Beware of Doug

by Elaine Fox

  Brady reached the front stoop and took the steps two at a time, not even glancing at Lily’s side of the house. Did he never think of her at all? she wondered. He’d probably decided she was too much work. Too confusing, sending mixed messages all the time. And it was true. She’d sent mixed messages to herself, too.

  She sighed and looked back down at her papers.

  Next to her on the couch, her cell phone rang. She picked it up and looked at it. Gerald. At one time that name on her phone would have made her heart leap. Now it just made her tired.

  She hadn’t heard much from him recently. Maybe he’d picked up on her tone of polite disinterest. Then again, he’d sounded pretty disinterested himself, going on mostly about the work and responding with generic platitudes like “oh really?” and “good for you” to whatever she said about herself or what was going on in her life.

  It seemed that since they hadn’t been able to forge much of a relationship before he left, they weren’t left with much to maintain long-distance. They certainly didn’t have anything to talk about on the phone except their completely disparate and personally unrelated activities.

  Lily picked up the phone and said hello.

  “Hello, Lily, it’s me,” he said, his standard greeting. “How are you?”

  “Fine, just sitting here grading some final exams. How are things in Hawaii?”

  Gerald answered with his standard joke about another day in paradise, and they talked about nothing for several minutes. Since he usually called on the cell phone, she’d had no trouble seeing how far their relationship had dwindled. In the beginning their conversations had lasted half an hour or so. Now they were down to approximately seven minutes.

  Sure enough, before long the conversation ended because of a knock on Gerald’s hotel-room door. But this time, as he’d hung up the phone, promising to call her again soon, Lily could have sworn she heard a woman’s voice in the background saying something that sounded distinctly like was that her? Did you tell—And then the line went dead.

  Lily looked at the phone a second, then put it back on the couch. She stacked her papers on her lap and placed them on the coffee table in front of her. Taking a long sip of her iced tea, she became dimly aware that Doug was barking, shrilly, relentlessly, from some distant part of the yard.

  She got up and went to the kitchen, looking out the back door. He was nowhere to be seen, but she could hear him barking. It was muffled, as if he were caught somewhere and couldn’t get out. She opened the back door and went onto the porch. The barking was coming from the shed.

  But how could he have gotten in there? It was always locked from the outside; in fact it couldn’t be unlocked, as the mechanism was old, and the key only good if you held it all the way to the right as you pulled the door open. The windows were all painted shut, and it was full of Aunt Vivien’s old furniture, packed so tight you could barely get inside.

  She walked down the steps and headed for the shed anyway. Sure enough, the barking got louder.

  “Doug?” she called.

  His barks became more frantic, as if the devil himself had hold of his toe.

  He was definitely inside the shed.

  Lily blew out a breath and checked around the three sides of the shed she could see. The fourth side bordered Nathan’s lawn so she couldn’t see it without climbing the fence. In any case, she could see no holes, no obvious places where Doug could have gotten in.

  “Doug! Stay there, Doug, stay. Good boy! I’ll be right back.” She turned and ran back into the house, grabbed the shed key off the hook near the back door, and returned to the outbuilding. Poking the key in the rusty lock, she cooed to the dog, reassuring him that everything would be fine, she’d have him out in a jiffy.

  Finally, the door opened onto the cool, musty space. Aunt Vivien’s furniture had been in there for years. Lily had been meaning to go through it since she’d moved here, pick out what could be saved and refinished, but she had yet to do it. The more years that passed, the more daunting the task became. With the furniture now covered with dust and spiderwebs, and the occasional dead mouse carcass, she hated even coming into the shed.

  “Doug? Where are you?” She propped the door open with the stone she kept next to it for just that purpose. The light from outside illuminated the broken dining table, the seventies-era sideboard, and an enormous console television. Against one wall was a blanket chest, on top of which was a chest of drawers, on top of which was a mattress from the four-poster bed whose headboard and footboard were leaning up against the back wall. On the left was a wall of boxes and an armoire with a split door blocking the side window.

  The only places Doug could be were underneath the piles of junk and stacked furniture, in some crevice that could not be accessed by a person. Lily got down on her hands and knees, peering into the darkness. She hated to think what else might be in there.

  “Doug!” she called. “Come on, boy. Come here!” Surely he saw the light from the door. “Head for the light, boy!” She laughed.

  Doug whined from the back left corner of the shed.

  “Doug, come on! You got in there, just come out the way you came in.” She patted her hands on the dusty cement flooring. Life with dogs would be so much easier if they just spoke English, she thought.

  Something shifted off to her right, and Doug started barking again. Lily sat up. What could that be? A rat? A human? No, there was no way a human would fit in there.

  “Doug, just come!” she called over his frantically growing barks.

  He must be caught, she thought, trapped behind or under something. She stood up and gingerly put her weight on the console television. From there she crawled back over the sideboard. Beside her, the mattress from the four-poster, which had been canted at an awkward angle, tilted ominously toward her. Lily pushed it until it righted itself against a rafter on the ceiling, then crawled forward again.

  She’d gone only a couple feet when, with a great groaning noise, the mattress slipped onto the sideboard and the chest of drawers crashed down behind it.

  Lily shrieked and thought she was about to be crushed, but the chest forced the mattress onto her back, then caught at an angle on the armoire as it fell, creating a cave under which Lily and the mattress lay, the base of the chest pinning the mattress against her with its weight.

  Doug barked furiously, and Lily yelled back at him to stop. The whole expedition was suddenly intensely irritating. He’d gotten in here, surely he’d have gotten out on his own eventually. Why did she feel like she had to rescue him? Brady was right, she did coddle the dog.

  “Doug, no! Dammit!” With effort, she turned over onto her back and tried to slide herself out from under the mattress, but she couldn’t bend her knees, and there was nothing to grab hold of. She was pinned.

  Good God, she thought after trying to slither like a snake and failing, she was going to die in here. Suffocate under Aunt Vivien’s decaying furniture.

  A few feet to her left, now that she was on her back—the opposite direction from where Doug was—she heard movement, and she let out another involuntary yelp. What the hell was that?

  A second later she heard a larger noise near the door of the shed.

  “Lily?” Brady’s voice.

  She simultaneously breathed a sigh of relief and cringed. Of all the times for him to finally choose to talk to her, he had to find her trapped in the shed, with spiderwebs and dead things no doubt hanging in her hair and squished on her back.

  Not to mention a mattress flattening her to the television set.

  “Under here,” she answered morosely.

  She heard him approach, heard a loud thud—his voice muttered shit—then the door slammed shut.

  She froze. “Oh my God. Brady, you didn’t shut the door, did you?”

  More mutterings could be heard, along with the sounds of someone picking himself up and brushing himself off.

  “Shit,” he said again, low. “No, I didn’t close it. It closed itself afte
r I damn near broke my foot on that rock.”

  “That rock,” she said, closing her eyes, “was keeping the door open. It locks on its own. From the outside.”

  Silence greeted this remark. Then she heard a hand on the door, rattling the catch against the ancient lock with considerable force.

  Silence descended again, and he said, “Well, that sucks.”

  She gave a humorless laugh.

  “Are you stuck?” he asked.

  She leaned her head back and exhaled. “Good guess. Yes, I think I might be.”

  Brady’s hands encircled her ankles, and she jumped. His palms were warm, his grip firm.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I think I can pull you straight out. You’re not actually caught on anything in there, are you?”

  She shifted and groaned as the edge of the mattress settled against one hip. “No, it’s just…this stuff is so heavy.”

  He pulled on her legs, and she slid about four inches before feeling the mattress move a little. He stopped and let go. Immediately, she missed the feel of his hands.

  “Damn, Lily. One false move, and this bureau’s liable to flatten you. Or me.” His footsteps crossed the cement floor from one side of the shed to the other. “Maybe I could get up there and push it back. I don’t know. If I do that, then these boxes will fall over…”

  “I do have this mattress, you know, in case you hadn’t noticed. I can’t imagine getting hurt under here. Just maybe suffocating.”

  “What the hell were you doing out here, anyway?” he asked.

  “It’s Doug. He’s trapped back in the corner. I could hear him barking. And there’s something else, I think. Something on the other side that keeps moving, too. I kind of don’t want to run into that.”

  “Maybe it’s trapped, too. And you’re trapped. And I’m trapped, though less than you and the dog and the mystery beast. So…it’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into.” She heard the smile in his voice.

  “Glad you’re enjoying it.”

  “It’s not often I get to do my Laurel and Hardy imitation.”

  “Is that what that was?”

  “You’re obviously not a fan. You know, I think if I just pull you straight out, fast, then that stuff can fall where it wants. It doesn’t look like it’ll come this way.”

  Lily turned her head. “whatever you think. I just…something’s digging into my side, so let’s do this quick.”

  His hands went round her ankles again; she felt her skin come alive.

  “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  He pulled. Her shirt rode up, her hair covered her face, her back scraped as it crossed from the sideboard to the console television. whatever had dug into her side ran up her rib cage and poked her shoulder, but she felt herself come free from the mattress. As she did, Brady fell backwards, and she landed hard on her butt on the cement floor.

  Behind her something shifted and the sound of falling objects made her lunge forward. Brady grabbed her arm and pulled her up, nearly jerking her shoulder out of its socket. Then she was hit in the back, pushed to her knees, and the mattress and bureau came crashing down behind her.

  Lily was thrown against Brady’s body, and the two of them were pinned against the front wall.

  “Well, that’s better,” Lily said, after a moment.

  Fortunately for Lily, the mattress protected her from the bureau, padding her back, and her legs were under her enough that it hadn’t crunched them. Lily’s chin pressed against Brady’s belly. Just a few inches below her face was his fly.

  She started to laugh. “Are you okay?” she asked. She could feel his belly moving up and down with his breath, so she knew it hadn’t killed him.

  “Yeah.” He groaned and the mattress shifted. “It just knocked the wind out of me a little.”

  She pushed herself to her feet, still pressed up against his body. Every nerve ending was alive with the feeling. She wasn’t sure where to put her hands, finally opting for his rib cage.

  Skin touched skin along their legs as they both wore shorts. Brady had on a freshly laundered tee shirt, and Lily’s cropped top revealed an inch or two of her stomach, along which she could feel the waistband of his shorts.

  Brady moved his hands to her hips. She felt his cheek on her hair.

  “I think I can…” He moved slightly, objects shifted weightily behind them, and her body pressed against his.

  It was dim in the shed. A filthy square window in the door let in a little light, but she couldn’t see his face, could not even move her head in that direction. But that only made the current situation more sensual. They were just bodies, hands, skin, pushed against each other. No eye contact, no reading each other’s expression, no misunderstanding.

  “Maybe that was a bad idea,” he said, low.

  A moment later she felt a hardness grow under his shorts along her abdomen. An answering heat flared within her.

  “Sorry,” he muttered.

  “Quite all right,” she said, her voice coming out higher than usual.

  From outside the front of the shed, Doug barked. Once, twice, then silence. They heard him snorting along the bottom of the shed door.

  “I thought you said he was trapped in here,” Brady said.

  “I thought he was!” She couldn’t believe it. Somehow, he’d gotten out and she and Brady were now…

  If she didn’t know better, she’d think the dog had planned this.

  Brady moved slightly, shifting his hips in an obvious effort to relieve his sudden constriction, and the contact sent heat shimmering up her body. She tried to move her hips in return, to ease his discomfort, but he groaned.

  “Don’t do that, Lily. Please,” he said, laying his head back against the wall behind him. “You’ll only make it worse.”

  Laughter tickled the back of her throat. “Oh I don’t know,” she said lightly. “I’m kind of enjoying it.”

  “You are, huh?” He pressed his hands against her hips in an attempt to move them away from the evidence of his arousal.

  “Yes, I am. You haven’t spoken to me in weeks, and now you have to. So yes, I’m enjoying this.”

  “We might be talking here for the next month if nobody notices we’re missing. I don’t know how we’re going to get out of here if I can’t push this mattress back. But it’s blocked by the junk behind it.” He shifted again. “This is a fire hazard, you do know that.”

  “I thought you said if you pulled me out, the stuff would fall the other way.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s why I’m not an engineer.”

  She laughed.

  “Besides,” he added, “I’m not the one not talking to you. You’re avoiding me. That’s why we haven’t talked.”

  “Brady, we haven’t talked since the night Tricia showed up and I tried to help and you sent me away. In my book, that means the ball was in your court.” She moved her hands a few inches lower, resting them on his hipbones, as he had his resting on hers.

  “Actually, I thought the ball was still in your court from the day you told me not to tell you what you felt. Which, by extension, I took to mean not to tell you how I felt.”

  Lily stilled. “How do you feel?”

  He snickered once. “Now she’d like to know. Maybe I’m not in the mood for saying anymore.”

  She couldn’t help it—she smiled and pressed one hip ever so slightly forward. “Not in the mood, you say?”

  “I think I made clear a long time ago that that operates independently of my mind.”

  Lily paused, considering. Was there any point in avoiding the subject any longer? Maybe it was the darkness that made her so bold, but she steeled herself, and said, “And your heart?”

  She had made up her mind about Gerald. It had been easy since he’d been gone and all she’d been able to think about was Brady. In fact, whenever she talked to her father she had to remind herself to ask about Gerald.

  And Brady hadn’t asked Penelope out, making that situation a little le
ss loaded.

  Could she dare hope there were actual emotions behind his actions? Or was she just a binge in the midst of his date diet?

  “At this moment,” he said slowly, “it seems to have the same sentiments as my heart.”

  Lily stood still, her hands lightly on his rib cage, afraid of breaking the spell of the moment. Had he said what she thought he’d said?

  He began to chuckle. “And if that’s not the most romantic way of saying that, I don’t know what is.”

  She moved her hands to his hips, her fingers tightening. For the moment, she was glad she couldn’t look into his face. It made her braver.

  “Saying what, exactly, Brady?” she asked, her voice soft.

  Her cheek against his chest, she could feel his heart pounding fast. The heat between their bodies seemed to ratchet upward exponentially.

  He blew out a breath of air slowly, carefully. “I’m in love with you, Lily.”

  Lily held her breath.

  “Sorry,” he added, at her silence.

  She tried to move, tried to shift her head so she could look up at him, but she couldn’t.

  “Brady, I—”

  “Hang on a second,” he said. “I’m going to try…” He snaked one hand up between them, then over her head. She felt his chest muscles contract, and with one great push she felt the mattress behind her give way a few inches.

  Beyond that boxes crashed, and with an old-wood creak and the slamming of drawers, the bureau tilted backwards far enough to create about a foot of space between them.

  Lily leaned back and gazed up into Brady’s face, searching his eyes.

  He looked down at her with sadness in his expression, and an almost shy deference to the set of his normally cocky shoulders.

  “I’m sorry,” he continued. “I know all about Gerald and how perfect he is for you, how much your dad likes him, and all that. I know I don’t even have a college education, and I’d look awful in that picture you talked about. I know that you—”

  “Shut up!” she said suddenly, taking his face in her hands. “Brady…I’m in love with you, too.”

  With that she pulled his head toward hers and planted her lips firmly on his.