Days Like This

by Laurie Breton

  “Well then, babydoll, we’ll just have to fake it.”

  Beneath her cheek, his heart beat steady and strong. “But we don’t need to fake it. You see, whenever you take me in your arms, I automatically hear music playing.”

  “Wow, that’s good, Fiore. Really, really good. Slick.”

  She tilted her head and looked up at him. “You think? I sort of thought it was.”

  “You should try setting it to music.” Still holding her, he leaned back and reached out a hand to flip a switch on the stereo, and Smokey Robinson’s sweet falsetto filled the room. Ooh, Baby, Baby.

  “Ah. That’s so much better.”

  “Of course it’s better, woman. The man is a god.”

  She tightened her arms around him as they swayed to the music. “No matter what terrible things people might say about you,” she told him with exaggerated sweetness, “nobody will ever be able to accuse you of having bad taste in music.”

  “I think there’s a backhanded compliment in there somewhere.” Without warning, he dipped her so low she nearly touched the floor. She let out a little shriek and clutched a fistful of his shirt. She was giggling when he smoothly pulled her back upright. “You might want to pipe down,” he said, “or we’ll have Leroy up here, sniffing around to make sure there isn’t an intruder in the house.”

  “Leroy’s tucked away all safe in his crate, so there’s no danger of that.”

  “What a relief. He’d definitely put a damper on my plans for the afternoon.”

  Smokey stopped warbling, and Aretha took over, saying a little prayer. He spun her away from him and then back into his arms. “You know,” she said, “this whole overprotective shtick is pretty normal. It’s a guy thing. You should have seen the fit my brother pitched when we told him we were getting married.”

  “I figured something like that went down. You and Travis went into a huddle in the kitchen and stayed there for quite some time. Of course, you have to cut him some slack. We came at him out of left field. He didn’t even know we were together until we showed up at his door, with you wearing a rock the size of Texas on your left-hand ring finger.”

  “It’s a family tradition. Trav always disapproves of my choices when it comes to men. It took him years to forgive me for marrying Danny. How dare I marry yet another rocker? So while you were in the living room making polite chit-chat with Leslie, Travis dragged me off to the kitchen and proceeded to express serious doubts about your suitability as husband material. He simply didn’t believe you had it in you to settle down and go the long haul with just one woman. He made a point of reminding me about your dismal track record, including, but not limited to, all those years you spent as a manwhore.”

  “That is not a real word. You just made it up.”

  “Au contraire, my friend. And if the shoe fits, does it really matter?”

  “Moving right along, I imagine you set him straight.”

  “Oh, I set him straight, all right. I told him that: A) You were thirty-five years old and you’d finally pulled your head out of your ass and grown up, and I wasn’t even remotely concerned about you going astray.”

  “Nice, Fiore. Very complimentary picture you painted of me. I can’t wait to hear B.”

  “Ah, yes. B. I furthermore told him you’d known me long enough and well enough to understand that if I ever did catch you dipping it someplace where it didn’t belong, I’d amputate first and ask questions second.”

  “You’ve turned really bloodthirsty in your old age. Is this supposed to serve as some kind of warning to me?”

  “Stay in line, MacKenzie, and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

  “I’m shaking in my shoes.”

  “You’re not wearing shoes.”

  “Smart-ass.” He dipped her again, and again she let out a startled yelp. “You just don’t learn, do you?” he said cheerfully. “I swear, if this keeps up, we’ll have the cops knocking on the door, telling us to keep it down because the neighbors are complaining about the noise.”

  “We don’t have any neighbors. And payback is going to be such fun.”

  “Bring it, baby. I have broad shoulders. So?”

  “So. Since his first volley fell short of its target, he tried a different tack. He put on this somber, mournful face, and told me he was afraid that someday, I was going to regret settling.”

  “Settling?”

  “Yes. That’s the exact word he used. He said I was too young, at thirty-three, to trap myself in a loveless marriage with an old friend just because we were both alone and looking for companionship.”

  “He did not say that.”

  “Oh, he said it. And he was dead serious.”

  She could feel the laughter rumbling up inside his chest before it spilled out, starting as a choked snort and ending in a deep belly laugh. He had the most amazing laugh. “Oh, man,” he said, wiping a tear from his eye, “where does he come up with this stuff?”

  “I have no idea. It seems he thought I was recruiting a shuffleboard partner for my sunset years.”

  He snorted again, made a choked sound in the back of his throat. “What did you tell him?”

  “Oh, you know,” she said offhandedly, as he spun her away and then back again, “I told him you were hung like a racehorse and we were spending all our spare time having screaming sex in every room of the house, and if he didn’t believe me, he was welcome to drop by and check it out for himself.”

  He froze for a split second before the anticipated explosion came. “Jesus H. Christ, Fiore! Don’t do that to me!”

  And she grinned. “Had you there for a minute, didn’t I?”

  “Who the hell are you, and what have you done with my baby?”

  “It’s all your fault. You’ve been a very naughty influence on me, MacKenzie. And I did warn you about payback.”

  “You only had me for about half a second. Damn, woman. That mouth on you is unbelievable. Now that you’ve taken ten years off my life, what did you really tell him?”

  Etta James replaced Aretha, telling her unfaithful lover that she’d rather go blind than watch him walk away. Casey closed her eyes and pressed her cheek to his chest, and while they swayed in time to the steamy blues ballad, she said, “After I stopped laughing hysterically, I told him he was way out in left field and couldn’t be more wrong. I said we’d been crazy about each other for years—”

  “Emphasis on the plural?”

  “Emphasis on the plural, just in case there was any possibility he might miss the point. And that we’d finally decided to stop screwing around and do something about it before we both got so old that neither one of us could remember how to insert tab A into slot B. Or why we’d even want to.”

  “You said that to your brother? Those exact words?”

  She looked up at him and batted her lashes demurely. “I did.”

  “Oh, man, I can just picture his face. You’re thirty-five years old and you’ve been married twice, and Trav’s still in denial about the fact that you gave up your virginity a long time ago. I bet that shut him up.”

  “Let me put it this way: That was a year and a half ago, and he’s never said another word to me about it.”

  He let out a soft, breathy laugh and rested his cheek atop her head, and for a time there was just the two of them and the music, weaving its magic spell in and around and through them. “If this song got any hotter,” she said, “I think we’d both go up in flames.”

  “Congratulations, Fiore. You just figured out the method to my madness. I know you. I know the blues works on you the way booze does on most women. Gets you all hot and loose and slutty.”

  “Slutty?”

  “You know what would make this whole scenario even more fun?”

  “I suppose if anybody knows slutty, it would be you. And the very thought of asking makes me feel faint.”

  “It would be even more fun if we ditched all the clothes.”

  “And danced naked?”

  “That would
be the idea.”

  “Do you have a clue how quickly things would deteriorate if we did that, MacKenzie?”

  “I suppose that would depend on your definition of deteriorate. Maybe we should just skip the dancing and get right down to business.”

  In response, she wound her ankle around his and ran the sole of her bare foot across worn denim, up the calf of his leg and back down again. “I’d like to revisit that slutty thing. I could use a little clarification.”

  “If you’re in the mood for show-and-tell,” he said, running his hands down her backside until they reached her thighs, “I’d be happy to give you a little demonstration. That might clarify things for you.”

  “Give me some time to think about it.”

  “Time’s up.” Without any effort, he boosted her up into his arms. She tightened her arms around his neck, locked her legs around his waist, found his mouth with hers and kissed him, slow and hot and sexy, in rhythm with the music, until they both ran out of breath and were in danger of passing out unless they took in some oxygen. Lungs afire, she pressed her face to his shoulder and listened to his attempt to regulate his own breathing. Etta was still singing and, locked together like a single unit, they were still moving in slo-mo to that hot, seductive rhythm. Casey tangled both fists in his hair, kissed his neck, and took a hard little bite of his earlobe.

  And said, “I vote for show-and-tell. Dancing is so overrated.”

  Rob

  They’d been playing together for a year when, out of the blue, Trav’s kid sister, who had this idea in her head that she wanted to be a songwriter, sent her brother a cassette tape of songs she’d written. Casey Bradley was just out of high school, barely eighteen years old, living on the family farm in a one-stoplight town somewhere in the wilds of western Maine, and she was a month away from tying the knot with some guy she’d grown up with. She had a strong, clear singing voice that sounded a little like Carly Simon, and the songs were pretty good. A little too pop-ish for Rob’s taste, but Danny had gone gaga over them, and being Danny, he’d badgered the living shit out of Travis to take him up there to talk to the kid about using her material.

  Trav had finally caved, and the two of them had driven the Chevy to Maine to talk to his kid sister. Danny had, of course, steamrolled right over her. What eighteen-year-old girl could say no to that face? There’d been just one snag. The girl couldn’t read music. She’d been doing it all by ear. Because there was only one person they knew who was any good at transcription, Travis and Danny had dragged her back to Boston with them, to Rob, with this half-assed notion that the girl could play the songs that were inside her head, and he could transcribe them onto paper.

  He’d taken one look at Trav’s kid sister and thought, whoa. She was gorgeous. A little bit of a thing, with big green eyes and long, black hair that fell all the way to her waist. But her beauty wasn’t all of it; there were any number of gorgeous girls out there. This girl really had something special. She wasn’t like the chippies who hung around the stage on a Friday night while he was packing away his equipment, girls with short skirts and low-cut shirts and too much lipstick, girls who made it clear they were available if he was interested. It hadn’t taken him any time at all to learn that if you put a guy up on stage and stuck an electric guitar in his hands, even if he couldn’t play for shit, even if he looked like Godzilla, he’d have no shortage of girls ready and willing to spread their legs for him.

  Casey Bradley wasn’t that kind of girl. There was a purity about her, an innocence that shone like a beacon in the night. She was cool and self-assured and smart, with just enough naïveté to sweeten the package. She was, quite simply, a nice girl. A girl who was yet another victim of the infamous Fiore charm.

  Rob tried to be philosophical about it. There was no way in hell a girl like that would look twice at a guy like him, not with Danny Fiore in the picture. The very idea was laughable, and the chemistry she had with Fiore was so palpable it was scary. Three days after she arrived in Boston, Travis phoned him around nine-thirty in the morning, dragging him out of bed, and barked, “Is my sister there?”

  Rob yawned and raked the fingers of one hand through his tangled mop of hair. “She’s not here,” he said. “She left around midnight, with Danny.”

  “Well, she’s not here, either. Her bed hasn’t been slept in.”

  “Maybe she went home.”

  “She didn’t go home. Her stuff’s still here.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t worry. If she’s with Danny, I’m sure she’s fine.”

  “What the hell would she be doing with Danny?”

  “Jesus Christ, Trav, what do you think they’re doing? I highly doubt they’re playing pinochle.”

  There was absolute silence at the other end of the phone. And then Travis said, “If you’re implying what I think you are—”

  He rolled his eyes. “Have you seen the way she looks at him?”

  “My sister’s not that kind of girl. She’s engaged, for Christ’s sake! Besides, I warned her to stay away from him. I told her what kind of guy he is.” Travis went silent for a few seconds. “You don’t really think—oh, man, he wouldn’t dare. Would he? I swear to God, if that son of a bitch so much as lays a finger on her, I’ll cut off his gonads and cram ‘em down his throat!”

  This probably wasn’t the time to divulge to Travis what Casey had confessed to him the night before, that she’d thought she wanted to marry the fiancé back home, until she met Danny Fiore. She’d asked Rob for advice, and he’d told her to follow her heart. In Rob MacKenzie’s book, that was always the best policy. Keep a cool head, and make your choices in life based on what you really wanted, not on what other people thought was best for you. It was the way he lived his life, and he believed it would be a much happier world if everybody followed that philosophy.

  So he and Trav wandered over to Avery Street and banged on the door of Danny’s crappy room, but the only answer they got was from the guy across the hall, who cracked open his door, glared at them, and said, “Nobody’s home. Some people work at night, you know. Get lost!”

  By this time, Travis was a wreck. “Should I call the cops?” he said.

  “And tell them what? That your sister, who’s a grown woman, seems to have taken off with your buddy without telling you? Sure. I think that’s a great idea. Let’s go find a pay phone right now.”

  “Fuck you, MacKenzie.”

  He patted Trav’s shoulder and said, “They’ll show up, sooner or later.”

  And they did. Eighteen hours later, the two of them were sitting in a huddle on the front stoop of Trav’s Joy Street apartment building when they saw Danny’s Chevy chugging up the hill. In classic Boston driver style, Danny nosed the Bel Air to the curb in a spot that would have nicely fit a Volkswagen Beetle, leaving the ass end hanging out into the narrow street. Danny stepped out of the car, drew Casey out the driver’s door behind him, and closed the door. Then he backed her up against the car and laid one on her, right there in front of her brother and anybody else who happened to be looking. She took his face between her hands and they proceeded to steam up Beacon Hill like it had never been steamed before.

  Travis started to rise to his feet, and in the hopes of preventing a homicide, Rob grabbed his arm and yanked him back down onto the stoop. Then, as casually as though they’d just come back from a five-minute trip to the corner store, the two lovebirds strolled hand-in-hand to the front stoop where Rob and Travis were sitting.

  This time, he couldn’t hold Travis back. On his feet with both fists clenched, Trav said to Danny, “You are a dead man.”

  And Casey said quietly, “Trav.”

  “Shut up,” her brother said without looking at her. “I’m not talking to you. I’ll deal with you later. After I clean up the street with this motherf—”

  More forcefully this time, she said, “Travis!”

  Her brother’s head turned in her direction, and he scowled. “What?”

  And she and Danny held aloft
their left hands, sporting shiny new matching gold wedding bands.

  Casey

  The curtain fluttered at the window, nudged by the same air that cooled the sweat from their skin. She lay on one hip, drowsy and sated, her head on his shoulder, an arm wrapped around him, their legs tangled like limp strands of spaghetti. From her vantage point, she had an up-close-and-personal view of the entire lean length of him. He had a beautiful body. Beautiful was probably a silly word to describe a man, but it was the only word that fit. Rob MacKenzie was built for speed. Slender, but nicely put together, with broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and that sexy triangle of hair, shades darker than the hair on his head, that marched from breastbone to pelvis. A hard, flat belly, and muscles in all the right places.

  Farther south, he was generously endowed, those slender hips of his born to fit between a woman’s thighs. His long legs were lanky but strong, knees and ankles still bony, no matter how much he’d filled out over the years. And there was something about his feet, those exquisitely sculpted feet, that always made her mouth go dry.

  If anybody had told her, seventeen years ago, that one day they’d wind up here, she wouldn’t have believed them. Not that she hadn’t loved him right from the beginning, but she’d loved him in a sweet, best-friends kind of way. She’d certainly never thought of him as husband material. Not back then. At twenty, Rob had been gaunt, scrawny, all knees and elbows, still growing into his feet. Cute as a button, with those green eyes and that glorious mass of golden curls he hardly ever remembered to comb, but he’d possessed a fashion sense that was nothing less than abysmal. Although he was always immaculately clean—and smelled heavenly—he dressed as though he’d picked his clothes, blindfolded, from a Goodwill box.

  In spite of his fashion sense, or lack thereof, he’d been smart. Scary smart. When they first started working together, she hadn’t even known how to read music. She’d been pulling the notes out of her head with the help of a pitch-perfect ear, her mother’s antique concert Steinway, and a portable cassette recorder. He’d been the one to teach her. Pretty much everything she knew about music, Rob MacKenzie had taught her, so long ago that the two of them had been little more than the amorphous, embryonic beginnings of the people they would eventually become.