Rusty Nailed (26 page)

And Simon? Simon was . . . a pickle. A pickle who was packing up his apartment next door as we speak, and making a helluva lot of noise while doing it. I was in my bedroom, purging my sock drawer, when I heard a very distinct thumping coming through the wall. A banging, if you will. I smiled, remembering the first few times I heard that banging.

Clive jumped up on the bed, looking curiously at the wall.

Pretty sure that sometimes he still listened to see if Purina was going to come meowing through that wall again. Fat chance.

I crossed to the shared wall, placing my hand on the spot I imagined was right above his bed, and sure enough, I felt another thumpity thump. What the hell was he doing over there?

I grabbed my phone and sent him a text:

What the hell are you doing over there?

Taking apart my headboard.

Ah! No wonder. I was having flashbacks.

His response was to bang on his wall again. I banged back.

Bang ba ba bang bang
.

Bang bang.

I giggled, then listened. Would he . . . ? Sure enough, a moment later, Glen Miller came through the walls. Smooth.

I went back to packing, and he went back to taking apart his headboard. Clive attacked a roll of bubble wrap and made it his bitch. A few hours later, we met back in my apartment and looked around at the tiny dent I’d made in getting things ready to be moved.

“When is the storage container coming again?”

“Two days.” I looked in my calendar to verify the date. “So you need to make sure anything you don’t want in the container is already moved out before the crew gets here. They’re taking care of everything else.” It was still weird to think about the new house. I almost
couldn’t,
with everything going on. One step at a time.

“We still staying here tonight?” he asked, peering over my shoulder at the calendar.

“I’d like to, if that’s still cool with you. One more night, where it all began? Besides, I went to the trouble of bringing my pussy,” I joked.

As if on cue, Clive ran through the kitchen and back out again like the hounds of hell were on his tail, towing a large piece of bubble wrap that streamed out behind him like a crinkly-sounding cape.

“You know I can’t resist that,” he murmured in my ear, arms sneaking around my waist. “By the way, you can erase that trip.”

“What trip?” I asked, my voice all gooey. His arms did that to me.

“The one to Belize. I canceled it,” he said, pointing to a date I had circled on my calendar.

“You canceled Belize?” I asked. That was three trips in a row.

“Yep, I wanted to be here to help with the house.” He nuzzled my neck. “I’m pretty handy with a hammer, if you’ll recall.” He bumped his hips into mine.

I bumped them right back. A little harder than was necessary?

Maybe. A little.

“I’m gonna go make sure I got everything in my room,” I said, shrugging him off and heading back to my bedroom. I knew he didn’t like it much when I questioned his schedule. And if he noticed that my voice was no longer gooey, he didn’t say anything.

Pickle.

•  •  •

E
very single one of my worlds collided on the same day. Friday dawned cold and clear. It was a good thing there was no fog, because the fog in my head by noon was enough for the entire Bay Area. Jillian and Benjamin were due in on a six o’clock plane. We wanted them to be able to enjoy their first night back without us hanging around, so when I left for work Friday morning I made sure everything was spick-and-span, with everything exactly how they’d left it.

Simon was closing on the new house at two thirty. He’d be signing the paperwork and picking up the keys, and I told him I’d meet him at our new address as soon as I could get away from work. Utilities were being turned on, we had a truckload of essential boxes being delivered, and Simon was in charge of buying and setting up our blow-up bed. Yep, a blow-up bed. Since we’d be living on the premises while our new home was renovated, we didn’t want any real furniture there. Didn’t want to have to keep moving it as we worked through the rooms, so we were living basic for a while.

Shit was about to get real. Really real.

Poor Clive didn’t know what was going on. After moving from Jillian’s house, back to the apartment, back to Jillian’s, back to the apartment, he barely knew where his litter box was. Luckily, the Stanford sweatshirt was long gone.

Uncle Euan and Uncle Antonio had chosen to move out of our building when it went condo, so my cat sitters were gone. I didn’t want Clive at the new house until I’d had time to kitty proof it, so off he went to kitty day care.

I felt like the shittiest mommy on the planet. And Simon’s feelings on the matter were not helping.

My veterinarian had recommended this great pet hotel. I say hotel, because this was not your average boarding place. He had his own room, with his own flat-screen TV playing hummingbird porn 24/7.

“It’s just temporary. I promise, sweetie.” When we went to tour the place I’d brought Clive along, and he and Simon looked around with the same expression.

Are you kidding me?

“We can’t leave him here, this place is ridiculous!” Simon whispered as we walked down the row of kitty rooms.

“This place is great. Don’t
you
be ridiculous,” I whispered right back as we followed the owner down the hallway.

“And this will be Clyde’s suite!” she sang out, opening the door onto the cutest little room I’d ever seen.

“It’s Clive. Not Clyde; Clive.” Simon sighed, rolling his eyes at me. My eyes told him to shut up. I took Clive from him, setting him down to get the lay of the land. He looked around, scratched at one of the posts, and looked back at me. “Where’s my window ledge?” he wordlessly asked.

These two. Honestly.

Simon and I argued about it on the way home. Clive sat regally
on the console between us in the Range Rover, hind legs tucked into the cup holders. The pet hotel was a little cheesy but it was great. And it was a means to an end. It would only be for a few days while we got a feel for the new space. I’d been with Clive much longer than Simon, and I knew if there was one loose floorboard, one cupboard with a wonky door, he’d go exploring and it’d be impossible to find him later. Simon protested that I was being ridiculous and a control freak.

I simply wanted to kitty proof the joint. That’s it. And in order to do so, my cat had to spend a few nights in an overpriced pet hotel with room service. The way Clive and Simon were acting, you’d think I’d suggested he spend a few nights on Alcatraz.

But here we were, moving day, and Simon had finally agreed it was in Clive’s best interests, as well as his own, to take him to the pet hotel before closing on the house. I’d kissed them both that morning, telling Clive to enjoy his adventure. He arranged his paw in a way that one of his little kitty fingers was sticking straight up. Not an accident, I’m quite sure.

I planned on working through lunch that day, trying to get everything pulled together so that when Jillian came back to work on Monday, it would be like she’d never left. No,
better
than when she left. I really wanted her to know how seriously I’d taken running her business while she was gone, even bringing in a few new clients while taking care of our existing ones. And mentoring a new intern with the same patience and guidance that she’d given me when I walked through those doors for the first time.

And that while, yes, we’d lost the carpet on the third floor, I’d replaced it with something even better.

I’d put together storyboards showing the progress on the Claremont; very striking. I’d streamlined one of the payroll reports so she could see not only total hours worked for her hourly employees but how many hours had been allocated to each project. And I
almost had all the invoices for all active accounts and projects categorized and color coded in different colored folders, which were spread out all over my office.

I was checking my math on a particularly long itemized receipt when Simon unexpectedly sailed in with a pizza box at twelve thirty. He plunked it down square in the middle of my desk with a flourish.

“Whoa, whoa, what’s this?” I exclaimed, looking up from my adding machine and realizing that I’d lost count for the third time.

“It’s called lunch, babe,” he said with a proud smile, pulling sodas out of a bag and looking for a place to put them down. “Damn, woman, I’ve never seen your desk this messy.”

“Simon, wait, don’t—”

He’d picked up three of my folders and stacked them together to make room, mixing up everything I was working on. “There we go—much better.”

I took off my glasses and glared at him. “Do you have any idea how much time that took me to organize this morning?”

He looked guiltily at the stack. “Oops?” he offered.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” I took the stack from him and started to separate them all over again.

“It’s House Day, Nightie Girl.” He looked at me like I was crazy. “I thought we could celebrate with a little lunch, and I know what you’re going to say before you say it: You’re too busy. No problem—that’s why I brought lunch to you!”

“Hey, Caroline, did you still want me to work on the cost projections for—oh, hey, Simon!” Monica said, breezing in from the hallway and stopping short when she caught sight of my boyfriend. She had a monster crush. It normally made me chuckle to watch her stammer and stutter around him, but today I didn’t even feel a flash of amusement.

“Monica, how’d you like some pizza?” he offered, picking up
the box from my desk. The papers underneath were now stained with grease.

I pulled a colored pencil from my head and started to chew.

“Oh no, I already ate a pizza, I mean I didn’t eat an entire pizza, I mean I went out for an entire pizza, I mean a slice! I had a small slice of pizza, and a salad, mostly salad and—”

I stopped her. It was embarrassing. “Yes, Monica, please work on the cost projections for the Anderson account and let me know if you have questions. Thank you.”

“Okay, sure, no problem, I’ll just be naked in the other room—I mean working! I just—crap. Bye!”

I dropped my head to my desk. Monica was the most talented, most mature young woman I knew. I would have killed for the poise she possessed at such a young age—except when Wallbanger was involved. Then she turned to goo. I could relate. And she didn’t even know he had the power to move an entire bed with the strength of his hips alone.

Speaking of hips, they moved into my field of vision, along with the pizza box.

“So, lunch?”

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. I was at that point when you either laugh or cry, and the scales just happened to tip toward laughter. I looked up at him, celebrating House Day in his own sweet and unaware way, and cackled like a loon. “Sure, Simon. Let’s have some pizza.”

I took the box from his hands, and right there on the top, surrounded by an army of dancing pepperoni and wearing a chef’s hat, was a picture of the devil himself.

Cory Weinstein. Pizza chain owner. Discount giver. Self-described man about town.

And the jackrabbit fucker who’d hijacked my O.

My eye began to twitch. The floor, to pitch. My skin he’d seen just once now crawled and creeped and bunched and itched.

The laughter that was ringing out from my lips turned to a shriek that stopped traffic all over town, upset several fruit carts, and may very well have been the slight earthquake tremor that was reported that night on the news. And my knees were kissing my chin as my body turned roly-poly in an effort to protect itself at all costs.

“Oh, will you settle down? There are positively no anchovies on this pizza,” Simon said, rolling his eyes and handing me a napkin.

•  •  •

I
’d had flashbacks all afternoon.

Cory, cheers-ing me with his Natural Light beer when I met him for drinks on our one and only date.

Cory, grinning as he slid behind the wheel of his stupid souped-up yellow Small Dick Mobile with the license plate
IEETPIE
. Point of order, he in fact does not.

Cory, poised over me grunting and blurry while his hips ran a race he would never win.

To be fair, I’d had every opportunity to stop this particular tragedy. And still chose to proceed with the single worst sexual experience of my life, resulting in the Great Orgasm Hiatus, as it came to be known to all mankind.

I now blinked my eyes hurriedly, trying to get the images to stop coming. I turned onto my new street a little too quickly and the contents of my bag spilled all over the floor of the delivery van.

Delivery van, you ask?

Yes, delivery van. In our haste to make real estate history with the fastest decision ever, we both forgot about my commute into the city. Sure, I could take the ferry, but I hadn’t had a chance to figure out the ferry schedule. And I no longer had access to Jillian’s very sporty Mercedes. So I’d purloined the Jillian Designs delivery van, and was using that to drive over the bridge to my new address. As I pulled up in front of the old Victorian that I now called home,
my lipsticks rolled around on the floor. I sighed heavily as I turned the ignition off, looking through the windshield at the house.

From the street, it still looked melancholy and a bit run down. I knew that was temporary. Perhaps I was feeling a bit run down? This day had taken it out of me, and I wanted nothing more than to explore my new home, take a hot shower, and crawl into bed.

A bed on the floor.

Shit, I didn’t care anymore. I just wanted a bed. As I shut the door to the van, it squeaked in a way reminiscent of Cory Weinstein’s bed as he jackrabbited his teeny peeny in a mind-numbingly (and hoohah-numbingly) way, and I flinched once more.

I slammed the door shut and walked up the steps. I could see Simon through the front picture window, moving boxes.

I felt my load begin to lighten. And something else begin to tighten. This was my new home, and I was sharing it with Simon.