Stranger

by Megan Hart

  “Yeah. But you have to admit, they tied it all up at the end. You knew that some of them were going to die, but did you think it was going to be that first dude?”

  I hadn’t. That had been a surprise, killing off the character that had been set up to seem like the hero. “That was good, you’re right.”

  With half an hour between each showing we had plenty of time to talk about the film, and we did. Sam might have watched parts of it from behind the shield of his hand, but he hadn’t missed anything important.

  “But did you like it?” I asked again as the lights went down for the start of the next feature. “I don’t want you to sit through something you hate.”

  Sam reached for my hand again. “These movies scare the crap out of me, but I like hanging out with you.”

  It didn’t seem as if we’d spent close to eight hours in the theater, but the empty popcorn and cups proved we had. So did my aching bladder, which protested the abuse of being made to contain so much liquid. The ladies’ room, typically, was full and it took awhile for me to get out.

  By the time I did, Sam had gone outside to wait.

  He smiled as soon as he saw me. “Hey. Thought maybe you’d drowned.”

  “Long lines.” We’d entered the theater in the light, but it seemed somehow fitting after a day of scares to exit in darkness.

  He turned to me. “So.”

  “So.” I cocked my head to look at him.

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “I did.” We started walking toward my car, and this time I couldn’t have said who was leading and who following. “How about you?”

  “Stellar.” Sam took a deep breath and looked up at the night sky. “I’m going to have to sleep with the light on, but it was great. Thanks for asking me.”

  “The look on your face when that guy jumped out of the closet with the meat hook was worth it.”

  Sam palmed his face. Below his hand I caught a glimpse of another of his lovely smiles.

  “Man. You must think I’m some kind of dork.”

  “No. It was sort of cute.” I didn’t tell him how much I’d liked the fact he could discuss the movies with me, unpeel them like layers. He’d picked out visual effects I’d have missed. He had a good eye for detail.

  He moved a little closer. “Great. Cute. That’s like saying I have a good personality.”

  I had to laugh. “Well, you have that, too.”

  Sam groaned. “Grrrrrrreat.”

  I laughed harder as we walked toward Betty. “This is me.”

  “This is your car?” Sam ran a hand over Betty’s hood.

  I unlocked the door. “Yep.”

  Shaking his head, Sam laughed and pointed a few spaces down. “That’s mine.”

  I stared. He stared. His car was a Camaro, too. His was in much better shape.

  He’d taken up my hand before I could pull away.

  “Fate,” Sam murmured. “Or luck. Whatever.”

  I let him move closer to me. Heat from his body surrounded me, though I hadn’t been cold. He didn’t touch me with his hands, but the caress from his gaze was enough to make me swallow hard against a dry throat.

  “Do you want to go someplace?”

  “Oh, yes,” I said. “Definitely.”

  He took me to the Pancake Palace.

  It wasn’t exactly what I’d had in mind, but what do you say to a man when you think he’s taking you to a by-the-hour motel and instead he leads the way to an all-night breakfast joint?

  “I’ll have coffee.”

  The waitress smiled at us both as Sam ordered their huge breakfast platter, “minus the pig.”

  Then he sat back in the garish orange booth and smiled at me. I ordered chocolate-chip French toast and a side of hash browns.

  “And some more coffee,” Sam said. “Keep it coming. We’ll be here for a while.”

  “Will we?” I asked when the waitress left the table.

  He nodded and stripped the paper from a straw. He twirled it into a knot and offered me one side. “Pull.”

  I pulled. He got the knot.

  “Someone’s thinking about me,” he said, and tossed the paper to the side. “Is it you?”

  “I’m sitting with you, Sam, I guess I might be.”

  “Something good, or something bad?”

  I laughed. “You know what? I honestly don’t know.”

  We talked about the movies until the waitress brought us steaming platters of food and set them down, refilled our mugs and asked us if we wanted anything else. Sam hadn’t looked away from me. Not once.

  “We’re good,” he said. “For now.”

  I picked up my fork and stabbed into the stack of French toast. I felt him staring, but concentrated on cutting my food. When I looked up, he was still looking.

  “Aren’t we?” he asked.

  I didn’t know the answer to that, either. I chewed a bite of syrup-soaked bread while I thought. Then I drank some coffee. Sam had dug into his own breakfast, chewing and swallowing and not pressuring me to reply.

  When my phone began to sing to me from my purse, Sam stopped with a fork halfway to his mouth. “‘Don’t Fear the Reaper’?”

  I pulled out my cell and gave him a smile. “I got tired of Deep Purple.”

  Sam put a hand over his heart and pretended he was staggering back in his seat while I answered. It was the answering service, of course, and I took down the number in the small notepad I carried with me for just that reason. Sam watched me write. I clicked my pen as I hung up.

  “Are you always on call?” he asked.

  “Mostly, yes. I have an intern, Jared, but…” I shrugged.

  Sam studied me. “He’s not good?”

  “Oh, he’s great. Really good. I just like making sure, you know…things are…done.” I faltered uncharacteristically, I thought.

  “Do you have to go?” he asked.

  “I might. I have to answer this call first. Maybe not.”

  He nodded. I dialed and spoke to a weary-voiced man whose father-in-law had passed away in a nursing home. We made arrangements to meet the next morning, and I called the nursing home to schedule the pickup of the body. I ate in between phone calls and drank as much coffee as the waitress brought.

  “You’re never going to be able to sleep tonight,” Sam commented when I finally finished all my calls.

  I looked at my watch. “By the time I get home, I’ll be fine.”

  Sam had finished his breakfast and settled back with his mug. “I’m impressed.”

  “By my caffeine intake?” I stirred sugar into another mug and lifted it to sip.

  “No. By the way you talked to those people. You’re good at what you do, Grace.”

  “Thanks, Sam. Thank you.”

  “I mean it.”

  Later, when we walked to our nearly identical cars sitting side by side in the parking lot, I’d stopped expecting a kiss. Of course, that was when he decided to swoop in for one, but instead of putting his lips to mine, Sam kissed my cheek.

  I put a hand over the spot where his lips had left their heat when he pulled away. “What was that for?”

  “I didn’t want you to think I didn’t like you.” Sam winked.

  I unlocked my door and opened it, but stared right at him when I said, “Do you?”

  Sam had put enough distance between us to make asking the question easier, but I’d have asked it even if he’d been close enough to touch. I was out of practice at having to guess a man’s intentions.

  Sam opened his car door and tossed his keys in his palm before curling his fingers over them. “Yep.”

  Nothing more. I waited, then shook my head and got behind the wheel. I watched him pull away and waved when he waved. By the time I got to the highway, I’d decided not to stress about it. My phone hummed “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and I answered it.

  “A lot,” Sam said.

  And though he hung up immediately after that, the call so brief I might have imagined it, I smil
ed all the way home.

  I’d expected the world to end when my dad opened my files and discovered my personal expenses were going to pay for my sexcapades, but so far I hadn’t heard a peep. The problem was, I had severe laptop withdrawal and needed my personal computer back from my dad. With my desktop acting up, that became my first priority. After my morning appointments I spent an hour and a half trying to get my iMac up and running again without interruption from him, from Shelly, who was unusually silent, or from Jared, who was downstairs avoiding us both.

  Fortunately, despite the problems, my Mac was a workhorse that didn’t lose any data, and once I’d figured out exactly how to go through and repair my disc permissions and a whole bunch of stuff I had no clue about, the computer powered up again without an issue. I backed up all my data onto disc, just in case, and pushed my chair back from my desk feeling like nothing short of a genius.

  Sam hadn’t called me in three days, but I wasn’t surprised. That seemed to be his M.O.

  Each day that passed without hearing his voice reminded me all the more of the reasons I didn’t want to deal with dating. He liked me, he didn’t. I liked him, I didn’t. I was plucking an entire field of mental daisies and coming up with no good answer.

  When at last he called, it was again on my cell and not the office phone. I knew it was him before I answered. Who else would call my cell during business hours?

  “How are you?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, Sam. How are you?” I heard the rush of liquid and his swallow, and I thought of watching the smooth skin of his throat work.

  “Good, good. Great, actually. I got a pretty permanent gig at the Firehouse. It won’t affect my teaching, either.”

  He’d said it as if I should know what he was talking about. “Teaching?”

  “Yeah. I got a job at Martin’s Music. I didn’t tell you? I’m giving guitar and piano lessons.

  Oh. And selling cellos and violins to elementary-school students on commission. I don’t suppose you’ve ever yearned to play the cello?”

  “I can’t say that I have, no.” Through my office door I caught a glimpse of Shelly and Jared talking. He leaned close, his hand on the wall by her head. Interesting.

  “Too bad. I could get you a good deal. But what do you say? Come see me play. We can have a few drinks. Hang out. Then if we both want to have some mind-blowing sex, we can talk about it.”

  “On your cowboy sheets? So sexy,” I told him.

  There is a frisson, a tension, when men and women talk about sex. Face-to-face it can be too much. Ridiculous, even. But over the phone, with nothing but the sound of each other’s voices and imagination, the ridiculous seems practical.

  “Of course not. We’d have to go to your place. I can’t bring you back to my mom’s.”

  “I don’t bring men to my place.”

  “Well, that would cause a problem then.” Sam chuckled. “I do notice, though, that you didn’t tell me mind-blowing sex was completely out of the question.”

  No matter how many times you eat, your body still eventually hungers. Fucking is the same way. No matter how many times you come, eventually you want to do it again.

  “I didn’t want to deflate your…ego.”

  Sam guffawed. “Okay. I get it. You have a boyfriend? Bring him along.”

  Again, he’d twisted me into surprise. “What?”

  “Bring him. I don’t care.”

  I had no idea how to respond to this. Had I been reading him wrong? Frustration whirled its gears in my gut and I tapped the top of my desk with my pen. “You don’t care if I have a boyfriend?”

  “Nope.” I could hear the grin in his voice and could imagine it all too well.

  “So if I showed up with a boyfriend, that wouldn’t bother you at all.”

  “Not a bit.”

  Why not? I wanted to ask, but bit back the question. “It might bother the boyfriend, don’t you think?”

  “Somehow I doubt that if you had a boyfriend, you’d tell him that you wanted to have mind-blowing sex with me.”

  I snorted. “Wouldn’t want you getting another beating, would we?”

  “Cold, Grace. So cold. Does that mean you’re coming?” He sounded immensely pleased with himself.

  “Maybe.”

  He laughed. “I’ll see you there.”

  I disconnected and stared at my phone for a minute. I plucked a few more imaginary daisies before I started printing out my business register. I didn’t exactly want to face my dad, but I wanted my computer. Being able to watch TV from bed while I instant messaged and surfed the Net had become too convenient.

  I called my parents’ house, only to have my mother tell me my dad wasn’t there. He’d gone fishing, of all things.

  “Dad? Fishing?”

  “Him and Stan Leary. Stan’s got a boat.” My mom said this as if it was no big deal, but in all the time I’d known my dad, which was my entire life, I couldn’t recall him ever going fishing.

  Or doing much of anything besides work, as a matter of fact.

  “When will he be back?”

  My mom had no idea, but she didn’t seem to care that I’d be stopping by to exchange my printout for my laptop. I told Shelly where I’d be and made sure my phone was on, and hopped into the Frawley and Sons van. It took only ten minutes from the time I hung up with my mom until I was pulling into her driveway, but though I called out as I entered the kitchen, nobody answered me. “Mom?”

  Nothing. I looked down the back hall, in her bedroom and the small spare bedroom where the kids stayed when they slept over. Both empty. I opened the door to the finished basement but heard nothing from down there, either.

  Finally I found her in the backyard, sitting in a lounge chair with a glass of tea in her hand.

  Melanie sprawled on a fashion-doll towel and colored in a book with the same theme. Simon pushed a dump truck back and forth in the grass and made revving noises. When he saw me, he leaped up with joy and threw his arms around my waist, squeezing.

  “Hey, monkeybutt.”

  “Auntie Grace! What did you bring me?”

  “Nothing,” I told him. “Do I always have to bring you something?”

  Simon seemed to ponder this. “I like it better when you do.”

  “I bet. Hey, Mom.” I held up my sheaf of clipped papers. “Where should I put these?”

  “Oh. I guess on your dad’s desk. I don’t know what he’s going to want to do with them.”

  Simon had gone back to his truck.

  “Where’s Hannah?”

  My mom shrugged. “I guess she had an appointment or something.”

  “Nanny’s gonna let me watch Frankie’s Teddy, ” said Simon, like we shared a secret.

  “Again?” I gave my mom a look, and she laughed and shrugged. “So, Dad’s fishing, huh?”

  My mom nodded. “Yes, he is.”

  “Wow.” I snagged a handful of graham-cracker bears from the bowl next to my niece.

  My mom laughed. “Honey, I told your dad if he didn’t find himself a hobby, I was going to make him go back to work.”

  My dad had always worked a lot. Nights, weekends. We’d learned not to hold dinner, or wait to blow out the birthday candles or open the gifts. My dad had always been there when we needed him, but he hadn’t been there for much else.

  “I thought you’d like him being home more.” I crunched the head off a teddy.

  My mom gave me a look. “We’re talking about your dad, Grace. He wants to reorganize my cabinets or give me hints on my knitting. I love your dad dearly, but sometimes it’s easier to appreciate someone when they’re not breathing down your neck all the time.”

  I laughed. “Right. I get it. Well, have fun. I have to get back.”

  I kissed my nephew, niece and mom, and went into the house to drop off the papers. My dad’s office was the house’s third bedroom, slightly larger than the spare room but not by much.

  It was the one room in the house my mother didn’t touch,
and not because she didn’t want to. My dad had banned her from it, and it showed.

  It looked as if someone had set loose a Tasmanian devil inside the room. Bookshelves lining one wall held hard-cover texts on military history and other nonfiction subjects in which I had zero interest, while others showcased half-finished models of Civil War soldiers and weapons. The desk, a simple plank of wood laid across two saw-horses, disappeared beneath the weight of dozens of newspapers and magazines, everything from the New York Times to People.

  Since his “retirement” my dad had taken up reading in a big way. I shifted a handful of paper to clear a space and put down my printout, then started looking for my computer. It wasn’t on the desk, but since it was only a twelve-inch, it wasn’t large enough to stand out amongst the chaos.

  It wasn’t on the desk, or on the armchair in the corner beneath a reading lamp. It wasn’t on the sideboard that was also covered with a mass of slippery, shifting papers that fell onto the floor when I tried to lift them. I looked around the room and could find no evidence of my little laptop anywhere.

  Dammit.

  I didn’t have time to go searching for it, either, because my phone rang, with Shelly telling me there’d been a death call and I needed to retrieve a body. I didn’t recognize the name of the family. I told Shelly to have Jared finish up whatever he was doing and meet me in the parking lot in ten minutes.

  She squeaked at that.

  “Is there a problem with that, Shelly?”

  “No, it’s just…I mean…”

  At this rate, I’d be there before she got up the nerve to speak to him. “Just intercom the prep room and tell him to come up, Shelly. You’ve done it a thousand times.”

  She squeaked again. By this time I’d pulled out onto the street and was only a few minutes from the funeral home.

  “Shelly! C’mon! Tell him to get out here. We’ve got a call!”

  And wouldn’t you know it, she stuttered with me, too, making me feel bad. “Can’t you call his cell?”

  I turned on the side street and pulled into the semi-circle driveway beneath the portico.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’m here.”

  “He’s not talking to me,” she whispered, suddenly fierce. “He’s ignoring me. He’s really mad, Grace.”