Hard to Hold (True Romance)

by LETO, JULIE

  “Which is why I changed it,” Mike admitted. “I didn’t get her until long after she was named and apparently, she had a lot of health problems as a puppy. Call me superstitious, but I thought naming her after a god of death was a bad omen. And since Sirius is also the name of the brightest star in the night sky, I change it to just Sirus.”

  The dog’s scampering had started to slow and she was now sniffing the ground in search of a strategic location in which to do her business. Mike had a plastic bag in the opposite pocket of the one which he shared with Anne’s hand. He supposed picking up after his dog wasn’t the most romantic activity he could imagine, but Anne seemed to be getting to know the real him in all his complicated glory in one fell swoop. He’d told her about his Tourette’s, he’d acted on his compulsion to clean, and he was about to make sure his dog didn’t leave a deposit for some unsuspecting neighbor to step in. She was getting it all—good and bad—right from the start. He’d always been honest with the women he’d dated, but he couldn’t remember ever feeling quite so voluntarily exposed.

  But Anne certainly didn’t seem to mind.

  “So how old was she when you got her?”

  “She was eighteen months old. A rescue. For both of us.”

  “That’s the second time you’ve said that,” Anne pointed out.

  “Does it sound corny?”

  “No,” she replied, then laughed. “Okay, just a little. Still, it’s intriguing.”

  Mike watched Sirus jog over to a tree, sniffing at the roots with the intensity of a police dog rooting out drugs. He’d adopted Sirus at one of the lowest points in his life, but confessing as much to Anne seemed a bit like overkill. He’d already hit her with quite a bit tonight. The date. The Tourette’s. And yet, her openness was undeniable. And infectious.

  “It’s an old story that’s been told for generations,” he said, with a tad more drama than was warranted, just to drive the point home that his past, at this point, was nothing more than a distant tragedy that no longer drove his life. “A guy gets his heart stomped. He decides to fill the gap with a female who, thanks to careful breeding and training, does everything he says and never lets him down.”

  “I hope you don’t expect unwavering obedience from all the women in your life,” Anne said.

  Mike snorted. “If you met my mother or sisters, you’d never have to ask.”

  “Not exactly shrinking violets?”

  “They pretty much escaped the whole flower family. Except maybe belladonna,” he joked.

  “I like them already,” she concluded.

  “And they’d like you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I like you.”

  And again, they were kissing. This time, Mike didn’t plan or strategize. Their bodies, leaned close against the cold, gravitated toward each other with a pull as natural as the moon and tides. Her chilly lips warmed under his, adding a layer of sweet, sensual awareness.

  He traced the edge of her mouth with his tongue and she instantly let him in, twisting so that he had full access. She tasted like mint and kissed with abandon. In his pocket, their hands tightened.

  And then, Sirus jumped across their laps on the bench.

  “Sirus! Bad dog!” he chided, half annoyed and half thankful that his pooch had interrupted a moment that could have gotten way more intense than he’d planned before their first date.

  Anne laughed and scratched Sirus’s ears, which sent the dog into apoplectic fits of happiness, punctuated with barks and whimpers whenever Anne attempted to stop.

  Soon the cold was creeping in through their outerwear, so they ambled to the café. With Sirus on her leash basking in the attention of strangers, Mike went inside and ordered two cappuccinos to go, a slice of cheesecake, and two forks. They ate standing at the outdoor pub tables, making quick work of the luscious dessert before heading home.

  Mike dropped Sirus off and despite the dog’s protests, walked Anne back up to her apartment. At the door, he lingered, certain he wanted to kiss her one more time, but mindful of scaring her away by wanting too much, too soon.

  She took the choice away from him by elevating herself onto her tiptoes and brushing a soft kiss on his cheek. “I had a great time tonight.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  He turned his head, stealing the full-on kiss he so desperately wanted, but pulling away before he reached the point where he wouldn’t be able to stop. Anne intoxicated him. The feel of her mouth on his, her tongue flavored by the sweet dessert, was the best indulgence he’d had in a long time. If he thought too long about how her intelligent conversation, easy sense of humor and general joy for life grabbed at his insides and pulled, he might never have found the power to say goodnight.

  She rushed inside. A sudden burst of energy ricocheted through his system. He could have run up and down the stairwell for at least an hour without losing a single breath, but he decided to wait for the elevator. Lingering near her, even if it was just down the hall, was a welcomed torture.

  But when the mechanism finally dinged, the sound was drowned by Anne’s distant scream.

  Eight

  NYCAM

  NEW YORK COALITION AGAINST MICE

  For Immediate Release

  February 21, 2006

  For more information:

  Contact Michael Davoli

  NEWS ADVISORY

  NYCAM TO STAGE RAID ON SCHENECTADY COURTHOUSE:

  ALL MICE BE DAMNED

  Schenectady, NY—Members of the NYCAM, the New York Coalition Against Mice, announced today that they will be launching a new series of raids against mice in the Schenectady Courthouse. The raids are part of a stepped up attempt to crackdown on the fastest growing crime in Schenectady: illegal mouse droppings.

  This raid was scheduled two days after a massive assortment of droppings were found in an Albany high rise apartment building. The droppings carried the markings of the Schenectady mouse gang, Magic Kingdoms Rejects. This was the first time that the MKR had staged a dropping in the state capital.

  Anne read the message in her inbox twice, and then burst out laughing. The stares from her coworkers made her cover her mouth and lean in closer to her keyboard, but she chuckled all the same. After what she’d put Michael through last night, she thought she’d never hear from him again.

  Instead, he’d turned her terror into a fake press release like the ones he wrote at his job.

  High on the endorphins from Michael’s parting kiss, Anne had spun back into her kitchen to put the energy to good use. She’d opened her dishwasher and instantly spotted a dead mouse on the top rack. Her throat still hurt from the screaming. Only a split second later, she’d answered Mike’s insistent knocking and somehow managed to tell him about her rodent invader.

  Precisely how he’d gotten rid of the dead mouse, she did not know or care. He’d not only stayed late to help her rewash every dish, but he’d apparently also listened when she’d told him how she’d be spending the majority of her time this week at the Schenectady Courthouse.

  The press release would make sure she didn’t forget the crazy ending to their amazing night any time soon.

  “I can’t imagine what would be so funny on the crime beat, Ms. Miller.”

  The sound of her boss’s voice sucked the humor out of her system with the same power as a high-flow toilet. In the dictionary, listed under the word “buzzkill,” was a photograph of Pamela Toledo. She was like a female Lou Grant—only not during the lighthearted Mary Tyler Moore Show, but the more serious eponymous drama—and without the humanity. In fact, the only real reason Pamela reminded her of Lou Grant was because she was a newspaper editor and she looked remarkably like Ed Asner.

  Anne quickly closed the window to her e-mail program, pasted on her best smile, and turned to Pamela. “Did you need me, Pamela?”

  Pamela threw the marked-up copy of Anne’s latest article across her desk. It floated onto the floor in a flash of red on white. “No, but you certainly nee
d me. I guess they don’t teach about dangling participles in journalism school anymore.”

  Anne forced her smile to remain steady. Never mind that she had graduated from journalism school more than five years ago and had since worked on several publications of equal size and scope as the Daily Journal. She preferred instead to picture the dangling not of a participle, but of Pamela’s squirming body out of a tenth-story window.

  “Right,” Anne said, scooping up the marked-up copy from the floor.

  “You finished with that article on the city council indictment?” Pamela asked.

  “Just waiting for one more quote from the district attorney,” Anne replied calmly, even though she’d reported that fact to her superior not twenty minutes ago during their morning staff meeting. “I was just about to call in. I’ll make my deadline, no problem.”

  She stared into Pamela’s scowl and silently counted to ten. Then twenty. Even after the woman cleared her nicotine-coated throat and shuffled away in mismatched montage of bad eighties business suits, Anne counted another ten, just for good measure.

  When the woman finally turned the corner into her office, Anne let out the breath she’d been holding with a colorful, but quiet, string of curses. When she’d first signed on to the job at the Daily Journal, she’d hoped to learn a great deal from the experienced newspaperwoman before she moved up and on to a byline at either the New York Times, Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. Instead, she’d been browbeaten, underappreciated and abused. Her ambitions, however, remained solid. She hadn’t worked this hard to be undercut by someone as soulless as her current editor.

  As usual, Anne would suck it up and endure—though shaking off Pamela’s nastiness would be a whole lot easier to do once she’d typed a reply to Michael.

  From: Anne Miller

  Subject: See Them Run: Mouse Hunters Fight the

  Good Fight in Schenectady

  To: “Michael Davoli”

  Date: Tuesday, February 21, 2006, 1:41 PM

  See Them Run: Mouse hunters clean up a courthouse

  By Anne Miller

  Staff writer

  SCHENECTADY - With military precision, jack-booted authorities descended upon the county courthouse this morning to rid the halls of justice of the four-legged scourge plaguing local jurisprudence like an act of God. The raid, conducted by the New York Coalition Against Mice, or NYCAM, was staged after newspaper reports brought to light a mouse invasion in the aging building.

  “It’s become a health hazard,” said spokesman Michael Davoli. “We’re here to serve, protect and clean.”

  The sweep also included sweeping up after the mice. County court officers were seen clambering on top of desks to get out of the rodents’ way. Jail inmates brought over for court appearances delighted in the mayhem. They stomped their feet, rattling ankle chains to scare up more mice. They called it their way of helping fix a problem long overdue for cleanup.

  “Honestly, I’d rather be in jail some days, it’s cleaner there,’’ said an inmate who preferred not to be named. By 3 p.m., after a day when nothing got done save mouse hunting, Schenectady County Judge K.D. literally threw up her hands, tossed off her robe, and officially closed court for the day.

  Court is expected to resume in the morning, after the heroic NYCAM members take their fight to downtown Albany.

  No word on how NYCAM plans to dispose of the mice.

  “Really, you don’t want to know,” Davoli said.

  “Mice in the courthouse?”

  Anne nearly jumped out of her skin. God, she hated working in the office. She much preferred the coffee shop. At least there, if someone was reading over your shoulder, they at least pretended they were doing something else. At the paper, eavesdropping was an art form.

  This time, Anne didn’t hide her humorous handiwork. At least, she thought it was funny. She was pretty sure Michael would, too. But everyone else? Not so much. She kind of liked sharing an inside joke with a guy who was also an incredibly good kisser, not to mention rodent-warrior extraordinaire.

  “While I’m sure the Schenectady Courthouse has its fair share of vermin, this is just a joke piece I’m sending to a friend,” Anne explained to Billy, the intern who used her desk when she was out in the field and who, the rest of the time, followed her around in a diligent attempt to learn something.

  “What are you up to?” Anne asked, hoping to deflect any other questions about her personal correspondence.

  “I finished looking over the copy of Deni’s piece on the zoning commission, and I was sort of hoping you’d have something more interesting for me to proofread.”

  Anne chuckled. “My grocery list, if I ever took the time to make one, would be more interesting to read than a report on the zoning board. I’m waiting for one last quote on this piece on the fraud trial, but if you’d like to look it over now, I wouldn’t mind. I have a phone call to make anyway. I’ll go down to the courtyard and you can read here, okay?”

  The kid nodded enthusiastically, but she sent him to grab a Coke while she read through her e-mail to Mike, fixed a spelling error because what would he think about a writer who couldn’t spell, and then clicked send. This was fun. She could only imagine what he’d send back in response. All because she’d found a dead mouse in her dishwasher.

  Billy returned, so Anne pulled up the article she was nearly done with, grabbed her note pad, coat, and cell phone, and went downstairs to the courtyard that had usually been appropriated by the newspaper’s smokers. The day was cold, but the sun beat down into the cement circle so she could walk around and chat with the prosecutor on the case without her teeth chattering. She had the necessary quote in less than two minutes, so she took the extra time to call Shane, who’d sent a text message instructing her to do so at her first available moment.

  “So, how’d it go last night?” Shane asked.

  Funny how caller ID had destroyed the niceties such as saying, “Hello.”

  “Up until the dead mouse, it was a very nice evening.”

  “Dead mouse? Tell me this is a metaphor.”

  “Nope,” Anne insisted. “I’m being completely literal. That is what I get for emptying my dishwasher. A steamed rodent body sitting amid my utensils.”

  “Ew!”

  Anne’s stomach roiled just thinking about it again. She’d always had an aversion to rodents of all species, but mice in particular gave her the creeps. Even the stark white, lab-bred mouse that had never existed outside his tiny cage made her skin crawl, with his wormy tail and pink mouth. She shivered just thinking about it.

  “The point is,” she said, raising her voice in a bid to shout the picture out of her head, “he heard me scream and came running. He not only took the disgusting thing away, he reloaded the dishwasher and ran another cycle, hand-washed the dishes that wouldn’t fit, and invited me to dinner at his place tonight so I don’t have to go anywhere near my kitchen.”

  Shane was quiet, which surprised Anne. She expected a squeal of excitement—or at the very least, a hearty “I told you so.”

  “What’s wrong?” she asked, suspicious.

  “Nothing,” Shane said. “Things seem fairly perfect. I think I’m jealous. Wow, there’s an emotion I haven’t felt in a really long time.”

  Anne laughed. She couldn’t deny that things between her and Michael had progressed a little quickly, from that first hug on the sidewalk to the incredible kisses they’d shared on her couch, in her doorway, and later on the bench at the park. Ordinarily, any new man she kissed required a certain amount of fumbling before they got to the good stuff. Nose bumps, groping hands, and sloppy tongues that moved either too fast or too slow so that the acrobatics of the kiss took center stage from the emotional expression were par for the course.

  But Michael had skipped that stage. He kissed her as if they’d been doing it for years. He’d tilted his head at precisely the right angle and more than once, he’d brushed his fingers over her cheek in a way that drove her mad.

&n
bsp; If she didn’t watch herself, she might find herself in love way too fast than was wise. She wanted a real shot with Michael— though the idea of turning down his invitation to dinner to slow the process of connection was wholly out of the question. Especially after his e-mail.

  “What have you got to be jealous of? You’ve got Jamie.” Anne said the last part with hestitation. With Shane’s track record, chances were high that he was already history. When she’d knitted with Shane the week before last, the bloom was already fading off the rose.

  “Eh,” Shane replied. “I do and I don’t. He’s a great guy, I guess, but it’s all so . . . physical. I don’t know if he’d sit still for an hour watching a complicated television show with me, help clear the dishes, take me for a romantic stroll through a park, and then dispose of a drowned, baked, and steamed pest for me, too.”

  Anne willed the bile suddenly burning up her throat to return to her stomach.

  “Can we please not talk about that anymore?”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Shane said with a snort. “It’s more fun to talk about Michael anyway. Or should I start calling him Mr. Perfect?”

  “It’s easy to make a guy sound perfect when I hardly know him.” Anne said. “Did you know he has Tourette’s?”

  She almost hadn’t asked Shane about it, but she was the only mutual friend Anne shared with Michael and she didn’t have a sense that he kept his condition particularly secret. He’d certainly disclosed it to her fast enough, as if he was giving her the chance to walk away as early in the romantic process as possible—something she could not imagine doing.

  “Yeah, I think I remember something about it,” Shane said. “He had a hard time with it when he was a kid, but I think he manages it pretty well now. Why, did you notice something?”

  “Actually, no. He told me. But it’s hard to notice anything about him but his glorious blue eyes and generous soul.”

  “Oh, dear,” Shane said. “You sound a little smitten.”

  Anne smiled. “I do, don’t I?”

  “Why’d you ask about the Tourette’s?”

  “It was important to him that he tell me. But to be honest, I didn’t think it was any big deal. I guess I’m afraid I might insult him by trivializing his condition, but if he has it under control, I don’t see why I should be concerned.”