by Reid, Penny
The Neanderthal Box Set
A Workplace Romance, 2020 Revised and Expanded Edition
Penny Reid
www.pennyreid.ninja/newsletter/
Neanderthal Seeks Human
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Epilogue
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, rants, facts, contrivances, and incidents are either the product of the author’s questionable imagination or are used factitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or undead, events, locales is entirely coincidental if not somewhat disturbing/concerning.
Copyright © 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016 by Penny Reid; All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, photographed, instagrammed, tweeted, twittered, twatted, tumbled, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without explicit written permission from the author.
Caped Publishing
Made in the United States of America
Third Edition: March 2013, May 2014; June 2016
ISBN: 978-0-9892810-1-0
eBook Edition
Dedication
To my computer: I couldn’t have written this without you.
To the software developers responsible for spellcheck: You are my everyday heroes.
To Karen: I hope this makes you laugh and makes you proud.
To my readers (all 3 of you): Thank you.
Chapter One
I lost it in the bathroom.
Sitting on the toilet, I started to panic when I noticed the graveyard of empty toilet paper rolls. The brown cylinders had ostensibly been placed vertically to form a half oval on top of the flat shiny surface of the stainless steel toilet paper holder. It was like some sort of miniature-recycled Stonehenge in the women’s bathroom, a monument to the bowel movements of days past.
Actually, it was sometime around 2:30 p.m. when my day exited the realm of country song bad and entered the neighboring territory of Aunt Ethel’s annual Christmas letter bad. Last year Aunt Ethel wrote with steady, stalwart sincerity of Uncle Joe’s gout and her one—no, make that two—car accidents, the new sinkhole in their backyard, their impending eviction from the trailer park, and Cousin Serena’s divorce. To be fair, Cousin Serena got divorced every year, so that didn’t really count toward the calamitous computation of yearly catastrophes.
I sucked in a breath and reached inside the holder; my hand grasped for tissue and found only another empty roll. Leaning down at a remarkably awkward angle, I tried to peer into the depths of the vessel, hoping for another yet unseen roll higher up and within. Much to my despair the holder was empty.
“Shit,” I half whispered, half groaned, and then suddenly laughed at my unanticipated joke. How appropriate given my current predicament. A bitter smile lingered on my lips as I gritted my teeth and the same three words that had been floating through my head all day resurfaced:
Worst. Day. Ever.
It was, no pun intended, an extremely shitty day.
Like all good country songs, it started with a cheatin’ fool. The “cheatee” in the song was obviously none other than me, and the cheater was my longtime boyfriend Jon. Realization of his philandering arrived via an empty condom wrapper tucked in the back pocket of his jeans as I, the dutifully dumb girlfriend, decided to do him a favor by throwing some of his laundry in with mine.
I reflected on the resulting debate after the found condom wrapper was smacked to his forehead by my palm. I couldn’t help but think Jon had a good point: Was I upset with him for having cheated on me, or was I disappointed that he was such a dummy as to put the wrapper in his pocket after taking out the condom? I tried to force myself to think about what I’d said earlier that morning.
“I mean, really, who does that, Jon? Who thinks, I’m going to cheat on my girlfriend, but I’ve got too much of a social conscience to leave my condom wrapper on the floor—heaven forbid I litter.”
I stared at the blue and white Formica door of my stall, tearing my bottom lip through my teeth, contemplating my options, and trying to decide if staying in the stall for the rest of the day was actually feasible. Hell, at this point, staying in the stall for the rest of my life seemed like a pretty good option, particularly since I didn’t really have anywhere to go.
The apartment that Jon and I shared belonged to his parents. I insisted on paying rent, but my paltry $500 contribution plus half of the utilities likely didn’t cover one-sixteenth the cost of the midtown two-bedroom two-bath walk-up.
I think part of me always knew he was a cheater; otherwise, he was too good to be true. He appeared to be all the things I always thought I wanted in a man (and still believed I wanted). Smart, funny, sweet, nice to his family, good looking in an adorkable kind of way. We shared nearly identical political views, ideological views, and values; we were even the same religion.
He put up with my eccentricities and he even said I was cute, whereas weird was the word I was most used to hearing about myself.
He made romantic gestures. He was a wooer in a time when wooing was dead. In college, he wrote me poetry even before we dated. It was good poetry, topical, related to my interests and the current political climate. It gently warmed my heart, but it didn’t make my sensibilities explode; then again, I wasn’t an exploding sensibilities type of girl.
One major difference between us, however, was that he came from money—lots and lots of money. This was a thorn in our relationship from the beginning. I carefully measured each expense and dutifully tallied my monthly budget. He bought whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it.
As much as I loathed admitting it, I suspected that I owed him a lot. I always wondered if he or his dad, who always wanted me to call him Jeff, but whom I always felt more comfortable calling Mr. Holesome, pulled the strings that landed me an interview for my job.
Even after our fight, for it was the closest we’d ever come to a fight, this morning he told me I could stay, that I should stay, that he wanted to work things out. He told me that he wanted to take care of me, that I needed him. I ground my teeth, set my jaw, firmed my resolve.
There was no way I was going to stay with him.
I didn’t care how smart, funny, or accepting he was. It didn’t matter how certain my head had been that his welcoming surrender to my oddities meant that he was the one; or even how nice it was to be out from under the crushing burden of Chicago rent, thus freeing money to spend on my precious Cubs tickets, comic books, and designer shoes. There was absolutely no way I was staying with him.
No way, José.
An uncomfortable heat I’d suppressed all day started to rise into my chest, and my throat tightened. The empty toilet paper roll that broke the camel’s back stared at me from the receptacle. I fought the sudden urge to rip it from the holder and exact my revenge by tear
ing it to shreds. After that, I would turn my attention to the Stonehenge of empties.
I could see it now: the building security team called in to extract me from the fifty-second floor ladies’ room, decimated toilet paper cardboard flesh all around me, my panties still around my ankles as I point accusingly at my coworkers and scream, “Next time replace the roll! Replace the roll!”
I closed my eyes. Scratch that—my ex-coworkers.
The stall door blurred as my eyes filled with tears; at the same time, a shrill laugh tumbled from my lips. I knew I was venturing into unknown, crazy-town territory.
As country songs do, the tragedy of the day unfolded in a careful, steady rhythm as I methodically worked my way through a mental checklist of all that had happened:
No conditioner leading to crazy, puffy, nest-like hair: Check.
Broke heel of new shoes on sewer grate: Check.
Train station closed for unscheduled construction: Check.
Lost contact after being knocked in the shoulder as crowd hustled out of elevator: Check.
Spilled coffee on best, and most favorite, white button-down shirt: Guess I can cross that off my bucket list.
And, finally, called into boss’s office and informed that job had been downsized: Double check.
This was precisely why I hated dwelling on personal problems; this was precisely why avoidance and circumvention of raw thoughts and feelings was so much safer than the alternative. I hadn’t wallowed—really wholeheartedly wallowed—since my mother’s death, and no boy, job, or series of craptacular events could make me do it now. After all, in the course of life, I could deal with this.
Or so I must tell myself.
At first, I tried to blink away the moisture in my eyes; but then I closed them and, for at least the third time that day, I used the coping strategies I learned during my mandatory year of adolescent psychoanalysis.
I visualized myself wrapping up the anger and the hurt and the raw, frayed edges of my sanity in a large, colorful beach towel. I then placed the bundle into a box. I locked the box. I placed the box on the top shelf of my imaginary closet. I turned off the light of my closet. I shut the closet door.
I was going to remove the emotion from the situation without avoiding reality.
After multiple attempts at choking back tears and doing so with a great deal of effort, I finally succeeded in suppressing the threatening despondency, and I opened my eyes. I looked down at myself and pointedly took a survey of my appearance: borrowed pink flip-flops to replace my broken pair of Jimmy Choos; knee-length gray skirt, peppered with stains of coffee; borrowed, too tight, plunging red V-neck to replace my favorite cotton button-down; my raucous, accidental afro.
I pushed my old pair of black-rimmed glasses, replacement for the missing contacts, farther up my nose. I felt calmer and more in control despite my questionable fashion non-choices.
Now, sitting in the stall, the numbness settling over me like a welcome cool abyss, I knew my toilet paper problem was surmountable. I squared my shoulders with firm resolve.
All my other problems, however, would just have to wait. It’s not as if they were going anywhere.
* * *
As I approached my desk—scratch that, my ex-desk—I couldn’t help but wonder at the circle of curious faces that lurked around my cubicle, wide eyes stealing glances in my direction. They hovered at an appropriate blast radius: close enough to watch my shame unfold but far enough to pass for a socially acceptable distance. I wondered what this kind of behavior said about my species. What was the closest equivalent I could draw as a comparison between this action and the lesser species in the animal kingdom?
Was it sharks circling around a hint of blood? I imagined, in this analogy, the sharks would instead be hoping to feast on my drama, my dismay, and my discomfort. I indulged my ethnographic curiosities and studied the hovering group, not really feeling the embarrassment that should have precipitated my exit, but instead observing the observers. I tried to read clues on their faces, wanting to see what they hoped to accomplish or gain.
I was wrapped in my detachment, and I drew it close around me.
I didn’t register the drumming of approaching footsteps behind me, nor did I realize that a hush had fallen over cubicle land until two large fingers gave my shoulder a gentle, but firm, tap. I turned, feeling steady but somewhat dazed, and looked from the hand, now on my elbow, up the strong arm, around the curve of the bulky shoulder, and over the angular jaw and chin, until my eyes met the breath-hijacking sight of Sir Handsome McHotpants’s piercing blue eyes.
I cringed.
Actually, it was more of a wince followed by a cringe. And his name wasn’t Handsome McHotpants. I didn’t know his name, but I recognized him as one of the afternoon security guards for the building—the one that I’d been harmlessly admiring-slash-stalking for the past five weeks.
I had never learned his name because I had a boyfriend, not to mention that McHotpants was about twenty thousand leagues out of my league (at least in the looks department), and, according to my friend Elizabeth, likely gay. Elizabeth had once told me that men who look like McHotpants usually wanted to be with other men who look like McHotpants.
Who could blame them?
More often than I was comfortable admitting, I reflected that he was one of those people who were just decidedly too good looking; his perfection shouldn’t have been possible in nature. It wasn’t that he was a pretty guy; I was certain he would not look better dressed in drag than ninety-nine percent of the women I knew.
Rather, it was that everything about him from his consistently, perfectly tousled light brown hair to his stunningly strong square jaw to his faultless full mouth was overwhelmingly flawless. Looking at him made my chest hurt. Even his movements were gracefully effortless, like someone who was dexterously comfortable with the world and completely secure with his place in it.
He reminded me of a falcon.
I, on the other hand, always hovered in the space between self-consciousness and sterile detachment; my gracefulness was akin to that of an ostrich. When my head wasn’t in the sand, people were looking at me and probably thinking what a strange bird!
I’d never been comfortable with the truly gorgeous members of my species. Therefore, over the course of the last five weeks, I’d been incapable of meeting his gaze, always turning or lowering my head long before I was in any danger of doing so. The thought of it was like looking directly at something painfully bright.
Therefore, I admired him from afar, as though he was a really amazing piece of art such as the kind you only see in photographs or displayed behind glass in museums. My friend Elizabeth and I affectionately referred to him as Handsome McHotpants; more accurately, we knighted him Sir Handsome McHotpants one night after drinking too many mojitos.
Now, looking up into the endless depths of his blue eyes through my black-framed glasses, my own large eyes blinked and the protective cloak of numbness started to slip. A tugging sensation that originated just under my left rib quickly turned into a smoldering heat that radiated to my fingertips then traveled up my throat, into my cheeks, and behind my ears.
Why did it have to be Sir McHotpants? Why couldn’t they have sent Colonel Mustard le Mustache or Lady Jelly O’Belly?
He dropped his hand to his side and then he cleared his throat, removed his gaze from mine, and glanced around the room. I felt my face suddenly flush red, an unusual experience for me, and I dipped my chin to my chest as I mocked myself silently.
I finally felt embarrassment.
I took stock of the day and my reaction to each event.
I knew I needed to work on being engaged in the present without becoming overwhelmed. It occurred to me that I was demonstrating more despair over a stall of empty toilet paper and the presence of a gorgeous male security guard than discovering that my boyfriend had cheated on me, thus leading to my present state of homelessness, not to mention my recent state of unemployment.
Me
anwhile, Sir McHotpants appeared to be as uncomfortable with my surroundings and the situation as I should have been. I could sense his eyes narrowing as they swept over the suspended crowd. He cleared his throat again, this time louder, and suddenly, the room was alive with self-conscious movement and pointedly averted attention.
After one more hawk-like examination of the room, as though satisfied with the effect, he turned his attention back to me. The stunning blue eyes met mine, and his expression seemed to soften; I guessed most likely with pity. This was, to my knowledge, the first time he had ever looked directly at me.
I had watched him every weekday for the last five weeks. He was why I started taking a late lunch, as his shift started at one thirty. He was why I now frequently ate my lunch in the lobby. He was why, at five thirty on days when Elizabeth met me after work, I began loitering in the lobby by the arboretum and fountain; I would peek at him through the squat tree trunks and tropical palms, knowing my friend would not be able to meet me in the lobby any earlier than six o’clock.
McHotpants and I stood for a moment, uneasily, watching each other. My cheeks were still pink from my earlier blush, but I marveled that I was able to hold his gaze without looking away. Maybe it was because I’d already put most of my feelings in an invisible box in an invisible closet in my head. Maybe it was because I realized this was likely the twilight of our time together, the last of my stalkerish moments due to the recent severing of gainful employment. Whatever the reason, I didn’t want to look away.
