And the Next Thing You Know . . .

by Chase Taylor Hackett

  “Just like that.”

  “Just like that. Good-bye, Mr. Chip.”

  I flopped down on Jeff’s couch and set the water bottle down on the coffee table, just so I could watch Jeff scramble for a coaster. I picked up the remote control and turned on the TV. I was a little surprised by what the TV was paused on.

  “Seriously? Dancing with the Stars?”

  “I wasn’t watching that.”

  “Yeah. Right. Then you won’t mind if I—” I started flipping through channels.

  “You messed up my date.”

  “Ah, c’mon. Calling a Grindr hook-up a date? Get real—let’s call a spade a damned shovel and get on with it.”

  “You really chased him off?”

  I interrupted my channel-flipping to turn to him with a face dripping with wronged astonishment.

  “How could you think this was somehow my fault? Really. I didn’t do a thing!”

  “It’s just a coincidence, I suppose, that you turn up and my—whatever—disappears? Hardly.”

  “It’s possible.”

  “Theo, everything, absolutely everything that’s wrong in my life these days, can be traced in a direct line back to you.”

  “Wow. Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Cool!”

  “And what happened to Edwardo, or Alejandro or—”

  “Enrique?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I don’t know. Guy’s been calling me all day for some reason.”

  “Maybe because you tattooed your name and number on his arm in letters three feet high.”

  “Oh, yeah, I did, didn’t I. Dja like that?”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Me? I just came by to give you this,” and I tossed him the tube from Tommy. “Moisturizer. Tommy swears by it, and he insists it’s never too soon to start, although in your case…” and I made a little face. “Awesome flat screen by the way, much nicer than Rebecca’s. Anyway, those crinkles around the eyes give you character now maybe, but in a couple years you’ve got character like Maggie Smith, and you don’t want that.” I went back to flipping channels. “Did you know that Robert Redford used to be hot? Hard to imagine.”

  “I don’t need moisturizer!”

  “At least I think it’s moisturizer. Yeah, I’m sure that’s what it is. Chip seemed to have the silly idea it had something to do with body lice, but whatever put that crazy notion into his head, I’ll never know.”

  I gave him my most cherubic smile, which people tell me is pretty goddamned cherubic.

  “If you weren’t so puny—”

  “Hey! I’m short. I am not small. I am not little. I am not— Oh, fantastic! Found it!”

  “What?”

  “The old movie channel. And look, it’s a silent! I love silent movies, don’t you?” I plopped my feet up on the coffee table. “Is that Mary Astor? So young!”

  I can’t tell you how awesome it was to know that I had this condescending, conceited, whore-chasing lawyer-boy totally knocked off balance. He stood there looking down at me for a couple seconds trying to figure out what to do with me, before he finally gave up and dropped on the couch next to me in surrender.

  “You—you really chased off my date?”

  “Hook-up.”

  “Why?”

  “Not sure, but—and I’m not gonna lie—it was strangely very satisfying. Do you have any popcorn? Microwave is fine.”

  “I could just smack you, you know.”

  “Of course you could probably find a replacement, but honestly at your age? Maybe you should give it a rest. And just out of curiosity, how much does a guy like Chip charge? I mean, for the—you know—the whole shebang? Or is it hebang in this case?”

  “I’m not— He’s not— Why you little—”

  “Anyway, save your money, and your back. After the exertions of the last couple days, you’re lucky you didn’t pull something. No cracks, please.” I reached over and smoothed out the crow’s feet on his left eye with my thumb. “Oooh, speaking of cracks.” I tsked my tongue a couple times. “Definitely not too soon for the moisturizer.” I pinched his cheek and he yanked his head away.

  I turned back and watched Mary A. getting downright girlish with John Barrymore.

  He glanced at the screen.

  “I don’t even like black and white movies, let alone silents.”

  “Reading skills not up to it?”

  “I should just—”

  “Yeah, but you won’t.”

  And then there was a distinct shift in gears. He scooched a little closer.

  “You are so bad, you know that?”

  I swear I could hear his boner starting up. I turned from the TV to him.

  “Hey,” I said gently, touching his jaw with one hand, looking deeply into his eyes. “You’re clearly a great guy, fabulous really—”

  “You bastard,” and he pulled away.

  “—but don’t have a bunch of expectations, okay?”

  “Fucker.”

  “Just don’t expect a repetition. And besides.”

  “Besides?”

  “I’ll bet anything you use a moisturizer already, don’t you. I bet your medicine cabinet is stuffed with skin-care crap.”

  His face. He went from frustrated to surprised to a half-laugh and he looked at me a long time. I always had the idea he was trying to figure something out. Right at that moment I was pretty sure he was trying to figure out if he should shove me down the garbage chute, or try again.

  “Hey, Theo?” he purred, his voice all low and seductive-like. He was obviously taking the second option.

  “Yeah?”

  “You do sort of owe me, after all.” He was moving in again.

  “Do I?” I purred back. We were getting closer. “You think I should make it up to you?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, meaning yes.

  “Because I’ve been bad?” I moved forward and brushed his lips with mine.

  “So bad.”

  “Am I?” Another brush with the lips.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Know what else I am?” I said, and I leaned in and oh-so gently took his lower lip between my teeth for a second, before I pulled away.

  “What?” he said, hoarse.

  I answered, still all soft and kittenish.

  “I’m nobody’s fucking second choice.” And I hopped up from the couch. “I’m gonna run,” I said, all perky. In my head I was thinking, you poor bastard, you’ve been a good two beats behind since I walked in here. I headed to the door, stopped and turned back. There he sat, mouth open. His khakis looked like the circus was in town. What a sap. I gestured to the TV screen, where Barrymore was giving us his profile for all he was worth. “Tell me how it ends.”

  I let the door pull itself closed behind me.

  And if anybody saw me skipping down the hall toward the elevator—I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.

  Chapter 31

  Pound Puppies

  Jeffrey

  Late morning on a Saturday. If I were smart, I’d be in the office, racking up the billable hours. Never enough billable hours in the day. But instead, I was here. At an animal shelter with a hundred and thirty-seven barking dogs in a building made of cement blocks. The noise was seriously unbelievable. Ten minutes of this and I’d be running for the exit.

  I was at the animal shelter where Theo volunteered. I figured he’d been blindsiding me for a while now. It was my turn to ambush him for a change, throw him off balance and see how he liked it. So I wandered, adoption brochure in hand, through room after room of kennels—first cats and then dogs—with a bunch of other people. The dogs all seemed to have something to say about the whole thing.

  As I came into the second room full of dogs, I saw him. Not who you�
�re thinking. There, sticking out of a dog cage, was a skinny little ass in a pair of skinny little black jeans.

  “Swithin?”

  He backed out of the cage carefully, a soapy sponge in hand, straightened up and turned.

  “Hey!” He was as surprised as I was.

  “Hey yourself. What are you doing here?”

  “I was about to say the same thing. I volunteer with Theo. He didn’t tell you?”

  “No, he hadn’t mentioned it, but we haven’t really talked about” and I gestured around me “this.”

  “I’m just like him. I want a dog, but I can’t really have one at this point in my life, so I come here to play with these dogs.”

  “Looks like fun,” I said, pointing to the sponge. There was still something brown clinging to it.

  “Oh—yeah,” he said, remembering the sponge, and he tossed it at a bucket of soapy water. “I need to finish that, too. Don’t let me forget. Theo know you’re coming?”

  “No, it was sort of—spontaneous.”

  “I think he’s just in the next kennel,” and he pointed to an open doorway to the next room.

  “Thanks. Nice to see you.”

  “Nice to see you not in a suit—you look good,” he said, fishing the sponge out of the bucket.

  When I came into the next big kennel room, there was Theo in the middle of some milling visitors. He and a woman were squatting down to a dog whose neck the woman was scratching. I stepped back a little. I wanted to watch him for a second. Could this woman really be thinking about adopting that dog?

  The dog in question, I have to tell you, was no prize winner. Almost no hair, ribs sticking out, and large purplish spots on its skin. And at just that moment, this hideous animal went into a squat and took a truly stupendous piss. Like gallons.

  Nice doggy.

  Both the woman and Theo sprang up—but the piss-pond had already flooded as far as Theo’s shoes and he was now tracking it on the concrete floor.

  I thought of that hole in the bottom of Theo’s sneaker—ewwwwww!!!

  I waited. What would little Theo do? Theo, the poster-boy for bad tempers. Theo, whose bark was so nasty, he didn’t have to bite. From my experience with Roger’s Scottish terrier, I’d figured out that sarcasm didn’t really work on dogs—lord knows I’d tried—but I certainly expected to hear an explosion of ironic invective to be heaped upon this poor beast.

  Like so much in my life lately, in this I was disappointed.

  Theo just went to a closet—and came back wheeling a janitor’s bucket and a mop, and set to work, patiently cleaning it up, all the while still trying to sell this poor woman on the virtues of this complete loser of a dog.

  N.b., I just used the words ‘Theo’ and ‘patiently’ in a sentence, which I would have never thought possible.

  “She’s generally pretty house-broken, but she’s been in a cage all morning, and so as soon as she came out, whoosh, Johnstown. You really shouldn’t hold it against her. It’s my fault for not taking her out to the exercise pen right away. I’ll be right back.”

  He wheeled the bucket and mop away.

  When he came back, he went straight down to the little tail-wagging monster, scratched the thing around the ears with both hands, and scrunched his face while this—creature—went to town, licking, licking.

  “Ooooooooooooh, yes,” he said cooing between the licks in the most ridiculous baby-talk voice, “who’s the prettiest girl? Hmm? That’s you! That’s you!” This of course spurred the mutt into even more frantic licking.

  Was this really Theo, the Snark King of the Great Middle West? Or was this just his job? Maybe he was working on a commission? I didn’t know, but he seemed dead-set on selling this poor dupe this grotesque animal. It was, at best, ethically questionable—and at worst, fraud. Roger’s Scottish terrier Haggis had annoyed me no end, but at least that dog looked sharp. This little atrocity on a leash was just an embarrassment.

  “If you want to take Clarice out into the exercise yard for a bit, you guys can get to know each other a little. Maybe she wants to pee some more—although hard to imagine. I’ll be around if you have any questions.” And he turned away from the pair—who seemed pretty smitten with each other—and he saw me.

  “Heyyyyyyy,” he said smiling. “What the hell?”

  “I just happened to be in the neighborhood, thought I might pick up a dog, maybe two.”

  “Yeah, we don’t do adoptions like that, sorry. But I’ll be happy to show you some candidates that might suit you.”

  “I can’t have that one,” I gestured in the direction of the dog he’d just sent out into the yard. “The whizzing wonder? He’s so pretty!”

  “I think she may be going to her new home today. Isn’t that fantastic?”

  “Really?”

  “I admit she’s not the prettiest, but she looks much better than she did when she came in. She’s gaining weight, and she’s on some drugs for the skin thing, and her coat will come back in full in a few weeks. And she’s so sweet. That’s why it would be awesome if she found a forever home today.”

  “I’m not really here to adopt.”

  “I figured. Why are you here exactly?”

  “Beats me. I just wanted to see…you know…hey, you get a lunch break?”

  “Are you asking me out? Like on a date? Because you shouldn’t really have a lot of expectations—”

  “—expectations, yeah yeah, silly me.”

  “Anyway, I just came back from my break. Sorry.”

  “Next time.”

  “I’d suggest tomorrow, but you have dinner with your parents.”

  Gotta say one thing for Theo. He certainly didn’t make it easy.

  “I changed my password!”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “Hey—be nice to me. It’s my birth week.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “There’s a party.”

  “Old news.”

  “Wanna come?”

  “Well, you hadn’t invited me, and you know how I am. I figured—”

  “—you were just going to show up anyway.”

  “Absolutely. And I intended to be very embarrassing.”

  “Which you’re so good at.”

  “I try, I do try. I hadn’t quite decided, but I was thinking I might just ring the bell and tell them I was the hired stripper, see where that gets me.”

  “Well, I’m inviting you, so now you can’t crash. And I’d much prefer it if you didn’t strip for my friends.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Doesn’t mean I won’t behave badly.”

  “Too bad about lunch.”

  “Ask me again sometime. I enjoyed saying ‘no.’” He grinned at me with that impish smile he can do. In my annoyance with him, I generally forgot how pretty he was, but he was. And a good thing too, or someone would have killed him long ago.

  “Theo, can I ask you something kind of personal?”

  “Mayyyyy-be.”

  “Are you standing there with a sock soaked in dog piddle?”

  He seemed to think about it and looked down at his miserable shoes, wiggling his toes in them.

  “On the advice of counsel…” Not sure how long we stood there smiling at each other before—

  “Hey Theo!” It was Swithin coming in from the other kennel room. “Did you just get a text from Jessica? She says LCT is looking for an office assistant.”

  “LCT?” I said. Not a firm I’d ever heard of.

  “Lincoln Center Theatre,” Theo explained. “Seriously?” He was digging his phone out of his pocket. “Oh my God!”

  “You said the people are horrible where you work,” said Swithin.

  “The pits,” Theo agreed.

  “Hey!”

>   “Oh shit, you work there too?” asked Swithin

  “I’ve made my point,” said Theo.

  “Isn’t he just the sweetest thing?” I appealed to Swithin.

  “Anyway, Theo,” said Swithin, holding up his phone. “You should call them. You can actually do word processing and stuff. Aside from Finale, my only computer skill is Facebook.”

  “You’re forgetting Call of Duty.”

  “True that. Maybe I should put that on my résumé? Anyway, bro. Call them.”

  “Yeah—you got this while I step outside?”

  “Sure.”

  “Hey.” I stopped him before he abandoned me. “I’m going to go. Let me know how it—you know. And, you know—what is it you guys say? Break a leg?”

  “Thanks.”

  Wow—he smiled at me, and it wasn’t snarky at all.

  “I’ll talk to you later then,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  And I did the weirdest, totally dumb thing.

  Without thinking, I leaned down and I kissed him good-bye. On the lips, but really quick. Nothing going on, no tongues, no smooching or anything, just a quick, chaste, good-bye kiss.

  Like you’d kiss your boyfriend.

  That’s what it felt like. A casual, thoughtless kiss you can give somebody when you’re together. Not the kind of kiss you give somebody when you’re not together.

  And we, according to me anyway, weren’t even dating.

  Were we?

  Theo seemed a bit surprised by it too.

  So was Swithin. First time I’d ever seen him actually push his hair back out of his face.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I did that.”

  “It’s—it’s okay,” said Theo.

  “Dude,” said Swithin, smiling. “Never apologize. Not for that.”

  He probably was right.

  “I’ll let you go. I’m sure you’ve got somebody more important to mop up after.”

  Chapter 32

  Tell Me On a Sunday, Please