The Obsession

by Nora Roberts

  “It looks like you’re putting pants on that dog.”

  “Then that’s what the hell I’m doing.”

  She dragged them the rest of the way on—red shorts with a white side stripe—then let the dog go.

  She leaned back on the steps while the dog—looking like an idiot—hurried over for a rub.

  “What kind of person puts pants on a dog?”

  “The kind who isn’t going to keep fighting to keep the damn cone on him. He gets out of it. Kevin duct-taped the thing, and he still got out of it if I took my eyes off him for five damn minutes. And when he was in it, he ran into everything. Including me. I swear on purpose. He hated it.”

  “Cone of Shame?”

  “Yeah, the damn Cone of Shame. So now he’s wearing the Pants of Humiliation. But the stupid dog seems to like them.”

  “Pants of Humiliation.” Xander had to grin. “You cut a hole for his tail.”

  “Kevin had them in his truck. His old running shorts. I got creative.”

  “Maybe, but how do you expect him to do what he needs to do out here?”

  “Why the hell do you think I was dragging them back on him?” She waved her arms, winced, rubbed her right biceps. “I brought him out, took them off so he did what he needed to do. Now they’re on, and he can’t get to the incision site. In fact, he seems to forget about it when he’s wearing them.”

  “Maybe you should buy him an outfit.” Impressed with her inventiveness, Xander sat down beside her, rubbed the dog. “I got my half of the deal. Alice said he did fine.”

  “Yeah, yeah. He’s fine. I’m exhausted.”

  “I can order a pizza.”

  “No, thanks, but— Crap, just crap. Yes. Please order. The backs of my calves are covered in cone bruises. My arms ache from painting and from struggling with this dog—who’s putting on those pounds just fine, thanks.”

  The dog brought Xander a ball he’d obviously stowed somewhere outside for easy access.

  “Don’t throw it. He really shouldn’t run yet.”

  Xander pushed up again. “Anything you don’t like on pizza?”

  “No anchovies, no pineapple. Anything else is fine.”

  The dog dropped the ball between Naomi’s feet, and when she didn’t respond laid his head on her knee.

  “What’s the dog’s name?”

  She heaved a sigh. “Tag.”

  “As in ‘you’re it’?”

  “No. As in he tags along.”

  “Tag.” The dog couldn’t have recognized his name yet, but apparently he recognized humor as he looked over at Xander, gave a doggy grin. “It works.”

  PANORAMA

  This visible world is but a picture of the invisible,

  wherein, as in a portrait, things are not truly,

  but in equivocal shapes.

  SIR THOMAS BROWNE

  Eleven

  Once or twice a week Xander and Kevin grabbed a beer after work. Sometimes they actually planned it and met up at Loo’s, but for the most part it just happened.

  It just happened that Kevin swung into Xander’s garage after trips to the lumberyard and the tile distributor—and the half an hour huddled with his electrician.

  He knew how to juggle jobs. Naomi’s was priority, but he had a couple others going, which meant he spent a lot of time traveling from site to site.

  And right now he wanted a beer.

  The garage doors, lowered and locked, didn’t mean Xander wasn’t around. Just as his truck sitting in the parking lot didn’t mean he was. Taking his chances, Kevin got out of his own truck and headed around the back of the garage, where a zigzag of steps led to Xander’s apartment.

  He heard the music, classic Stones; he followed it around to the rear bay—Xander’s personal bay—and found his friend tending to the love of his life.

  The ’67 GTO convertible.

  Or, as Kevin thought of it, the Date Car.

  “Who’s the lucky lady?” Kevin asked, pitching his voice to ride over Mick’s.

  Xander glanced up from polishing the chrome rocker panels. “She is. She needed detailing. I’m just finishing it up.”

  Xander had what he considered a damn fine crew of his own, but nobody, absolutely nobody, touched the GTO but himself. He loved her from her chain mail grille to her eight taillights, and every square inch of her Coke-bottle body between.

  He rose now to take a critical look at his own work.

  She shined, sparkling chrome against the red body. That was factory red—just as his grandfather had driven it off the showroom floor.

  “Are you going to take her out for a spin? I’m up for it.”

  “Not today. We got rehearsal in—” Xander checked the old schoolhouse-style clock on the wall. “In about an hour. We got a wedding up in Port Townsend on Saturday. Lelo’s cousin.”

  “Right, right. I remember. Got time for a beer?”

  “I can make time.” Xander took one last look at his sweetheart and stepped out. “Nice evening. How about we do this on the veranda?”

  Kevin grinned. “That works.”

  They trooped up the steps into the apartment. The main space held the living room, kitchen, and—with the card table and folding chairs—the dining area.

  Bookshelves—loaded—rose and spread over an entire wall of the living room. Kevin had built them—and the bookshelves in the skinny second bedroom used as an office, and the bookcase in the bedroom—when Xander bought the property and the business.

  Xander opened the old fridge, a cast-off harvest gold number that had been the rage in the seventies, grabbed two bottles of St. Pauli Girl, popped the tops on the wall-mounted opener—a rust-colored naked woman holding the opener in upstretched arms—and tossed the caps in the trash.

  They went out the bedroom door onto a postage-stamp porch and sat in two of the folding chairs that went with the card table.

  And considered it fine.

  “Big wedding?”

  “Yeah. I’ll be glad when it’s done. The bride texts me every five minutes the last few days, screwing around with the playlist. Anyway. It’s a living.”

  “Did you break your ban on the Chicken Dance?”

  “Never happen. I took an oath.” Xander stretched out his legs. He’d positioned the chairs so he could just stretch them out without his feet dropping off the edge. It worked.

  “I saw your built-ins in the big house—library? And the tile work in the half bath. Nice.”

  Kevin stretched out his legs as well and took his first end-of-the-workday pull. “You were up there?”

  “Yeah. The dog was wearing your pants, man. I gotta say, he looked better in them than you.”

  “I’ve got excellent, manly legs.”

  “With bear pelts.”

  “Keeps me and my woman warm in the winter. It was a smart solution. I don’t know how the hell that dog kept getting out of the cone, but once she got the idea for the shorts, and we got them on him, he left his no-balls alone.”

  Kevin took a second pull on his beer. “And you’re still trying to move on that?”

  “The dog?” When Kevin just snorted, Xander shrugged. “I will move on that. In time.”

  “I’ve never known you to take time on a move.”

  “She’s skittish.” At least that word came to Xander’s mind. “Don’t you wonder why that is? She doesn’t act especially skittish, look skittish, but she is under there. I’m curious enough to take time. If I just liked the look of her—and I do like the look of her—but if I just, I wouldn’t bother with so much time. Either it’s going to happen or it isn’t. I like that she’s smart. I like the contrasts.”

  “Contrasts?”

  “Skittish, but ballsy enough to buy that old place, live out there on her own. She handles herself—and makes you think she’s had to. I like what she’s doing to the old place, or paying you to do.”

  “She’s got ideas.”

  “Yeah. She’s damn good at what she does. You’ve gotta appreciat
e somebody with talent who knows how to use it. And then . . .” Smiling, Xander took a long drink. “She named the dog.”

  “He’s a good dog. He loves her like you love that GTO. He stole Jerry’s hammer the other day.”

  “A hammer?”

  “Naomi brought it, a sandpaper block, two work gloves, and a pipe fitting back down the other day. He takes them up to her like presents.”

  They sat a moment, in companionable silence, looking out toward the road where a few cars passed, the scatter of houses beyond, and the field where they’d both played Little League what seemed like a million years before.

  “Tyler’s got a T-ball game on Saturday.”

  “I’m sorry I’ll miss that. It’ll probably be more entertaining than the wedding.”

  “I remember playing T-ball, right over in the field. You and me and Lelo. Remember?”

  “Yeah. Dim, but yeah.”

  “Now I’ve got a kid playing. Makes you think.”

  It made Xander think, nostalgically, of Lelo, who’d been scarecrow scrawny with beaver teeth. He’d stayed scrawny, Xander considered, but had grown into the teeth. “We sucked at T-ball, man, both of us. Got a groove on in Little League.”

  “Kids mostly suck at T-ball, that’s part of the charm. Maddy starts kindergarten next fall.”

  Xander turned his head, gave Kevin a long look. “You’re thinking about having another.”

  “The subject’s come up a few times.”

  “Well, you do good work there.”

  “Yeah, we do. We always said two, and when we ended up with one of each, hey, that’s a nice balance. Now Ty’s playing T-ball, Maddy’s going into kindergarten, and we’re talking about starting another from scratch.”

  “Three’s a magic number. You can look it up,” Xander added when Kevin just looked at him.

  “It’s looking like we’re going for the magic number.”

  “Have fun with that.”

  “That’s the plus side. It sure is fun working on making one. You’re not looking for sex with Naomi.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “I mean not just sex.”

  Xander contemplated his beer. “Why do married guys think single guys are only after sex?”

  “Because they used to be single guys, and remember. Case in point—what was her name. Shit. Ah, Ari, Alli, Annie. The redhead with the rack and the overbite? Worked at Singler’s last summer?”

  “Bonnie.”

  “Bonnie? Where’d I get all those A’s from? That was just sex. She was built, so there’s that. But all the work went into the face and body, none into the brain.”

  “It was the overbite.” Even now, Xander could sigh over it. “I’ve always been a sucker for an overbite.”

  “Naomi doesn’t have one.”

  “It’s a flaw I’m overlooking. Sometimes it’s just sex, as Bonnie illustrates and your memory serves. And sometimes, as you ought to remember, you want some conversation, some meat along with the sizzle. Bonnie had the sizzle, but I knew it wasn’t going to be enough, even for the summer, when she picked up a copy of East of Eden I had on the nightstand and said she didn’t know I was religious.”

  “Religious?”

  “She figured Eden—so it must be a biblical story. She didn’t even know who Steinbeck was.” And he could still shake his head over that. “Even an overbite can’t make up for that.”

  “It’s good to have standards.”

  “Oh, I’ve got standards. So far, Naomi’s meeting them, so I can take some time.”

  “What if she’s lousy in bed?”

  “That’d be both surprising and disappointing, but if so, we can still have conversations. Does she ever talk about her family with you?”

  “Her brother, her uncles. Little bits and pieces here and there. Not much elaboration, now that you mention it.”

  “Exactly. It’s interesting—what she doesn’t say. It’s interesting.”

  —

  He thought about that, late into the night, long after rehearsal and the cold-cut subs he and his bandmates chowed down on.

  In general he liked the company of men more than the company of women. He understood what men didn’t say, didn’t need or want it all laid out in specific words, expressions, freaking tones of voice. Women, to his mind, were work. Often worth it, and he didn’t mind work.

  But time spent with women, when it wasn’t before, during, or after sex, was entirely different than hanging out with men or working with them.

  In general, he preferred the short, straightforward mating dance and considered the extra steps and flourishes a waste of everyone’s time.

  You wanted or didn’t; there was heat or there wasn’t.

  For some reason he found himself willing to take those extra steps with Naomi. He didn’t really mind them; in fact, he enjoyed them, all the stops and starts, the detours.

  And in his experience once the mating dance was done, the first rush of sex slowed, interest faded.

  He liked being interested.

  He turned on the bedroom TV, with the sound low as it was mostly to cover the silence so he didn’t miss Milo’s snoring so keenly. He picked up his nightstand book—a worn paperback of Lord of the Flies.

  He never had a first read on the nightstand, not if he wanted to sleep, so he settled in with the familiar and fascinating.

  But he couldn’t get Naomi off his mind.

  —

  On the bluff, Naomi turned off the lights. Her brain was too tired for more work, too tired to pretend to read, even to stream a movie. The dog had already settled down, and it was time she did the same.

  Since her tired brain didn’t want to turn off, she let it wander, circling around faucets, lighting fixtures, whether she should do that study of Douglas firs she’d taken that morning, the green eerie through thin mists. It would make a solid cover for a horror novel.

  She worked on it in her head, played up shadows until she drifted off, drifted away.

  When she walked through that eerie green, the wind rolled through the tops of the trees, a whoosh and moan that laid a chill on her skin. She followed the path. She wanted to get to the water, to the blue, to the warm. Her footsteps were muffled on the thick cushion of pine needles, and those deep green shadows seemed to shift into shapes. And the shapes had eyes.