Stray

by Natasha Stories

  “Yes,” she said, breathing heavily, with a hand pressed to her chest, her arm nestled between her breasts where I’d like to put my face. “I just didn’t know anyone was there.”

  I passed on reminding her she’d loaned me a room to make my call. Handing her the boxes, I tried on my most charming smile. At least, some women had told me it was charming. Between Ashleigh’s ball-busting, Megan’s inexplicable hatred and whatever it was about me that kept the vet so jumpy, I was beginning to lose confidence.

  “Can I make it up to you? Have dinner with me.”’

  The blush that spread across her cheekbones was lovely, but disappointing. She was going to turn me down again. Damn, what did I have to do to get to spend some time with her? Sure, I’d like to sleep with her, but right now I’d take an hour across a restaurant table, just to get to know her.

  “I, I really don’t think I should,” she said, her head down. Come on, Erin, I thought. Look me in the eye. Throw me a bone, here, I’m dying.

  What I said was, “My timing must suck. Rain check?”

  “Sure,” she said, her voice shaky. I didn’t get it. I really didn’t. Not to brag, but I’m not used to being turned down. She’d been like a cat on hot coals ever since I met her, except when we were discussing the dog or she was treating him. Then she was confident, all business and sexy as hell. Worth the pursuit; I’d just have to step up my game, as soon as I could break up with Ashleigh.

  “Chuck had a request for me,” I mentioned, as if it were just a casual remark.

  “Oh? What was that?”

  “He wanted to know if his kid was giving you a hard time. I told him she was rude and obnoxious and was driving you crazy.” I wanted to get a rise out of her, and it worked like a charm. Her blush was back, her eyes wide and sparkling and her hand flew to her mouth.

  “You didn’t!” she exclaimed.

  “I did.”

  “Oh, my God. What did he say to that? Did it ruin your business?”

  “No, actually he got quite a kick out of it. But he did say he didn’t want to have to cut his trip short. I think he’ll be having a word with her.”

  “Oh, no. That’ll probably make it worse. But thanks for the thought, you meant well.”

  Shit, I just couldn’t win. I might as well go back to the resort, have a nice dinner by myself, and turn in. It appeared I wasn’t getting any action tonight.

  It was just my luck that when I walked into the Eagle’s Nest on the top floor of my hotel I was almost mowed down by Ashleigh and two of her friends. Wonderful, a tag team. I steeled myself for the tirade, but it didn’t happen. I couldn’t believe my ears.

  “Oh, hi, hon,” she purred. “The girls and I were just having an early cocktail. Is this where we’re eating tonight? You’ve been so busy, I feel like we’ve been ships passing in the night.” Ashleigh’s tinkling fake laugh punctuated the cliché.

  “Um, yeah, I was just going to grab a bite,” I offered, not wanting to commit to a dinner date with her. Maybe she hadn’t been back to the suite to find my stuff gone. The last thing I wanted was a scene, especially when I was outnumbered. I wondered if we could ditch the harpy twins, her entourage.

  “Oh, goodie!” Ashleigh gushed. “Just let me see the girls down to the lobby, and then I’ll be right back. Go ahead and get us a table.” Before I could dodge, she planted a wet kiss on my lips and groped my ass, making her friends giggle. There was nothing to do but get the table and wait. Maybe I could pass it off as a misunderstanding when we got back to the suite. I wasn’t sure exactly how I’d do that, but it was my only hope unless I wanted an ugly scene. If nothing else, at least the ugly scene would take place in private.

  Ashleigh disabused me of that notion as soon as she returned to the restaurant. Instead of the giggling, flirty Ashleigh who’d performed the role perfectly in front of her friends, the harridan showed up.

  “Just what are you playing at, Jon?” she hissed, thankfully keeping her voice down so the other diners didn’t notice. “Don’t think you can just move out of our suite into another room and leave me all alone in there! You move back in tonight or I’m telling Daddy how you’re treating me.”

  One more risky action before I was ready—could I do it? Could I actually tell her to get lost and I didn’t care if she told Daddy? What would be the consequence? More immediately, what would be the advantage? True, I was getting tired of her tantrums. On the other hand, I didn’t have anything else going, since the elusive Dr. Timms had shut me down again. What was one more night with Ashleigh? Or two, or three? However long it took to get all of the proxy papers in my hands.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Your bags are gone from the suite. They told me at the front desk that you’d requested another room and your luggage was moved there.”

  “What? No! There must be some mistake.”

  “There certainly is, and you made it. Don’t try to deny it. But I’ll forgive you if you move back to the suite tonight. We’ve hardly spent any time together. I want you to make love to me.”

  A sick feeling in my stomach took my appetite, but I’d dodged the bullet for now. How long I’d be able to keep up the pretense was anyone’s guess. Now I knew how streetwalkers felt, and they had my full sympathy.

  The only way I could think of to perform was to pretend Ashleigh was Erin. Mentally, I apologized to Erin, even though it wouldn’t be the first time. It was a rotten way to treat the vet, whether she knew it or not. However, desperate times call for desperate measures. After dinner, I meekly sent for my bags and followed Ashleigh back to our suite, hating myself with every step.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Another night alone in my apartment, another unfortunate pre-cooked meal, this time a frozen pizza. I bought this stuff for emergency quick dining, and deliberately chose stuff I didn’t like, to force myself to cook. It wasn’t working.

  Neither was trying to forget about Jon. He had me tied in so many knots that I jumped out of my skin every time he spoke to me. And why did he keep trying to get me to go to dinner with him? Wouldn’t that get him in trouble with his girlfriend? After all, this was a small town, even if you counted the resort people and all the guests.

  I had done the right thing in turning him down again, but as I listlessly chewed the cardboard crust of my frozen pizza, I had to wonder if my stomach was going to survive this. After dinner, bored, I decided to call Cassidy to finalize plans for our New Year’s weekend. She had promised to coordinate with the other girls and then act as liaison with me.

  “Cass, hey, it’s me,” I said, as if she would be able to determine who ‘me’ was if she didn’t already recognize my voice.

  “Oh, hey, Erin.” She sounded weird.

  “I called to see if you guys are all set. Do I need to get reservations for you?” I’d love to have them all at my apartment, but it was just a one-bedroom, and five of us would be a bit uncomfortable trying to share the one bathroom.

  “Oh, no, I’ll take care of it. How are you, Erin?” Wait, were we starting the conversation over?

  “I’m fine. So Josie, Tracy and Dani are all set, too? You’re all coming, right?”

  “Um, no, Dani can’t make it.”

  “Oh, darn! Why?”

  “Erin, I haven’t known how to tell you…” The words were bad enough, but the sound of her voice told me to brace for something horrible. My heart froze.

  “Cass, what? Please, tell me Dani’s okay!” I knew I couldn’t take one more blow, not while I was already wondering if I’d made a mistake in coming here. What if Dani needed me, and I wasn’t there?

  “Erin. No, she’s fine.”

  Now I was pissed. “Then what? God, you sounded like she’d died!”

  “She’s getting married.”

  “What!” I squealed. “That’s fantastic! When? Who?”

  “Erin, sit down.”

  “I am sitting. Cass, why are you being so weird?”

  “It’s Greg. I
’m sorry.” For a moment, I thought I’d misheard her. Greg? My Greg? How could that be? Then it all hit me. He wasn’t my Greg any more, hadn’t been for six months. But, Greg and Dani? I couldn’t process it.

  “Erin, are you okay?” I stared at the phone, my mind stunned into an inability to think, or feel. “Erin! Say something. Oh, God, I knew I shouldn’t have told you on the phone. Damn that slut anyway. Erin!”

  I finally found my voice, or a sort of croak that passed for one. “Greg? And Dani? How?” Fortunately, Cass understood, even though I couldn’t form a coherent sentence.

  “Oh, honey, he was cheating with her even before you guys broke up. We didn’t know how to tell you, and then it didn’t seem important any more because you did break up and then you moved away. We had no idea it was serious. I’m so sorry.”

  Sorry? How about fucking two-faced? Dani, one of my best friends, or so I thought, cheating with my boyfriend. And the rest of my so-called friends keeping it from me? Suddenly, white-hot rage swept through me. I didn’t know what to do with it, but I couldn’t talk to Cass any more. I hung up without saying another word.

  Then I looked around wildly for something to throw that wouldn’t break or make a mess. Always controlled, I thought with a bitter laugh. Well, this was an out-of-control situation if there ever was one. Deliberately, I stepped over to my cupboards and opened the doors. The phone was ringing, but I ignored it. Before I threw the first plate, I screamed until my throat was raw, and then I broke every dish I owned, throwing them against the wall with all my might. I only stopped when, between one bowl and the next, I heard a timid knock at my door.

  I took a deep breath and went to the door, hoping I didn’t look like an escaped lunatic. There stood Mrs. Padgett, my sweet landlady, looking frightened out of her wits.

  “Mrs. P!” I said. “Is everything all right? Do you need help?”

  “I was about to ask you the same thing, dear. Did I hear you screaming?”

  Tears started in my eyes as I gestured for her to come in and showed her to a seat. The broken dishes were in full view, the apartment being little more than a studio. She stared at them without comment.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. P. I got some distressing news. I didn’t realize you could hear me.”

  “Distressing? Would you like to talk about it, dear?” No, I really wouldn’t. I wanted to go to bed and stay there for a week, or maybe a month. I wanted to ignore that I now literally didn’t have a pot to piss in. Okay, well, not literally, but I had broken every dish in my cupboard except the bowl that was in my hand when Mrs. P knocked on the door. A sob escaped me though, and suddenly her thin old arms were around me, and she was saying, “There, there, let it out dear.”

  And the floodgates opened. I slumped into her arms and cried all the tears that hadn’t come when Greg and I broke up. Then I cried the tears of anger that Megan elicited, and finally I cried the tears of betrayal that my friends couldn’t tell me my boyfriend was cheating. The low-down, miserable, son-of-a-bitch. Finally, I had no more tears and Mrs. P was soaked to the skin on the shoulder I’d literally cried on.

  “Feel better, dear? Can you tell me what that was all about?”

  I did feel better, strangely enough. And now that I’d accepted the truth and let out my grief, the anger flooded in to replace it. “Yeah, it was about a sorry bastard of an ex-boyfriend and a slut of an ex-girlfriend who’s about to marry him. I just found out all my friends knew they were cheating behind my back before we broke up, and no one had the balls to tell me. Sorry.”

  “Oh, my. Well, I think you have a good reason to be upset, and I’m sorry. Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?”

  I laughed. “That would be great, except I seem to have broken all my cups. Thank you for coming to check on me, Mrs. P, but I think I’d like to be alone. I need to clean up this mess, and then I’m going to bed.”

  “That seems like a very sensible plan, dear. Do let me know if I can do anything for you. You seem like a lovely girl. You deserve a better boy.”

  Girl, boy, how odd. I was pushing thirty. But maybe to Mrs. P that was very young. She had to be seventy if she was a day. I showed her to the door, assuring her that I’d be fine. Sighing, I started the task of picking up the shards of crockery. What I needed was a hot, sweaty, one-night stand. Something to take my mind off the picture of Greg and Dani that was turning my stomach and make me feel alive again. I could have a date with Bob, but what I really wanted was six inches or more of hard dick. I wanted to be fucked hard and left wrung out. And I knew just the man to do it, if only he didn’t have a girlfriend. Jon Miles.

  Maybe they had an open relationship, maybe that’s why he started hanging around me. If I could have just one night with him, would it scratch my itch? Could I forget him after I had him just once? Would he even respond to my advances? I tossed and turned for what seemed like hours when I finally went to bed, finally drifting off with the decision to at least take him up on whatever he next invited me to do.

  ~*~

  The woman staring back at me from the mirror looked closer to forty than thirty. Every minute of my rough night showed in the bags under my eyes, the wan skin and the hair that was in knots from tossing and turning all night. I needed to pull myself together before I went to work, but it was the last thing I wanted to do. If I’d been less conscientious, I would have called Megan to close the clinic so I could take a sick day. But then my superstitious nature kicked in. If I faked being sick, it was sure to turn into a real illness, and then I’d be short a sick day. I dragged my aching body into the shower and went about reconstructing a reasonable facsimile of myself.

  Fat lot of good it did. When I got to the clinic, I was twenty minutes late and Megan was annoyed, as usual. A walk-in had been waiting impatiently for me to take a look at her son’s ball python. Snakes weren’t my least favorite type of patient, but they weren’t my most favorite, either. I motioned the woman back to the examining room reserved for everything except dogs and cats and took the small ball of reptile in both hands.

  “What’s he been doing, or not doing, that has you concerned?” I asked her.

  “Well, actually, I’m not sure it’s sick. But, it keeps crawling into its water bowl, and I came to find out if we should provide it with a bigger one, or maybe put it in an aquarium, you know, with water all over the bottom, and maybe some rocks?”

  Heaven save me from people who don’t know how to use Google. Aloud, I said, “Didn’t the place where you bought it tell you how to care for it?”

  “Well, they said it eats pinkies, and that’s about it. I don’t even know what a pinkie is. My son feeds it baby mice.”

  “A pinkie is a baby mouse,” I said, with as much patience as I could muster. “How often does your son handle the snake?”

  “Oh, as soon as he gets home from school, he gets it out of the cage, and carries it around until dinner. He likes to try to scare his sisters with it, or show it off to the neighborhood boys. He isn’t at all afraid of it,” she added with pride.

  “Well, it’s afraid of him,” I said. Asperity colored my tone as I went on. “I’d suggest you get a book about the care of ball pythons so you won’t forget any of this. Snakes, especially ball pythons, don’t like to be handled. Your son should handle it no more than fifteen minutes at a time, no more than two or three times a week. Crawling into the water dish is its way of showing its stress. Does it have a place in its cage to hide?”

  “No, should it?”

  “Absolutely. It’s going to die if your son keeps handling it like that. Tell him if he wants it to live, don’t handle it for at least three weeks.”

  “Well, what fun is that?” The rest of my patience made a run for it, so I counted to ten before I said something offensive.

  “It isn’t about what’s fun, Mrs., er. It’s about what’s best for the animal. If your son isn’t old enough to understand the difference, I doubt he is old enough to be responsible for an exotic animal. Or any animal.
There is nothing wrong with this snake that proper care won’t fix. Please hand this to Megan on your way out,” I said, giving her a slip of paper with a full office visit charge on it. Mrs. Whatever looked at the number and gasped.

  “But, you didn’t do anything! $60 to tell me the damn snake is stressed?”

  “Did you know he was stressed before?” I asked. My tone was dangerous, but perhaps she didn’t know that.

  “Hmph. Dr. Simmons wouldn’t have charged me this much.”

  “Perhaps not, but he is not here and I am.” I felt sorry for the snake, knowing there was no way the family would ever bring him back here. However, I had no doubt it wouldn’t last long anyway, because the woman didn’t seem all that interested in making her son take proper care of it. In fact, I should probably report the family to the SPCA, but it might not do any good, since the nearest local branch was located in Boulder.