I don’t remember taking the first step, but then I never do because I take so many of them. What I do remember is my ponytail flopping, heavy and wet, against the bare skin at the top of my back that my bunched-up shirt didn’t cover. I remember that halfway up the stadium stairs, somewhere around seating section D, my legs started to burn.
Blood pumped into the muscles, tightening them, squeezing them into wonderfully painful knots of potential, and then kinetic, energy. They were pistons, I was a V-8 engine that couldn’t be stopped.
That is, until my toe caught the loose bit of step just above seating section KK and made a loose bit into a missing bit.
Those V-8 pistons didn’t stop for a second, but physics meant that the rest of the car did. I fell into a heap, although luckily I caught myself with an outstretched hand and didn’t suffer anything worse than a skinned knee, a scraped palm, and a bruised ego.
Briefly, I had a fantasy of some big, shaggy-haired man catching my flailing ass and hauling me back to my feet before laying me down on the cold metal benches of section KK and kissing me so hard that the back of my head left a dent in the aluminum. I imagined that after he kissed me, he ripped my shirt a little on the collar, sucked at my neck and put his hands places that would usually make me reach for the pepper spray.
But the guy in my fantasy wasn’t just a guy – no, no, no – he was something different, some unchained id that couldn’t be contained. He had fierce eyes, of some indeterminate color; but the color hardly mattered because after mauling me with his hands, he had my shorts around my ankles and was pulling my hair while he—
And then I remembered the stinging in my left knee.
There was no mysterious alpha male with a cocky grin and an improbably large, er, pair of hands to catch me. There was no head-forcing kiss, or libido-throbbing caress. There was just me, Delilah Coltrane, Dilly to all my friends and my single enemy, alone in a stadium with a bleeding knee and a slightly embarrassing flush on my neck and chest.
“It could be worse,” I told the fitness tracking shackle strapped to my wrist, which didn’t reply except to beep and tell me that I’d stopped moving and that I needed to go faster. “I could have broken my leg and fallen off the side of the stadium.”
It beeped again, the humorless son of a bitch. This time it beeped to tell me that I had been motionless too long. It was going to switch off, and then seconds later, it made good on the threat as I poured water onto my knee. The bleeding mostly stopped. The wound on my palm was more of an impact scrape – the kind that throbs and hurts like hell, but just kinda gives the skin an agitated gray color instead of breaking it.
Thank goodness for small miracles. The last thing in the world I needed was to feel guilty about getting blood all over a stadium step that some janitor would either have to clean up, or more likely, would choose to ignore.
By the time I’d gotten back down to the field and to my duffel bag, my knee had mostly stopped throbbing, and I wasn’t limping anymore. Any more than I normally did, at least – the souvenir of an old car wreck that hadn’t gone away in the four years since I got it, so I had sort of placidly assumed it’d be with me forever.
Of all the things that a person can carry around – guilt, regret, anxiety – a limp wasn’t the worst. Although I had pretty good helpings of those other things too, come to think of it. But somehow I kept on. Maybe it was the fact that without me, my dog would have no one to feed him, or maybe it was my constant fantasizing about being caught every time I fell by some hunk of man who would ravish me in all the right ways.
Who knows?
But I kept on going, day after day. Maybe it was just to see what was going to happen next. That sounds sort of pitiful now that I think about it, but I mean it in a more exploratory way than a woe-is-me way. For me, life is just a story that keeps telling itself the longer I go, and I love stories more than anything in the world.
The funny thing is that as much as I love them, I never seemed to have many good stories of my own. I mean, sure, I had some times in high school that would make pretty great Cameron Crowe movies, but for the most part I did my thing and interesting events never much got in the way.
Then again, as is usually the case with me, when things get interesting? They get interesting.
For a girl who never had many stories, for a girl whose main fantasy was being caught when she fell down and scraped her knee? I was about to be pulled into one hell of a story, and I’ll tell you right now – it didn’t take long at all for my fantasies to get a whole lot dirtier.
Dirtier is the wrong word for it.
Hairier? Furrier?
Either way, my Prince Charming turned out to be a lot more beast than beauty. Which, come to think of it, is perfect for a girl like me.
By which I mean I’m always finding hairs sticking out of my pantyhose. Er, the two times a year I wear it, anyway. Look, what I’m saying is, there are a lot of things in the world to think about, and honestly? I never got real excited about shaving.
-2-
“Wait, did you just say ‘growly’? Is that even a word?”
-Delilah
“Where the hell have you been?” Jeanette, my lone employee and best friend, had her feet up on her desk when I walked back into my studio with nary a sniff of the agony I’d been through a half hour before. “The phone’s been ringing like crazy and you’re out sweating.”
“Running the stadium,” I said, dropping my gym bag on the floor and taking off my shoes, which I placed on the hat rack. Who the hell needs a hat rack these days? And who the hell needs shoes when you’re indoors? “Bare feet get my brain blood going.”
“Gross,” she said flatly. “Anyway, why don’t you just use the elliptical you bought three months ago? You know, the one sitting in your studio? I feel like if it was in a house, it’d be used for storing laundry. Instead of boxes of clay, I mean.”
“I feel like we’re married sometimes,” I said.
Jeanette snorted a laugh. “I’d make you shave your damn legs if we were.”
With a smile, I shook my head and pulled the elastic out of my ponytail. I’d forgotten to let it out in the car, which is a lot better for drying out one’s hair. But as it stood, my coppery-blond mane had one hell of a kink in the middle of it. Jeanette tilted her head, in the same way that normally precedes your grandmother saying “you’re a mess” but meaning it in only the best possible way.
“Anyway, you said we had orders?” I asked.
“No, I said we had calls.”
“You’re... going to need to clarify that.”
I make things. Sculptures mostly. Sometimes I get a commission for a stained-glass window, and I do it because I’m not too proud or too picky to take the money, but I really hate it. All the dye and the lead caulking and everything, it’s just such a damn mess. One time I got a call from someone who wanted me to do an ice sculpture at their wedding. I was supposed to show up with a chainsaw and carve a huge block of ice into the shape of a dolphin. Speaking of stories I have, there’s a hell of a story.
That middle-aged lawyer desperately wanted some wild stunt that he was sure would impress his twenty-two year old secretary-cum-wife. The ponytail he’d grown and the convertible Porsche he’d bought weren’t enough, so somehow he decided to move on to ice sculpture. Don’t ask me how that train of thought goes. Anyway, I told the guy that I had no idea what I was doing, but he was about as into listening as I am shaving.
Turns out, using a chainsaw isn’t all that much different from what I normally do, so the statue was fine, if a little South Florida Kitsch for my taste, and Mr. and Mrs. William J. Kelly III, Esq. were married for at least three months. I know that because he called me to do the next wedding, too.
Like I said, I’m not proud enough to turn down work.
“No ice sculpture dolphins,” Jeanette said, reading my mind. Then again, that was the most memorable work I’d ever had, so maybe it wasn’t so mu
ch that she was a psychic and more that I was just sorta boring most of the time. “Although, uh, this one is pretty unique.”
“Unique’s good,” I said with a shrug. “It pays, right?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Well. Really well.” There was a peculiar look on my long-term best friend’s face that said more than her words. Her lips were drawn tight and she was blinking a lot, the way people do when they think they’ve seen a UFO but aren’t the sort to believe in that kind of thing. “Like, so well that I kinda think the guy was bullshitting me.”
“Oh come on,” I said, grabbing the estimate sheet she was holding in a hand that shook. Jeanette isn’t a shaker. “How much could it possibly... holy shit that’s a lot of zeroes.”
I stared at the note and shortly, my hands joined hers in a little group trembling session.
“What’s it for?” I asked, consciously forcing my hand to stop shaking. I might drink a pretty good amount – I am an artist after all – but nowhere near enough to get the shakes. Still, it was a lot of zeroes. “Did he say?”
Jeanette shook her head, still staring at the note with the zeroes on it. “Said he’d come by later. He didn’t want to commit to anything before he saw you. That’s how he put it, too,” her voice was distant and dreamy and holy hell that was a lot of zeroes. “Didn’t say anything about your work. Just said he wanted to see you first.”
Flitting dreams of scruffy-hot calendar hunks danced through my head. “Did he sound hot?” I asked, and then had to laugh at myself to pretend I wasn’t serious.
“Yeah,” she answered in a monotone. “Real growly. Back of the throat kind of, uh, Steve Perry growl.”
“The guy from Journey?” I searched my karaoke memory banks. That might go along with the drinking a little too much. “Isn’t that more of a wail?”
She nodded, still with that blank expression on her face. “Call it whatever you want, it’s hot as hell. Anyway, the guy said he’d come by later. Didn’t want to... wait, I already said that, didn’t I?”
I patted her on the back and gave her neck a little squeeze. “It’ll be okay,” I said. “Somehow, we’ll pull through a growly-voiced man who is apparently very rich who wants to pay me a shit-ton of money for an unknown project.”
I remembered that she said there were a bunch of calls, but not any orders. “What else was there? You said there were a bunch?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jeanette said, shaking out the cobwebs. “It’s just that is so many zeroes it was hard to focus. It was just some random junk. You have a dentist appointment on Thursday, and they said if you didn’t show up for this one, they’d have to start charging you for no-shows. Your therapist said the same thing, but your appointment with her is Friday at four.”
She seemed to drift off again. “God it was so growly. I felt his voice in my ladyparts.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Which, er, ones? I’ve got a few parts that are lady-only.”
“In my crotch, Dilly,” she said. “His voice made my crotch tingle.”
“I... see,” I said. “I can’t say I was expecting that sort of honesty.”
“When have I been anything but blunt?”
“Fair enough.”
I nodded slowly, unable to un-arch my eyebrow. Jeanette, with her slightly too-big horn rimmed glasses, and tightly pulled-back bun, just sat and smiled, longingly. She opened her mouth, and I expected something else about crotch tingles, but instead she relayed that the electric bill was three days past due, I had a meeting with a regular client who wanted another statue of her dog, and something about how she was starting to get hungry. And then she mentioned tingling again, which I chose to ignore, not because it bothered me, but because I needed to focus on the important parts.
Not that sort of part.
“Did he say when?” I sailed right past her tingling bits, the dentist, my therapist Dr. Brundall, the dog statue and the electric bill, which I made a mental note to pay before I had to fork over ten extra bucks for a late fee. “The growly guy, I mean.”
“No,” she said. “Just later. You know how billionaires are. They don’t like schedules. They live at their own pace, or some other macho alpha thing. At least, that’s what I learned from romance novels. Also they are apparently all into spanking and tying women up.”
I thought for a moment. “That doesn’t sound all that bad, huh?”
“Nope,” she answered. “Wait, which part? The not having schedules, or the being tied up and spanked?”
I took another second to think, because honestly it all sounded pretty good. “You know,” I said, “I’d take pretty much anything I could get at this point. That sounded kinda desperate, didn’t it?”
She shrugged. “When in Rome.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
Narrowing her eyes, Jeanette took on a very grim, very serious look. “Dilly,” she announced, with way too much gravity for what she’d said, “I have no idea.”
*
In the back of my mind, I knew I should’ve waited to talk to Mrs. Brubecker about her dog statue, but I figured making the eighth Scottish terrier statue for her was a fairly safe bet. Each time she got a new dog, she commissioned a half-sized statue of them, and each time she got a dog it was a Scotty.
Except, of course, the one time I decided to try and get ahead of life for once.
She showed up with Rufus, a very dopey, but very sweet, creature that seemed to be about half German shepherd and half, I dunno, wiener dog or something. He was tall, fairly cylindrical in shape, and unfortunately for me, nothing at all like a Scotty. One of his ears perked, while the other flopped. His tail was curly, but sort of cocked off in one direction, and he didn’t seem able to close his mouth all the way.
Still, he was lovable as all hell, I have to give him that. And it wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t a Scotty.
The front door clanged open just as Mrs. Brubecker and I were finishing our meeting in my studio, and I heard Jeanette talking to someone who, in retrospect, did have a very growly voice. I was neck-deep in sketching though, so I didn’t pay any attention to Captain Sexy Voice for quite a while. Everything I did, when I finally got around to doing it, was highly regimented. I met with a client, took some sketches, took some measurements, sketched some more, and did a lot of frowning before I finished.
Usually when I finished something, I’d look at it and frown some more. It’s always a thing I’ve done – I’m way, way, way too self-critical. Everything I do, I think is complete garbage. I learned about halfway through my twenties that no one else seemed to think that, and when I hit the big three-oh, I realized how much time I was wasting with the self-doubt. That didn’t stop me from feeling it though, like a slow, driving, punch in the gut. You know when you watch boxing, and one guy gets a knockout, so they show the punch in super slow motion? The waves that go through the, er, punchee? Ripples that you’d never see if you weren’t watching in super slow-motion?
Yeah, that’s more or less what it’s like when I finish a sculpture and have to look at it before whoever wanted it picks it up. That’s why I tend not to keep a showcase around, if I can help it. But, staring at the Scotty, I knew we’d be good friends for a while. It isn’t every day that someone wakes up in the morning and says to themselves, “holy shit! I need a statue of a Scotty!”
Except, of course, when that’s exactly what happens.
“I’ll give you ten grand for that thing,” a voice from behind me, said. When I didn’t answer immediately, he upped the ante. “Twenty?”
“Huh? Why?” I turned around, stunned and slightly slack-jawed. It wasn’t my most dignified moment, but what the hell? Someone had just offered me twenty-thousand dollars for a foot-and-a-half high statue of a dog. And I’ll be damned if his voice wasn’t every bit as growly as advertised.
Taller than me by at least six inches – check.
Shaggy, dark hair – check.
My heart still bea
ting – check.
It was embarrassingly hard to deal with myself just then. The flush from my stadium fantasy was back, except this time, I was staring at my fantasy. And he was offering me twenty grand for a statue of a damn dog.
“Why?” I croaked. “It’s just a dog.”
He took a step closer, and reached out. I’m pretty sure he was trying to shake my hand, but it turned into more of a “grab her before she hits the deck” sort of handshake. Meaning, not much of a handshake at all. He took my hand and my knees went weak from the heat coming out of his palm.
From the second our skin touched, I knew this wasn’t any regular guy. I’ve met plenty of hot men before, dated a few of them, but this was different somehow. I’m not talking about a “oh and I knew right then he was Mister Right” sort of thing – that’s a load of shit. I’m saying that no person has skin as warm and comforting as his.
With smoothness rivaled only by things in movies from a time when people wore fedoras and didn’t look ridiculous, he held my hand with both of his and let my wobbles even out. He just smiled at me, his mouth quirked up on the left side, a dimple in his cheek prominently on display. His eyes were the color of storm clouds just before rain – dark, silvery hazel – and nothing I could do was going to let me tear my gaze from his.
“What are you, a Dracula or something?” I scoffed, trying to make myself relax with a joke.
“No,” he said with another smile. “Also, wasn’t there just one Dracula?”
Witty, at least a little bit – check.
My heart still mostly beating – check. I think.
“Were you serious?” I croaked again, my throat felt like I’d swapped bodies with a bullfrog.
“About not being Dracula? Yeah,” he said, squeezing my hand a little tighter. That’s when I noticed that one of his hands was on my wrist, and that his grip was making me feel something akin to what Jeanette told me earlier, with the tingling. “I’m absolutely sure I’m not Dracula.”
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