by Cach, Lisa
What did she care about a gorgeous body?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Really.
Chapter Two
The sound of a car in the driveway made Jack look up from his computer. A glance out the window showed the sunlight slanting in from the west, telling him the day was drawing to a close.
“Shit!” He scrambled off the stool and over to the window, looking for Kelsey. The yard was empty except for the goats, munching on brush. He dashed through the house and out the front door, hoping that it was her car he’d heard, and that he could still catch her.
An older man stood in the driveway, swaying slightly as he held a digital camera at arm’s length and tried to compose his shot. His target was Kelsey, standing stiffly with her arms at her sides, a tight-lipped smile on her face. The middle-aged woman Jack had seen working in the yard was stage directing. “Come on, let me see a big smile,” the woman cajoled. “Let me see that pretty smile!”
Kelsey bared her teeth.
The photographer made a noise under his breath. “A little more relaxed, sweetheart,” the woman said. “You look ready to eat someone. Are you sure you won’t take off your hat and goggles, and let us see your face? Mark will want to see those pretty eyes of yours.”
Kelsey’s smile fell.
The woman sighed and the man took the picture. They looked at results on the camera screen and both shrugged. “At least you look thin,” the woman said. “That’s all men really want to know about a blind date.”
“Hi,” Jack said. All three jumped. Kelsey shrank into herself as he approached, shoulders hunching and neck drawing in like a turtle’s. “I’m Jack Lovgren,” he said, extending his hand to the older woman. The couple introduced themselves while Kelsey edged away.
Bridget leaned close to him and whispered, “She’s very shy.”
Apparently so. Shy girls, however, were easy to win over as long as you weren’t too forward with them. A bit of patience, a few quiet words, and they were yours. Waving a wienie in their faces didn’t help, but still, with gentleness, restraint—
Kelsey turned her head with the smoothness of an automaton and met his eyes. “Your penis scared me,” she said in a flat voice. “I’ll probably have to check under my bed tonight to make sure it’s not going to creep up in the middle of the night and get me.” She grinned, waiting.
Bridget sucked in a breath. Derald’s mouth dropped open.
Jack blinked, confused. “Er, I promise to keep it at home with me. I won’t let it loose again.”
She sidled closer and nudged him with her elbow. “I wouldn’t want to have to tether it like Little Bastard,” she said.
What?
Kelsey giggled. “It wouldn’t like being tied to the hillside and made to eat blackberries. That’s not its natural diet.”
Bridget made a worried sound in her throat. “Kelsey…”
Kelsey suddenly laughed. “And nettles!” She brought the fingers of one hand to a point and made biting motions towards Jack’s face. “Poison oak! It wouldn’t like eating poison oak!”
“Er, no, it wouldn’t,” he said, flinching away from the bites. What the hell was going on here?
Kelsey’s hand froze mid-bite and she stared into his eyes, her own distorted by the tinted goggles. “You don’t think this is funny?”
“Funny?”
“My joke. To lighten the mood.”
Surprise quickly turned to pity, and Jack cringed with embarrassment on her behalf. The poor awkward girl! She was like a nerdy middle school kid trying to be witty, but doomed to failure from the first word out of her mouth. “Oh, yes, I see. Bravo! Very clever!” He tried to sound convincing.
“Oh god…” Kelsey moaned, and smacked herself on the forehead of her Legionnaire’s hat. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” She crossed her arms over her head. “I’m such a dork! I knew I shouldn’t have tried a joke! I knew it!” She shook her head, arms covering her face.
“No, no, it was funny! My penis is like a monster under the bed, yes, I see it! And it’s a mean bastard that must be punished, right? Bad penis! Bad! Bad bastard penis!” He pinched his fingertips together and made biting motions at his crotch.
Kelsey peeked out from under her arm, her mouth pulled down unhappily. “Little Bastard is a goat.”
“Ah! That makes it all much more clear.”
Kelsey groaned, then turned away from them all and ran back to the yard.
“Kelsey?” Bridget called after her, taking a step as if to follow, then hesitating.
“She’s a loon,” Derald said, as if finding proof to what he’d long suspected. “A verifiable loon. I told you we shouldn’t set her up with Mark. The guy deserves a normal girlfriend.”
“She is normal,” Bridget said crossly. “And deserves a good man. I don’t know what got into her.”
“Bridget, she has a penis fixation.”
Jack cleared his throat, feeling bad about Kelsey’s distress. “Er, it’s my penis that’s on her mind. I’ll have to take credit for the fixation.”
Bridget snorted. “That’s rather a high opinion you have of yourself.”
“No! I mean I gave her an eyeful of it earlier today. Apparently it was more than she could handle.”
Bridget scowled at him. “What kind of pervert are you?”
“It was an accident! I opened the curtains and she was right there! I thought she was an angry old Japanese woman!”
“And that’s better?”
He grimaced. “One of those oba-sans would have whacked it with a stick!”
Derald and Bridget frowned at him. “I don’t know what type of kinky sexual practices they get up to in Japan,” Derald said slowly, “but I don’t think you should be springing them on young women you don’t know. All this S&M type talk, it makes me uncomfortable leaving my wife here to work.”
Bridget patted Derald’s arm. “I can take care of myself, darling. I have a fresh pair of pruning shears, and I know how to use them.”
“I’m not going to touch or harm anyone, I swear it!” Jack said.
“I’ll have my eye on you,” Derald said, tapping the corner of the said oculus with a fingertip. “And I’m checking the sex offender website when I get home. I don’t want to find your name on it.”
Jack threw up his hands. He was surrounded by lunatics. “It was a pleasure meeting you,” he said, nodded to them, and went to find Kelsey.
He found her sitting on the slope with a goat in her lap, scratching it behind the ears and murmuring. She glanced up as he approached, then returned her gaze to the top of the goat’s head.
He stopped a safe distance from the goat, visions of cartoon billy goats butting people in the rear springing to mind. He wasn’t exactly afraid of animals, but neither had he been in close proximity to anything other than dogs and cats. The goat was watching him out of a yellow eye with eerie, horizontal pupils.
Eesh. No wonder they were associated with Satan worshippers.
Jack moved his attention from the goat to Kelsey; or rather, to what he could see of her. She was a rangy girl, all long limbs and hard angles. There were no soft curves that he could see. She had a square, dirty jaw and pale, chapped lips, and the end of her nose looked unremarkable except for a smear of white zinc oxide. Her hat and goggles would be perfect for a bank robber.
As she whispered unintelligible words to the goat, he belatedly recalled what his coworker had said when recommending Kelsey Safire as a landscaper: “She’s a bit unusual in her methods and comes across as an organic nutcase, but if you want high-quality unique work, I can’t say enough about her. Just don’t expect a crew of twenty to come in with gas powered machinery and transform your yard inside a week. Be patient with her. She’s worth it.”
He’d thought it an odd recommendation at the time, but it made much more sense now.
“Kelsey,” he said.
She continued scratching the goat.
“Kelsey?”
Her gaze flicked up
in acknowledgement, before returning to the goat.
“I’m sorry we got off to such a bad start. How about we forget any of it ever happened and start over?”
She nodded, the motion barely perceptible.
“Great! Hello! You must be Kelsey Safire, the landscaper I’ve heard so much about. I’m Jack Lovgren, and am thoroughly delighted to make your acquaintance.” He stuck out his hand, low enough that she could see it over the goat’s head.
He waited, hand hovering, until finally she put her gloved hand in his and they shook. A smile curled gently along her chapped lips, and she peeked up at him.
He released her hand and squatted down on his haunches. He nodded at the goat. “Does it bite?”
“It depends.”
“On what?” he asked.
“Whether she wants to.”
“How do I know?”
“She tells you,” Kelsey said. “You just have to know how to read her.”
“I think that’s true for people, too,” he said softly.
He was rewarded by her wide-open eyes meeting his. What color were they? He suddenly wished he could see. “Can you take those goggles off?”
She shook her head. “I can’t see without them. They’re prescription.”
“Ah.” He could think of no plausible reason to insist. “So, what’s the story on the goats?” he asked, rising. “Are they yours?”
She eased the goat off her lap and stood. “Yes, although I think of them as coworkers.”
He laughed. “I sometimes think of my coworkers as goats.”
She didn’t laugh, blinking at him instead as if wondering why he’d taken a cheap shot at his coworkers. “Goats are easy and organic, and they clear the land without destroying it,” she said. “They’re like machines for turning weeds into fertilizer. And you can milk them.”
He looked at the goat standing nearby, its two teats distended and smudged with manure, and decided not to touch that topic. “You don’t use poisons on the blackberries?”
“Don’t need to.”
Which reminded him. “How are you going to kill those snails in the bucket? Drown them?”
“Oh, no. Come see.” She led him down to the bucket and pried off the lid. Inside, at least a hundred of the slimy buggers, large and small, slid over each other and the greenery tossed in with them. It looked like a snail orgy.
“You’re not going to set them free, are you?” he asked, repulsed.
“No. I’m going to eat them!”
His gorge rose. “Not really?”
“Oh yes. These here are Helix aspersa, which is not your tastiest snail, but they’re still quite edible, especially if you use a lot of herbs and butter.”
Jack swallowed back his nausea. “Why eat them? Why not just kill them?”
She smiled, revealing perfect white teeth. “Because it satisfies my desire for revenge. Eat my garden, and I’ll eat you.”
“Oh.”
“Garden snails aren’t native to the region, you know. They’re only here because someone back in the 1800s introduced them, assuming people would pay heaps for the delicacy. But they didn’t.” She snapped the lid back on the bucket. “They’re a lot of work to prepare: you have to get the slime off, and that means soaking them in salt water which makes for a big vat of mucous-y froth. Clams are far easier, so when people here want chewy mollusks, that’s where they go.”
“I guess so,” he murmured, feeling faint. At least the topic had made her come out of her shell, so to speak. She was positively animated on the subject of snail consumption.
“When I cook my next batch, do you want to try them? I mean, these are technically your snails. I suppose I should have asked if I could have them.”
“No, no, you go right ahead. Take all you want. I’m not much of a gourmet.”
“I saw that.”
“Huh?”
“I saw you eating cereal out of the box.”
Jack shifted, uncomfortable with the thought of being watched all day like a fish in a bowl. “It was convenient.”
“Can’t you cook?”
He couldn’t resist playing with her. “Sure I can. I know how to reheat Chinese take-out.” Actually, he could do more than that, or at least he used to be able to, before he got so busy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d made a full meal for himself.
She shook her head, obviously pained.
“I’m not home enough to cook much, or make it worthwhile to stock a pantry,” he temporized.
She tilted her head to the side, looking at him. “If you’re not home much, why do you want the garden?”
“Because I don’t find it relaxing to look out the windows at a bunch of blackberries. I want order at home. Peace.”
She nodded. “A refuge.”
“Yes! I want to sit and look at the garden, and let the rest of the world disappear. I want it to quiet the mind, like those Japanese temple gardens are supposed to.”
“I think you must have a lot of static in your head.”
He laughed. “I could wish for something as innocuous as static. It’s more like a thousand voices reminding me of everything I need to get done.”
“If a quiet mind is what you want, you’ll have your own part to play in this garden.”
She sounded as certain as a Zen monk and he found himself hanging on her words, awaiting her wisdom. “How so?”
She picked up her bucket of snails and started to walk away. “Step one: Turn off your phone.”
“Sorry, can’t do that.”
She shrugged, but didn’t turn.
He watched her go, a half smile on his face. She was a strange one, all right: all oversensitive shyness on the surface, and unfiltered, babbling honesty underneath. She was, of course, a social train wreck. Her physical appearance was no help, either: she was as androgynous as a stick, and with less sex appeal. Heaven help the guy Bridget and Derald were setting up with her.
He went back into the house and, with the lights off, watched as Kelsey gathered her flock of goats and herded them down to her truck. In the low slanting light of late afternoon there was something timeless about her movements, and about the animals surrounding her with the yellow light limning their forms. For a moment, the rest of the world disappeared.
Then his phone rang.
Chapter Three
“Whatcha doing?” Holly asked, coming into Kelsey’s room.
Kelsey glared at the contents of her closet. “Looking for something decent to wear. All I see are jeans, T-shirts, and a few ugly old dresses I’ve only worn to funerals.”
“Wait a minute! Let me catch my breath here.” Holly fanned herself. “Are you telling me that you might, possibly, perhaps be interested in buying new clothes?”
“I don’t know. If I have to. I guess.”
“Hallelujah! My prayers have been answered!” Holly dropped to her knees and clasped her hands together, her glossy dark brown hair and perfect oval face making her look like a Madonna. “Thank you, Lord. Oh, thank you.”
“It’s not that exciting,” Kelsey grumbled. Holly was two years older than her and had long felt it her duty to bring her gangly younger sister into the heavenly light that was Fashion. She sold luxury cars for a living, but even her hardest sell couldn’t get Kelsey into a dressing room.
“What’s brought you to this revelation?” Holly asked, getting to her feet and moving past Kelsey to dig in the closet. The sisters lived together in the bungalow they’d bought three years earlier with a small inheritance from their grandparents. A third girl, Holly’s friend Erica, rented a room in the attic.
“I knew you’d ask me that.”
Holly’s turquoise green eyes met Kelsey’s own, the remarkable color the only obvious similarity between them. “A man.”
Kelsey scowled.
“It is! It’s a man! Who is he? Where did you meet him? He asked you out? Of course he asked you out, you’re looking for something to wear!”
“No, no one’s aske
d me out. And I haven’t met him yet. I’m getting set up on a blind date,” Kelsey said, which was not a lie in fact but was a lie in her heart. It was Jack she’d been thinking of while going through her closet, not Mark; Jack, whose face she could now clearly picture, his lean, narrow features stalking her like a wolf in her imagination. She wasn’t a fool: She knew she’d made a bad impression with her penis-under-the-bed joke and blathering about snails. She knew she hadn’t a hope in the world with Jack Lovgren, and she wasn’t sure she wanted one, either. She just had a crush on him, and it was a delicious, private passion that could only be nurtured in solitude.
“So what’s the story?” Holly asked. “Are you going out, or not?”
“Bridget is trying to set me up with a guy who teaches biology.”
“Wow! That actually sounds promising.”
“It does, doesn’t it?” Kelsey rattled off the rest of Bridget’s specs on Mark.
“He sounds perfect for you. Cooking, botany, board games… I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
Kelsey shrugged. “If we ever meet.” She explained about the photo.
“Pish. Don’t worry about that. If anything, you were smart to keep the hat and goggles on. Can you imagine what your hair must have looked like? And those goggles leave a big red dent on your face when you take them off. I don’t know why you can’t just wear your contacts and sunglasses.”
“The sunglasses might fall off.”
“Newsflash, sweetie. You put them back on.” Holly shut the door to the closet. “There’s no point looking through that. C’mon, we’re going shopping!”
“Right now?” Kelsey cried, as Holly grabbed her arm and dragged her from the room. “Isn’t it too late?”
“The Internet is always open!”
Three hours and a quart of ice cream later, Kelsey’s wardrobe hadn’t grown by so much as a stocking. “We must have looked at five hundred dresses,” Holly complained, her eyes bloodshot and her mouse hand cradled against her belly with a pack of ice, suffering from carpal tunnel. “How can you think they’re all horrible? How?”
