Biting Oz: Biting Love, Book 5

by Mary Hughes

  Glynn had kissed me, and I had responded to every big, dark, dangerous bit, lust igniting my very cells. I’d never known anything like it. Granted, I hadn’t experienced a lot because the store kept me sixty-hour busy, but I wondered if anything could have prepared me for the instant union I felt with him.

  Glynn had kissed me. Was that normal, a guy going straight from “hi how are you” to locking lips? And then seem almost angry that he’d done it?

  Glynn had kissed me. Why me, why not Rocky, who was a hundred and ten pounds of hot? Or one of the other pit or adult cast members? Hell, why not the flamboyant Director Dumbass, who was cute in a driven, psychotic sort of way?

  A pounding came from below. My dad, hitting the ceiling with a broomstick. “Get to sleep! Work tomorrow.”

  I sighed. What Pop lacked in subtlety, he made up for in volume.

  But in this case, he was right. Worrying over Glynn’s inexplicable behavior wouldn’t make it into sense. The only way to deal was Business Truth #7, courtesy of Queen Elizabeth I. “Never decide today what you can put off until tomorrow.” It would either disappear or grow until the solution was obvious.

  Tomorrow I’d work hard in the store, forget about Glynn kissed me—forget about all tonight’s crazy—by reminding myself where my duty really was. My parents, the store, my dreams.

  Chapter Three

  My alarm went off at five. I’d dreamed about Glynn kissing me and woke sweet and heavy and even more determined to lose the events of last night in my work.

  Showered and dressed, I staggered downstairs at five twenty into the familial abode—not thinking about Glynn. The Wurstspeicher Haus didn’t open until eight, but I had tons to do before then. A big store has accountants and salespeople and a purchasing department and the IT guy. A small store still has to pay taxes and deal with customers and buy product and fix the things that buzz and blink. We had Mom and Pop to do all that—and me.

  No lights, so I followed the lifeline scent of freshly brewed coffee and stumbled into the kitchen, then poured by feel alone. It was dark because Mom and Pop left for work before dawn. The kitchen smelled of bacon and eggs and buttered toast.

  Mom’s opera music was blaring. L’Orfeo by Monteverdi, early music to start the day. She’d save Stravinsky for evening.

  Not thinking about sweet, hot kisses, I grabbed a bagel, hoisted my coffee and hit the stairs down. I shivered, not lust, just simple chill. May mornings were still on the cool side and the stairwell was unheated. I gulped hot coffee as I trotted downstairs and through the door.

  The office area was warmer. Our building was a storefront, literally. The store was the front half. The back was originally my grandparents’ flat, converted into offices and storage after Grandma and Grandpa Stieg went to the Happy Sausage Shop in the sky.

  The stairwell opened into the dining room, now a general work area. To the right was the kitchen, now storage. Straight ahead were two bedrooms, Mom and Pop’s offices. Left was the store.

  Time to forget Glynn and kisses, which I had not been thinking about anyway. I squared shoulders and headed left to work and duty.

  My father looked up from his paperwork as I stumbled by. His face gleamed round and ruddy in the glow of his accountant’s lamp. “Junior, gut. Help me carry in the wurst.” Gut meant good. Wurst was what we called sausage. He heaved to his feet, which made him maybe an inch taller. At five-six, not only his face resembled a cookie elf.

  “Where’s Mom?” Or actually I said “Wo ist Mutti?”, as he and I spoke German at home (I knew a bit of Italian too, courtesy of Mom). I took a quick bite of bagel, set it and my coffee on his scarred desk and trailed him to the kitchen.

  “Your mother is on the phone with suppliers. They are asking why we need so much blutwurst.”

  “Because people are buying it?” I snorted. “Why Mom? The only German she speaks is the stuff she learned to sing.”

  “She has decided it’s time to get more fluent. She says to me, ‘Gunter, I wish to learn, to be better’. Your mother is a strong woman, Junior. You could do worse than to be like her.”

  “Yes, Pop.” We’d had this conversation before. The problem was I was like her, too much. To me, learning meant not making the same mistakes she had. Time to change the subject. “It’s going to be a warm day. That’s going to stress the coolers in the store.”

  “Ach, those coolers are practically brand-new.” He jerked the dolly into place and we hoisted boxes of product onto it. “Younger than me.”

  “Pop, they’re fifty years old. The warranty expired before I was born. They clank like Marley’s ghost. If we could just get one new cooler with the fund—”

  “That cash is for emergencies.” His tone said end of conversation.

  Well, wonderful. Hold off thoughts of Glynn and kisses with the distraction of work? Silence to fret in was so helpful.

  But work in silence we did. Pop threw heavy boxes on the stack like they were Styrofoam. He was strong enough to have loaded alone—for all his diminutive size, he was built like a mule. But I always helped, and not just because of duty. Pop made me, to “build up my strength”. He was big into the Protestant work ethic—but secretly I think he still wanted me to be a son.

  Nixie Emerson has this thing about names having power. Her parents christened her Dietlinde in a subtle attempt to mold sassy-punker her into a normal German.

  My dad naming me Gunter, nickname Junior? Not nearly so subtle.

  One of the reasons I grew my hair down to my ass. Before I got the breasts, it was the only way people remembered I wasn’t a boy.

  In silence, we rolled product into the store, like Glynn’s lips rolling over mine… Time to talk again. “So, um, Pop. Any problems with the shipment?”

  “The usual tampering with the boxes. Mustaches drawn on the Usinger elf. ‘This side up’ pointing down. These Käsegecken. So petty.” My father sniffed.

  The Käsegecken were the Cheese Dudes, our next-door neighbors. Lately they’d taken to stealing or defacing our shipments if we didn’t cart them inside right away. Sometimes they’d even go through our personal mail. I knew that because Lady Liberty stamps don’t generally sport beards. Messing with US mail is a federal offense, but magic markers aren’t exactly uncommon. And the Dudes managed to stick the mail back in our box within a day, so we couldn’t prove it wasn’t just slow delivery.

  Never mind that the MC post office was so punctual they had a “thirty minutes or it’s free” policy—and a record better than Ritsa’s pizza delivery.

  I said, “I still don’t get why they hate us. Selling Limburger and Brie right next to our bratwurst and kielbasa. You’d think that’d be a perfect pairing. Cheese and sausage, right?”

  “They are jealous. Ours is the better location. The larger store.”

  “But why the vandalism? There’s more, Pop.”

  “Sure, they accuse us of being old fashioned fuddy-duddies, of scaring away their customers. How silly is that? They, who are the newfangled flash-in-the-pans, are scaring off ours. When you walk into a tourist shop, you expect a cheery little tinkle-bell, ja?”

  I had to admit their deathmetal recording screaming “Cheese, Marvelous Cheese” certainly changed the ambience of the area. But all I said was, “Their Web site is pretty kickass.”

  “Watch your mouth.”

  And that killed the conversation again. Not because I’d said “ass”. Because I’d used the W-word, Web site. In my dad’s view, anything that wasn’t built out of sausage was suspect. So while ass was totally allowable, Web site was verboten. Which made me consider Glynn’s totally allowable ass…no, no. Thinking of work, not Glynn. Thinking of opening the store, unpacking sausage. Opening a pack of large, fresh sausage, unzipping Glynn’s… I sighed.

  At eight sharp I slipped on my Wurstspeicher Haus apron and took position behind the register, ready for business. Surely dealing with the rush of customers would take my mind off Glynn.

  Oh yeah, the rush of maybe fiftee
n customers. A dozen were regulars who still bought their meat daily, ingrained by a lifetime of routine. (At least I hoped it was routine, not necessity. Meiers Corners was pretty old-fashioned, but I didn’t think they had iceboxes instead of refrigerators. Probably.)

  A couple of midweek tourists were salted among the dutiful dozen. Not a lot of traffic.

  I chafed. Nothing to do behind the counter but dream of Glynn. And I couldn’t leave. Despite doing most of our business weekends and holidays, even though I’d started an Internet presence, someone needed to run the daily cash register. The sum total of the work force was Mom, Pop and me.

  Why not just hire someone? Well, our net on fifteen customers was maybe fifty dollars. Fifty a day versus $8.25 an hour minimum wage (Illinois’s is higher than the national)—not a lot of options. The only people you could pay less than minimum was family or a slave. Sometimes I thought they were the same thing.

  Yeah, whiny, I know. I had a roof over my head, three free squares and as much gas money as I needed as long as I walked everywhere. I loved my parents and they needed me.

  But I couldn’t live at home forever.

  The store’s bell tinkled, barely heard over the clank of our old coolers and the soaring notes of La Traviata (Mom had moved into the nineteenth century). A customer. No matter what I wanted, my motto was “If you have the job, do the job”. I snapped on my professional smile and my brain snapped on its sausage-selling instinct.

  My body snapped on a tingle, imagining a doorway filled with lyrical baritones of the Big Dark and Dangerous kind.

  But it was Twyla Tafel.

  “Hey, Junior. I’ve come for my blood sausage.” Twyla sauntered in on Kenneth Cole heels, a hundred and forty pounds of curves and detours wrapped in a Donna Morgan suit, blue-green. Only she’d probably call it teal or azure. An art major in school, Twyla was the mayor’s executive admin, emphasis on Executive. We have a mayor, but like king and prime minister, he does the handshakes and Twyla, the daughter of an African diplomat, actually governs.

  I pulled up her order. “More blood sausage? Didn’t you just get some last week?”

  “What can I say? Guests seem to like it.” She signed for it. “Oh, I need to add a personal blood sausage order. Five pounds.”

  “We’re selling a lot of blutwurst lately. I wonder why. I can’t imagine cooked blood being widely popular.”

  “Maybe don’t question it too closely. It’s all money in the register, right?” She gave me a bright smile as she pulled out her wallet. “Speaking of which, the city’s order is covered by our PO, but is credit okay for mine?”

  “Sure. The Wurstspeicher Haus has made it into the twenty-first century in some things.”

  “Thanks to you.” She laughed as she flipped out a card. “I think your dad would still be asking ‘paper or canvas’.”

  “Or pigs’ bladder. Speaking of which, is a plastic bag okay?” When she nodded, I started filling one. “So what’s with the personal order? Party?”

  “Julian and Nixie have a few guests.”

  My head snapped up. Twyla’s a resident of the Emerson townhouses, living there with her hot Greek, Nikos. “Guests? Like for the PAC opening?”

  “You’ve heard of it?” She gave a quick, rueful smile. “Of course you have. Nixie told me you’re playing in the pit. Sorry. I’ve just been so worried about it. It’s the culmination of some pretty serious budget retooling.”

  The bell tinkled. I glanced at the door, hoping for Big Dark and Dangerous, but a couple tourists wandered in. I said hello and smiled helpfully at them. They ignored me to check out the coolers.

  Out-of-towners. They didn’t mean to be rude; they just didn’t know any better.

  I turned back to Twyla. “Budget retooling?”

  Twyla angled closer and lowered her voice. “You know the economy is pretty grim, right? Well, Meiers Corners is mostly self-sufficient, but it’s affecting even us. The mayor had a brilliant idea.”

  I groaned. “An all-polka channel on Hulu?”

  “Please. I had some hand in this. Problem is, we’re a local economy. That limits us. To expand, we need to go regional. We picked tourism as our vehicle, and are sinking cash into all things quaint and touristy.”

  “But that’s awesome.” Little dollar signs floated before my eyes. The sausage store was the epitome of quaint and touristy.

  “Sure. Except to finance the expansion, Mayor Meier talked the Sparkasse Bank into making loans. Lots of them, and some pretty serious money, including the renovation of the PAC.”

  “But the bank makes money on loans, doesn’t it?”

  “If the touristy places pay the loans back. If they don’t…well, we’re not just sitting back hoping tourism takes off. We’re actively promoting it. Oz, Wonderful Oz is our kickoff. We’re counting on the pull of a Broadway-caliber show to bring in the out-of-towners. If they like it well enough, they’ll come back with a couple thousand of their friends.”

  “That’s no problem. I saw the show last night. It’ll be terrific.”

  “That’s not what I heard.” She leaned in. “I heard it was awful.”

  “Julian?” I shrugged. “It was the first dress. The stars are outstanding. It’ll be awesome.”

  “I’m glad you’re confident. The bank went out on a bit of a limb. Not as bad as the bottom dropping out of realty, but if the tourist businesses don’t turn a healthy profit and can’t pay back the loans, the bank will be in trouble. Best scenario?” She lowered her voice once again until I was practically reading her lips. “The bank gets sold. And the buyers might not be so friendly to locals.”

  “Ouch. If our coolers go, I’m hoping to get a loan myself.”

  “Then play that show like it’s your ticket to Coolerville.”

  Not only my future was riding on this production. The city’s financial health was too.

  At five thirty I turned the register over to my rent-a-kid and ran upstairs for the traditional before-rehearsal, five-second shower and degreasing. Cotton really soaks up the odor of garlic and marbled fat.

  I had just pulled black jeans and a black T-shirt over a lacy powder-blue thong and demi-bra (they were next in the underwear drawer—really) and was brushing my teeth when a knock came at the attic door.

  “That’s weird.” No one ever knocked. Because of the setup, my parents were the only ones who had access to the attic, and they took unholy delight in bursting in on me unannounced. Especially (to my chagrin) when I was “going through puberty”, if you know what I mean. Curious, I spat and rinsed and headed for the far door. It took me across my “hallway”.

  Picture a capital T. Turn it sideways and set it on our house, the top bar along Jefferson in the south. My room—bedroom and tiny bath—was at the intersection, sitting like a tree fort in the branches of the attic, the rest being bare rafters and blown insulation.

  The stairwell door was at the foot of the T. A set of two-by-fours laid over the joists was my hall. I traveled it by instinct, ignoring the fact that one wrong step would put me through my parents’ ceiling. If I ever got out of here, I’d be a shoo-in for a high wire act.

  I hurried to the door and opened it. Swallowed my tongue.

  Filling the doorway and then some was Glynn, hands thrust in his black leather jacket pockets.

  His jaw, freshly shaved, was more honed than I remembered, his skin almost dewy. His lips… I groaned. The upper begged for a nibble, the lower demanded a full tongue-swipe. Those edible lips parted, revealing strong white teeth. The tip of his tongue peeked through.

  A storm of lust broke in my belly, drenched my thong.

  Glynn’s nostrils flared, elegant yet animal. His eyes—smack me with a kielbasa, his eyes burned deep, hot purple.

  “H…how’d you get in?” I croaked. More thong-dousing—apparently parts of me wanted to know how he’d “get in” too.

  “Through the store. Your teenager wasn’t very attentive. I found my way into the house.”

 
“You penetrated the family abode?” Penetrated. Just club me. “Um, why have you come?” Come. “Here, I mean. Why have you come here…to the store? Yes, that’s what I meant.” Shut up, Junior.

  I heard a soft grunt, a stifled groan. Him or me, I didn’t know.

  “I’ve come to pick you up.” His mouth barely moved, lips stiff. “We’ve Emerson’s limo.” He shifted his hands from his jacket to jam them into his jeans pockets.

  “Limo?” My eyes automatically latched on to his hands, which framed a rising zipper. “You’re offering me a fast ride…?” Oh, thank you, Dr. Freud. I cleared my throat and pretended I wasn’t an ass. “You do know the PAC is only a block from here?”

  “It’s on our way. I didn’t like the thought of you toting those heavy instruments when I could do something about it.”

  “That was nice.” Trapped in a limo with Big Dark and Dangerous, porn flick fantasy number five. Maybe I should have refused, but lugging the headless-corpse sax was a pain. Besides, how much trouble could we get into in just one block? “Give me a sec to pack up.” I started to close the attic door. Manners took over. “Why don’t you come back? Be careful to stay on the walkway.” I started for my room.

  No footsteps clunked behind me. I took a couple more steps but still heard nothing, so I twisted around to see if he was there.

  I managed to twist myself off-balance. I tried to catch myself, but my foot hit the edge of the narrow walkway, skidded off. No nearby walls or even studs to grab, so I fell.

  With incredible speed and grace, Glynn snared me just before I put a Junior-size hole through my parents’ ceiling. I was ridiculously grateful—until I realized he’d caught me around the breasts.

  And that one big, hot hand was gently squeezing.