A Hasty Wedding

His eyes were drawn across the roadway to Holly’s little cabin. In the window boxes her red geraniums were gilded silver by moonlight. The cat was enjoying the rocking chair on the porch. It looked like the kind of homey scene someone with some artistic talent might want to capture. Cat in a Rocking Chair at Midnight.

He looked for any shadow of movement, the ranch grounds bathed in the soft orange of the yard lights they had installed just last week, in case whoever poisoned the water came back to finish the job they had started.

He shook his head, not wanting to get back on the merry-go-round of fury and helplessness.

He gazed instead at the darkened windows of her cabin and bet her kitchen didn’t look like this.

Come to think of it, he didn’t really want to think about her either.

He opened his fridge and inspected the contents. One carton of milk of dubious age. One package of cheese which had not been that shade of green and blue when he had originally purchased it. Mustard and ketchup, neither of which he thought would make a very appetizing sandwich on its own. In the crisper were two withered apples and a package of slime that he deduced had once contained lettuce.

He glanced out the window again and told his mind firmly not to go there.

It went anyway, right into her fridge, where there would be neat rows of delicious and healthy things to eat. Fresh milk, cream for her coffee, oranges and apples and pineapple spears, maybe a neatly packaged leftover chicken potpie or tuna casserole. She probably had chocolate chips to make cookies, and lard to make pies.

“Or maybe her fridge looks exactly like this one,” he told himself.

This preoccupation with food was a brand-new one. When the kids were in residence the camp cook fed him along with everyone else and didn’t mind him scrounging through the fridge for leftovers in the middle of the night. He loved Dagwood sandwiches, and seeing how many things he could squish between two slices of bread. Whole pickles, thick slices of beef, jalapeño peppers, tomatoes.

His mouth watering, he opened his freezer compartment. The Häagen-Dazs was at the very center of a frigid cave of thick, wavy ice.

“There is a God,” he muttered, and took it out. He lifted the lid, and inspected the intricate and frosty crystals that had formed on the surface. He knew trying it was the act of a desperate man, but he got a spoon, and hazarded chipping into the ice cream. He tasted, paused, smiled.

He wandered into his living room and sat on the sofa. It was expensive black leather, not particularly comfortable. Tonight it felt cold to lean his bare back against it. He had a chrome and glass coffee table, which he put his feet up on.

“Decorations by Harley,” he decided, looking around critically. Maybe he hadn’t ever really put his penchant for motorcycles behind him. This was what being tired did—made a man’s mind go places it didn’t generally go.

And tonight his apartment seemed to him a lonely place. Without personality and without soul.

Not to mention cold.

Abruptly, he got up, feeling as if he was being pulled by a magnet. He went down the narrow stairs to the office below. There was only ash left from Holly’s fire, so he carefully rebuilt it, enjoying the ritual of shaving kindling, lighting the match, blowing the embers to life, feeding in progressively larger wood. He liked his fires man-sized, not like those little piddly things she lit.

By the time he had the fire roaring, his ice cream was nearly melted, but he settled himself on her sofa, the afghan over it warming his bare back, and sighed with something that dangerously approached contentment. It was cozy down here.

But difficult as hell not to think about her when it was all her little touches that made this room so much nicer than the one directly above it.

The truth was he couldn’t believe Holly Lamb had told him she’d think about allowing him to escort her to the Coltons’ dance. That was almost a no.

From her. Miss Mousey.

What had he expected? The truth? He’d expected her to fall all over herself saying yes, because that’s what women, in his experience, did.

Women with a hell of a lot more on the go than her. Looks. Sophistication. Polish. Great bodies.

He did not look at this assessment in the light of being conceited, it was just his experience of reality. He asked women out, they said yes. Women liked him. Beautiful women liked him. It had driven his roommates in college crazy, before they’d begun to twist it to their advantage.

“Invite Fallon along. He’s a babe magnet. Great leftovers.”

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