in Simsbury, a town of quiet charm about twenty minutes from Hartford proper.

  She passed the town hall on the right and a large cemetery to the left, with gravestones as far as the eye could see. All of those people, she thought, had once been alive and productive and loved by their families. They’d all had identities of their own, knew their niches in the grand scheme of things, unlike her.

  A stocky mother waited to cross Main Street with her daughter, the child looking up at her with adoration. Shannon swallowed a lump in her throat that had appeared uninvited. The little girl had no worldly knowledge, but she knew where she came from, knew whose lives intertwined hers. She was young enough still to be blessed with unconditional love.

  Shannon shrugged off the unwelcome thoughts invading her mind. Three more quick turns had her driving down Hal’s street to a surprisingly modern house. There weren’t many contemporary homes in the area, New England being a bastion of the traditional and the quaint.

  Two last squishes in the beemer’s carpet and she was on the sidewalk, striding toward Hal’s domain. The place was stucco, also unusual, and he’d painted his front door cerulean blue. Next to it a single, scraggly-looking holly bush reached courageously for the sun. She wished it luck and good fertilizer before ringing the bell.

  Hal opened it almost immediately and gestured her in.

  “Hi,” she said, struck again by the strength of his jaw and the intense blue of his eyes. Now, she’d have to get him to stand straight instead of slouching, dress him decently and drag him to that gym.

  Whew. They only had a few short weeks. And during that time she had to coach him for the media, too. She foresaw many hours in each other’s company.

  “Hi, Shannon. Are you feeling happier today?” He looked at her searchingly.

  The question caught her off guard. “Uh. Yes, thank you.”

  “Hmm.” He didn’t seem to believe her.

  “Really,” she said with a bright smile. “Everything’s fine.” She looked past him at the foyer and the living room beyond. She’d never seen a house so bare. The foyer contained a single black umbrella and an empty coatrack, nothing else. No mirror or rug or pictures on the walls.

  The living room, too, was all bachelor and function—no creature comforts besides a massive, overstuffed, cotton-duck sofa, an elaborate state-of-the-art entertainment center, and what looked like a bouquet of remote controls radiating from a simple glass bowl on an elliptical steel coffee table. No art hung on the walls, though a stack of framed pictures, protected by cardboard corner covers, leaned into a corner. Shannon’s guess was that they’d been delivered by his mother or sister—a well-meaning female in his life—and he’d promptly forgotten them.

  “So…what’s that in your purse?” Hal eyed the black plastic hanging out of it.

  She cleared her throat. “That’s a lawn-and-leaf bag.”

  He blinked.

  She smiled reassuringly. “You know, in case we need to weed some stuff out of your closet.” She thought it best not to mention that most of his clothes would likely need burning. It didn’t seem kind. Though if his closet was as minimal as the house, she wouldn’t have much to do.

  “Oh.” They stood in awkward silence for a moment. He seemed fascinated by her hair. She really, really shouldn’t have had sex with him.

  Shannon dropped her hobo bag, twisted the mass of hair behind her head and secured it with a pencil, true to habit. “Well, do you want to show me where your bedroom is?” The question sounded odd and intimate to her own ears.

  “Yeah.” Hal turned and led the way out of the foyer. The first article of clothing she’d need to burn was the pair of jeans he had on. They fit poorly and were more fray than hem at the bottom. She was a big fan of faded denim on men, but it had to be made by Levi’s only and hug the buns properly. She pondered how to get them off him so she could toss them into her Hefty bag. Hot seduction, take two?

  Hal had a big, rangy frame. Any essence of nerd he possessed came from the way he carried himself, not his actual build. He was completely unassuming, as if he’d just been too busy to notice when God had filled out his shoulders and broadened his chest. Shannon, used to the buff, gym-trained bodies of L.A., found it endearing. Somehow it made her want to hug him.

  He led the way down a hall to the master bedroom, which was surprisingly orderly, except for a crop of dirty socks dropped at the end of the bed. Men. Why they considered it impossible to walk them to a laundry basket, she’d never know. Her last, brief boyfriend, Brian, had done the same thing, waiting for the socks to skip by themselves into the washer. The only difference was he’d thrown them to the left side of his bed, not the foot.

  Looking at Hal’s bed made her oddly self-conscious; aware that she was standing in the private space of someone she didn’t know very well, even if they’d been intimate, as he put it. He had squashy goose-down pillows, her favorite, and a fluffy down-filled duvet.

  She knew a crazy urge to be ten again, and take a flying leap from the doorway into the center of the mattress. Funny, that—she usually tensed up in a man’s bedroom, wondering when he would pounce on her and expect her to fulfill his every pin-up girl fantasy.

  Hal moved to the double closet doors and pulled them open. Inside minimalism had died a horrible death, buried under an avalanche of dated and hideous clothing.

  Shannon stared at it in disbelief. Was that a plaid Western shirt with pearlized snaps? Ye gods. And a color-block shirt from the eighties. And a red-and-blue argyle vest…then there were a couple of dated eighties suits, in tan and light blue, made of fabrics she wouldn’t even use for drop cloths.

  “Hal? Have you ever gone through and purged your closet completely?”

  “Well, I’ve gotten rid of things that didn’t fit.” He seemed pleased with that.

  She turned to him with a fixed smile. “I see. Listen. I see a lot of things here that…well, they won’t quite work with the new image we’re going for. The GQ, media-ready Hal Underwood. You’re becoming a power player, so we’ll need to get you power clothes.”

  “Power clothes,” he repeated doubtfully.

  “Yes.”

  “How much is this going to cost me?”

  She decided to sidestep that particular issue. “I’m not sure yet. But will you trust me to get rid of what needs to go? I mean, I know you’ve got a ton of work to do.” She flashed him a winning smile.

  His eyes narrowed. “Yeah, but I think I’ll just get my laptop and do it right in here.”

  Damn. The battle commences. Shannon rolled up her sleeves. By the time he’d returned with his laptop, she had a third of his closet on the floor in heaps.

  It was bloody war. He fought for every shirt she pulled out, every ratty pair of jeans, and even shoes that were curled at the
toes and blue-green with mold, or had barely any leather left to them.

  “Those can be resoled!” he insisted.

  “Veto.”

  “Carpenter bell-bottoms are still fine for mowing the lawn…”

  “Yeah, no. What a shame—the zipper’s broken.”

  “I saw you twist it! What the hell…?” He grabbed for the denim, but Shannon stuffed the jeans into the bag and sat on it. She looked up and blinked her eyes, all innocence.

  “I did no such thing.” She tugged at a hideous maroon velour jacket next.

  “Velour is fine for inside the house.”

  “No, velour is not fine for anything on a man. Erase the concept of it from your mind. Toss!”

  “But—hey! No way! That Western snap shirt is a souvenir from Texas.”

  She shuddered. “Maybe so, but you’ll get arrested if you wear it in Connecticut.” She ripped a sickening checked jacket from its hanger and rubbed her eyes to see if it would go away. Nope.

  “I paid seventy bucks for that blazer,” Hal moaned, “and it still almost buttons.”

  “Key word—almost. We won’t discuss the fact that it’s unlined.” She shoved it into the bag.

  “Hey, I didn’t agree—”

  “Hal, honey. I wouldn’t use that horrifying rag to clean my toilet. Let it go.”

  When they got finished, a total of seven items were left in Hal’s closet, and he looked stricken. “Three white shirts,” he moaned. “Two pairs of jeans…one tie and a windbreaker? That’s all you’re leaving me?”

  “Yup.” Shannon, merciless, finished tying a knot in the third lawn-and-leaf bag. She turned to him with an evil grin. “And, babe, that’s only so you won’t go naked to work while I start to build your new wardrobe.”

  “You…you give new meaning to the word brutality,” he complained.

  “I know,” she agreed. “I realize this is traumatic for you. But really, it’s for the best. You just wait. The reincarnated Hal will be beating off women with a stick.”

  “But I don’t like pushy women.”

  “Then you sure must not like me much!” She flashed another grin at him.

  “Not true,” he said seriously. “I like you a lot. Even though you’re a fashion bully.”

  “Well, thanks, Hal. I like you, too.” She touched his arm. The muscle jumped under her fingers. “You’ve been a pretty good sport about this.”

  He moved away. “I didn’t expect to like you,” he said suddenly.

  She sucked in a quick breath. “Why?”

  “You’re too…gorgeous…to be nice.”

  9

  HE MAY AS WELL have slapped her. Shannon stared at him for a long moment before she grabbed one of the overstuffed black bags and started pulling it toward his bedroom door. The same old issues followed her wherever she went, it seemed.

  I swear to God I’m going to get a prescription for Rogaine and use it to grow a mustache. I’m going to eat fried food and chocolate until nobody sees me under the fat.

  She sighed. Who was she kidding? She was just as much caught in the trap as anybody else, trained from birth to cultivate her looks for attention.

  “Hey,” Hal called after her. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. And let me take that, it’s too heavy for you.”

  She ignored him and continued to drag the bag, pulling it along his hardwood floors with a whoosh. She was upset enough about his comment that she dropped all pretense of professional demeanor.

  “A lot of people assume that I can’t be a nice person, and I hate it. Do you know how few close friends I have? Two. I have two—my business partners, Jane and Lilia, whom I’ve known since we were all eight, with snaggleteeth and braids. Other than that I have hundreds of acquaintances.”

  “Shannon—”

  “I feel eyes boring into me everywhere I go, measuring, assessing, comparing.”

  “I never thought about that.”

  “Why is it that because I look a certain way—” she turned and asked the question quietly, without heat “—everyone assumes that I’m deficient in every other department? That I’m stuck-up, or stupid, or shallow or useless?”

  “They’re jealous,” he told her. “That’s all.”

  She dropped the bag and put her hands on her hips, breathing fast. “You’re not jealous! Unless you’re telling me that you’re a closet drag queen. But you just judged me the same way.”

  “I didn’t,” he insisted. “I’m wary, that’s all. Your looks are…intimidating. You seem like a being from some Planet of Perfection, where there are no flaws.”

  “Planet of…?” Speechless, she let her hands drop to her sides. “That’s nuts. Look, I have huge feet, and a big ugly mottled birthmark on my thigh, and flabby upper arms. I go to the bathroom, same as everybody else. I’m not manufactured by Mattel!”

  “Hey,” said Hal. “Calm down.” He put a soothing hand between her shoulder blades and rubbed. Normally she hated being touched, but he did it to comfort, to relax, and not to grab or own. She didn’t move away.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to take out my issues on you, of all people. You’re my client.”

  “It’s been a long afternoon. Would you like a beer? I wish I had wine to offer, but…”

  “I’d love a beer, thanks.”

  Hal went to the stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen and she followed. It was the cleanest kitchen she’d ever seen: obviously unused.

  “You don’t cook much, do you?”

  “Nope.” He handed her a cold green bottle after twisting the cap off.

  “Thank you. Did you just move into this place?” She took a sip and felt the pleasantly bitter bubbles spread over her tongue before heading down her throat.

  He nodded. “About a month ago. My accountant kept nagging me about how I was pouring money down the drain by renting, and how I needed the tax write-off from a house.” He put his own bottle to his lips and she noticed again how beautifully shaped they were. They formed an ironic quirk in his face, saved his blue eyes from being angelic. Hal might not be a sophisticated man-about-town, but she knew that he was no angel. Angels didn’t make love the way he did. Have sex. Whatever.

  She took a swig of beer to distract herself from that train of thought, because she was starting to want to jump him again.

  “So I obviously struck a nerve,” Hal ventured.

  She began to peel the label off her beer bottle. “Yeah.”

  “Sorry. I guess we all carry around our pasts and the ideas we form from them. Most of the really pretty girls in my past were stuck-up. They knew they were beautiful and they used it. Unfortunately you remind me of one of them.”

  “And she wasn’t nice?”

  He raised his own beer bottle to his lips and drank from it. “Definitely not.”

  “To you in particular?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did she do?”

  “You really want to know?”

  Shannon nodded.

  “Samantha Stanton. That was her name. Gorgeous. She used to wheedle my trig homework out of me and copy it before class. Stupid me, I let her. Then she wanted me to pass her test answers and I wouldn’t play ball. So Sam got even.

  “Around prom time she lied and said she’d broken up with her boyfriend—would I take her? Part of me was suspicious. I mean, why would a varsity cheerleader want the chess club nerd to take her to prom? But another part of me, probably my dick, believed her.

  “So I rented a cheesy tux and shiny plastic shoes, slicked my hair back and bought a corsage. Showed up on her doorstep.”

  He stopped and shook his head. Took another swig of beer.

  Shannon waited.

  “The front door of her palatial home opens, and it’s a whole preparty. Half the football team, her boyfriend, all of her snotty girlfriends and cheerleader buddies. And they all fall down laughing at me, the dork on the doorstep who thought he had a chance in hell of taking Samantha to the prom.”

>   Shannon sucked in her breath in horror.

  “I was so humiliated I could barely breathe.”

  “What did you do?”

  Hal shrugged. “I left. I thought about putting sugar in her gas tank. I thought about a lot of things. Used to dream about revenge…especially when the crank calls came late at night. She and her friends used to think it was funny to talk dirty to me. Get the nerd all hot and bothered and hang up on him. I guess the idea was to leave me with a big boner for their entertainment. Nice, huh? Those were the days before caller ID.”

  “I’m so glad I remind you of this girl. Sheesh.”

  “Actually, Sam’s not such a looker anymore.” Hal grinned. “I didn’t actually attend my high school reunion, but I hear she’s now the size of a whale, has three horrific kids by her high school boyfriend and he’s a deadbeat drunk.”

  “What goes around comes around,” said Shannon.

  “Seems like it,” he agreed.

  They sat in companionable silence for a few minutes. Then she said, “Hal…I don’t want you to think I normally have sex with people after knowing them six hours.”

  “What, you like to know them at least eight?” His tone was teasing, but his glance was sharp and evaluative.

  “At least.” She played along and was flip. “No, really. I’m pretty picky. But I had some upsetting news the other day—no, I still don’t want to talk about it—and then I just felt this spark with you, and all of a sudden it seemed right and natural and…and…urgent.”

  “Urgent?”

  “Yeah. The connection part. I wasn’t just horny—though of course that was part of it—I needed to reach something in you. Something rare and elusive that you have. Though I can’t say I know what it is.” She peeled off the rest of the label.

  Then she stared him straight in the eyes. “I might have started off using you for comfort sex. But it didn’t end that way. I want you to know that.”

  HAL HAD HEARD pretty speeches before. He gave them about as much credence as he did pretty women. Maybe this one was nice, but she was obviously letting him down easy. She was saying, “Don’t think you’re going to get lucky again,” while at the same time trying to make him believe that the encounter was more than it was.