by Lynn Red
Morales’s eyebrows drew upward, wrinkling his forehead as they did. “You’re a goddamn basket case,” he said with a smirk and then turned back to Bruckner. “So, how much did you say you’d sell this place for?”
“Hell, son,” Bruckner said. “I just want out from under it. I ain’t been able to work in a half-dozen years, and I ain’t gonna be any time soon. Call it fifty grand? Everything included?”
“Fifty grand minus the cost of the hydraulics to fix the lift?” Blake asked, from out of nowhere.
Morales looked over at Blake as the love-sick bear was speaking. He nodded with the question. “Sounds fair,” he added. “Though I didn’t know you were an unconscious real estate tycoon.”
Bruckner let out a long sigh. “Yeah, I figured you was gonna ask for that. It’ll cost about ten grand to fix it, but—”
“We’ll take the place for forty-five,” Blake said. Morales was just shooting his eyes back and forth between the two of them. He said nothing, though.
“But you said minus the cost of—”
“Forty-five,” Blake repeated. “We’re already getting a good deal at fifty. I don’t feel right ripping people off.”
“Huh,” Bruckner grunted, and wiped his head with the hand towel again. He stuck out his hand, and they all three shook. “I didn’t think there was many like you two. I guess I learn somethin’ new every day. I’ll send the paper work and then... oh, what the hell,” he said as he fished the keys out of his coveralls. “What are you gonna do, steal it? Feel free to start setting up.”
With another round of handshakes, the old guy shuffled out of the bay door, his shoulders visibly held higher than they had been when he walked in. Morales clapped his pal on the shoulder. “Well, there we go, bought a place. And a hell of a price, too.”
When Blake didn’t respond, Morales turned him around to look him in the face. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” Blake said as a smile crept across his face. “But I think you just might’ve been right. God... Yeah, I think you might be right. I’m a crazy idiot, aren’t I?”
“You’re no idiot,” Morales said. “But crazy?” he shrugged with a grin, and kicked the oily rag off the floor straight at Blake’s head. It hit with a soft thud and oozed down his head.
Morales let out a boom of laughter. “I really, really, really didn’t expect you to just take that in the face. I’m sorry!”
But Blake was a thousand miles away. He shrugged. “I just can’t get mad,” he said. “No matter how hard I try, I just...” he shook his head and smiled as he sighed. “You owe me some Lava soap though.”
*
Lexie was just about to pull her hair out by the roots.
“No, no, no! I can’t do another damn DVD. No one bought the last one and it took me three months of editing and whining at my ex-boyfriend to help me fix the cameras and get it all done. And trust me, Het, getting him to have sex for more than ten minutes was like pulling teeth. Can you imagine making him fix cameras?”
Hettie Angelo, Lexie’s agent-cum-personal life coach, snorted a laugh. “I know, I know. But you don’t have to deal with his whining and shockingly low sexual prowess. Right? I mean, Mike’s ass is long gone.”
“He was a wolf,” Lexie said as she stuck the cap of her pen in her mouth and rolled it between her teeth. “Not an ass. I mean he was an ass too, but—”
“Right, shifter joke, I got it thanks.” Het laughed again. “All I’m saying is that the DVDs aren’t for sales. They’re for keeping people who sign up for your various crowd-funding things happy. And you’re an internet celebrity, you know, so people expect you to keep them smiling. Or you’ll end up like that Swedish YouTube guy and just scream at video games for twelve year olds for the rest of your life.”
An audible shudder coursed through Lexie’s body. “Don’t even. Just don’t even.” She was silent for a long moment. “Okay fine, how long does it have to be?”
“I just had a thought. Why not just put together a few videos and record some new segues between them? You don’t have to make a bunch more art projects or anything... maybe just a couple as special features or something. Put some little short, personal videos in between the ones you’ve already got, and bingo-bango.”
“Right, Tony Soprano, bingo-bango.”
“That was Bada-Bing,” Het said. “And that was his strip joint.”
“How could I forget? Oh wait, no, I didn’t. I was just making fun of you for talking like... you know what, never mind.” Lexie laughed. “I can’t possibly beat you in a pop-culture verbal joust.”
“Nor can you beat me at ruthlessly efficient multitasking and interview scheduling. Speaking of that—”
“Jesus, no. I’m not doing it. I’m never going on The Today Show again. Matt Lauer totally looked down my dress.”
“Okay, first of all, no he didn’t. Second of all,” Het took a deep breath and let it out in a long, trailing sigh. “These interviews are good for you. You don’t leave your house, Lexie! You’re a hermit with a million people watching you, and reading your words, and hanging on your newsletters. You need to get out some! And if I can’t force you to go out for drinks, I can at least schedule interviews.” Almost as an afterthought, she added, “It’s a spot on The Daily Show in three weeks and they want you to talk about internet perverts sending you weird dick pics. Also that new host is really hot.”
Lexie snorted, hard. “Okay,” she said. “Okay that sounds awesome. Let’s do more of that and less of the boring where I have to give a fifteen minute lecture on how to be an internet celebrity. You do that, and I’ll do whatever the hell you want me to do.”
“Even leave your house more than once a week?”
“No more Today Show, no more hermit. I swear. I’ll go out and get shit-faced at least once a week. Deal?”
“That sounds,” Het said with a pensive twist to her voice, “like I’m encouraging you to go out and join a fraternity.” She made a short humming sound. “Actually if you did that, and then got all the frat guys to do little cute artsy-craftsy bullshit, can you imagine the amount of ad revenue we could garner? Hell we could probably get Keystone Beer to sponsor the—”
“Oh-kay,” Lexie cut in, dragging the word out. “I realize that I don’t have, like, a tremendous amount of artistic integrity or anything—you’re talking to the girl who did a short series on how to turn fish into beer coozies—but that is a little outside the pale.”
“Right, right, fine, no sponsored frat-house arts. But you’ll do the DVD? And you’ll do the interview, right? They gave me like thirty minutes to call back and I knew you’d want to do that one.”
“Oh shit! I have to go, I gotta get ready for a—a thing.”
“Wait, what? You have to answer me about the interview, I—wait, did you just say you have to get ready for something? Oh my God girl, don’t tell me you have a date? I mean please do, but... it’s a date, isn’t it? I bet it’s with a big, sexy bear, huh? The kind that heats your underpants up like you sat on a hot pad.”
“It’s a da—wait a second,” Lexie said, having a thought. “You didn’t have anything to do with this, did you?”
Hettie let out a slow laugh that would have set anyone else’s curiosity to a peak. Lexie, however, had her mind on other things. Other, bigger, better things, and so she just sailed right past the hitch in her friend’s voice. “No, of course not,” Het said. “How could I have had anything at all to do with you getting a date with a giant soldier bear?”
“Yeah, true,” Lexie said, once again ignoring a hint that was so bald-faced it walked straight past being a hint and right into being a statement of fact. Still, she had bears on the brain. “Okay well goodbye then, I gotta get ready for... uh, you know, that.”
To the plaintive sounds of Hettie pleading for an answer about The Daily Show, Lexie thoughtlessly hung up her phone and stared into the mirror. As she watched her own eyes, she realized what she’d done. She grabbed the phone she’d tos
sed onto her bed and hastily texted FUCK YES DAILY SHOW back to Het before setting to work.
Het sent her back an LOL a few seconds later, but by then, Lexie was fully absorbed in what she was doing in the mirror. Her makeup was laid out in front of her in a fan of mascaras, lipsticks, bases and blushes, but as she stared at the array, she got a little bit of a knot in her stomach and realized that she’d never told her mystery date where the hell she lived.
And then she realized that she couldn’t remember if he’d even said he’d pick her up. And then, a thousand different doubts and fears gripped her to the core. Her nose twitched as she watched her own eyes grow as big around as saucers. “You know what?” she asked her reflection. “Why the hell am I so nervous? I’m not actually a shut in.”
Regardless, she saw the screen on her phone light up, and snatched it off the bed before it even managed to ring. “I didn’t tell you where I lived, did I?”
“Holy... that was fast.” It was the growly, sexy, belly-rumbling voice from before, only this time he was laughing. “Actually I was going to tell you that I’m gonna be a little late because I—”
“Late? No, that’s not good. House is twelve-eighteen Cline,” she said. “Why do you need to be late?”
“Well I had a run-in with a dirty rag and—”
“I’m not wearing any makeup,” she said quickly. “And apparently I’m main lining some kind of stimulant because I can’t stop talking even though you just said something about a dirty rag and... oh my, yeah I should take a breath.”
Blake was quiet for a moment, though Lexie heard him exhale. It sounded like he was laughing, but she couldn’t be sure because the phone reception wasn’t all that good, and anyway, she was hyperventilating. “Why am I hyper,” she took a breath, “ventilating? I’ve never...”
“Never?” he asked with a twist in his voice. “Never once? I really hate to think that I did this to you.”
She felt her heart slow and her breathing come under something resembling control. “No,” she said. “No, I mean, yeah you did, sort of but then you got me over it. I’m gonna be real honest with you – I have no idea what the hell’s going on with my brain.”
“Well,” Blake said, “tell you what. I can come over and you can tell me all about it, and then after that we can either go out on this date, or we can sit around your place and watch Star Trek reruns. I really don’t care, I’m just interested in getting to know someone who didn’t used to be my commanding officer. Deal?”
The way he talked, the smoothness in his voice and the ease with which he carried his words and his attitude instantly relaxed Lexie even further. Which, let’s be honest, isn’t an easy thing to do. “I have no idea what you just did to me,” she said, “but I don’t think I’ve felt this calm since I accidentally took two Xanax when I meant to take one.”
“I really hope I made you drool a little out the corner of your mouth.”
The laugh bursting out of Lexie’s mouth was loud, booming, and more than anything it was honest. “Oh my God,” she stammered, laughing so hard her cheeks hurt and her eyes seemed to bulge a little in the sockets. “You just turned me purple, I think. I am drooling, but not because my jaw is slack. I can’t stop laughing, I can’t make myself quit sputtering and...”
“I can’t wait to see you,” Blake said. The gravelly heat in his voice almost instantly put a stop to the laughing, but not in a frightening way. No, it was more of a warmth that crept up Lexie’s back, following the tendrils of nerves out to her fingers and up the back of her neck. She shivered slightly.
“You... can’t?” she asked, finally.
“I’ve been imagining you for the last day and a half. I keep hearing the way you laughed on the phone and how you described your awesomeness. And I’m not being sarcastic, either. After the past few years...well, let’s just say I’ve waited for this a long, long time.”
After a moment’s silence, “oh” escaped Lexie’s pursed lips. “I... I don’t know if anyone’s ever made me feel quite like this without ever even seeing me. You... haven’t, have you? Seen me, I mean?”
He made a short humming sound. “Nope, not that I can think of. I didn’t recognize your name or anything when Eve called me to tell me.”
“Wait, really?” she was caught somewhere between exaltation and horror. Someone who didn’t know who she was? It’s a little arrogant, sure, but in her defense, Lexie Headly was basically a household name in the shifter community. Ever since her first video about not understanding how the hell to make her handprint look like a turkey went viral, she hadn’t had a trip to the market without someone recognizing her.
“You’re being serious,” she said, almost pensively.
“Yeah,” he said. “Should I know you? Remember, I’ve been in the desert for like five and a half years, so I haven’t exactly been attached to pop culture in any meaningful way since the early 2000s.”
“No,” she said, “it’s just... you know what?” A sudden rush of relief flooded Lexie’s brain. She didn’t have to play any parts; she didn’t have to play up the snark and sarcasm to please an audience. She could just be Lexie. “Forget I said anything. I just did some internet videos and people seem to know me.”
A whole life explained away with eleven words, she thought. That’s it, and... somehow I don’t care. Five years of building a reach and social media presence, and all it’s done is made me a nervous wreck. And... somehow I love that he never heard of me.
Outside, cars were passing. She could tell by the headlights coming through the bay window in her living room that she could see down the short hall from her bedroom. It dawned on her in that moment, exactly how she felt about the whole thing.
“You okay?” he finally asked, and when he did, Lexie realized she’d been quiet for a lot longer than she meant. “You thinking about something?”
“Nah, nothing,” she said, smiling to herself. “Okay so you got my address, when you coming?”
“Promise you don’t think I’m creepy?” he asked softly. “I might have gotten here while we were talking and then just sat outside.” Then, as though to explain why he was not, in fact, creepy, Blake continued. “We bought a garage today. Place to repair cars and all that. It wasn’t far away. And I promise, it was just a coincidence that I called you when I was three or four blocks away.” An easy laugh came next.
He’s good at that, Lexie thought. Really, really good at it. A trill of excitement slid down her back, making all sorts of parts of her sing in anticipation; in fact, it made parts of her start reacting that she didn’t remember acting up in a long time. She let out a soft giggle, more out of not knowing what else to do.
“No, no,” she finally said. “That’s kinda cute actually. Well, I guess... come on in!”
He hung up without saying anything further, an act that seemed to Lexie to be really, really hot. She couldn’t explain why, but there was something about the soft, silent self-assuredness that this guy—Blake—showed, that sent an electric charge up her back. “Cute,” she said a second later, to herself, in her empty room, “doesn’t begin to explain it. Oh goddamnit, I forgot my makeup.”
A thudding knock at the door meant there wasn’t any damn time to worry about painting herself. “Oh well,” she said with a little smirk at her own reflection. “Guess he made my choice for me. Guess if he’s not the kinda guy that can take me without a coat of fresh paint then he’s not the sorta guy I care about being around anyway, right?”
She turned to answer the door, but a momentary lapse of confidence seized her. With one last glimpse in the mirror, she gave herself a quick coat of lip gloss. What the hell? She thought. If he ends up kissing me, it may as well taste good.
5
“Come in!” Lexie shouted, trying to keep herself from getting any more nervous than she already was.
Blake gripped the door handle and tried to pull, but was met with a thunk of metal on wood. “Oh sorry,” she said, laughing. He was chuckling too. “First time
I ever remember to lock the damn thing when I’m home is immediately followed by the first time I tell someone to let themselves—”
The instant she turned the deadbolt and opened the door, Lexie Headly was, for possibly the first time in her life, rendered absolutely helpless and frozen in place.
“Hi,” the bear soldier said softly. His deep blue eyes twinkling, his cheekbones achingly cut, and his jaw almost unbelievable hard, he stared down at Lexie—he was a head taller or so—and smiled in a way that made her question her own sanity in one moment and made her want to rip her clothes off the next. “Nice to meet you, I’m—”
When she reached out to take his hand, the bear went speechless. He stared at her, mouth slightly agape, as though he was about to speak and then stopped himself short. “You,” he said finally, “you’re exactly like I imagined.”
The glasses slid slightly down Lexie’s nose, and she went to push them up with her other hand, but found him already doing it for her. “Oh,” she said. “Thanks.”
“Sorry,” he smiled in a way that could disarm a crazed yak. “Like I said, I’ve been in the desert for longer than I care to think about. My manners are a little sketchy these days.”
As he spoke, Lexie noticed that the big bear’s jaws moved softly, almost gently. For some reason, it made her wonder what his hands were like aside from shaking them, and what it would be like if he kissed her. He must’ve noticed the way she was watching him, because Blake smiled just a little, that easy, beautiful, undeniably sexy smile that Lexie thought she’d never seen anything quite like.
“Are you, er, ready to go?” she asked. She couldn’t take her eyes off him, and the fact that he couldn’t take his off her just made the whole thing both better and a thousand times more terrifying.
“Actually,” he said, “I kinda was serious about the sitting around and watching Star Trek thing. And now that I actually see you? Now that I’ve got your hand in mine,” he looked down and then lifted her hand to his lips, kissing the back like some gentleman from a Jane Austen novel. “I think I’m more serious than I thought I was.”
