didn’t, I could start seriously considering a trip to the vet.
And then it hit me. A trip to the vet. Only Skiball didn’t have a veterinarian in town. Not anymore. I would have to find a new one. It was a sad thought for many reasons. Gail Pilsner had been gone just a few hours and life was already moving on without her.
I frowned. I didn’t want to dwell on that before going to bed, not unless I felt like tossing and turning all night. The best thing would be to take a nice, hot shower and then add some cleaning tips to my new Grime Solvers blog. I always found cleaning therapeutic, and thinking about cleaning worked nearly as well. I’d sit down to work on the blog entry till I tuckered out.
A half hour later I was at the little desk in my bedroom, a fluffy white terry-cloth bathrobe wrapped around my midnight blue New York Yankees pajamas. When I turned on my computer and checked my e-mail, I saw that I’d gotten one from Mike. I looked at the time stamp on the e-mail and saw that he’d sent it at midnight his time. If I was right about the time difference, that would have been about six o’clock in the evening my time.
I stared at my computer screen. The e-mail header read, Missing You Tonight .
My finger hovered over the mouse button as I did some more silent calculating. I can add and subtract as well as any second grader, math whiz that I am. In Paris, it was now about five o’clock in the morning. Almost wake-up time for Mike. Almost bedtime for me. It underscored that we were a wide world apart. Or at least half a wide world.
Half a world seemed far enough.
Missing You Tonight.
Swallowing hard, I started to open the e-mail, but my finger wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t click the mouse button.
I hadn’t missed Mike tonight. I’d thought of him, but I hadn’t missed him. About when he’d been writing the e-mail, I’d been getting ready for dinner with Alejandro Vega. Wondering how slinky I ought to dress. Wondering if I might go to bed and wake up in his arms, and knowing there wasn’t really much to wonder about. Because whenever I looked into his eyes, I wanted him to make love to me. And whenever we were together, I couldn’t stop looking into his eyes.
If our night had gone as I’d planned, it would not have ended with a kiss in his Range Rover. If it had gone as planned, I would have let Alejandro Vega’s kisses sweep me off to a world that was ours and ours alone.
Since it was pretty clear from how he kissed me that he’d been prepared to risk catching my cold, I thought.
I sat staring at the screen for another second or two, sighed, and closed the e-mail program with Mike’s message unread. Once, I’d have felt guilty about not feeling guilty. Maybe I still did, a little. But just a little.
I opened a new document file in my Grime Solvers folder and started typing away:
Rough night tonight. Don’t ask how come, because I don’t want to think about it right now. My goal is to lull myself into sleepiness, and I’m sticking to the subject of cleaning since it relaxes me. And since I figure that’s mostly why we’ve
Three and a quarter sentences into my entry, I suddenly stopped clacking at the keyboard. I’d heard the sound of a car pulling up outside.
My bedroom window overlooks Carriage Lane, which runs along the north side of the house to cross Main Street. Chloe’s garage and one of the Fog Bell’s entrances (there are three) face the lane. My window’s almost directly above the entrance. The car sounded as if it had pulled up right in front.
I got up, went to the window, pulled back the edge of the blinds, and peeked out.
A black Lexus idled almost directly below me on the street, its passenger door facing the curb, the beams of its headlights lancing out toward the corner. As I watched, its door opened wide and the interior lamp went on to allow a glimpse of a man behind the wheel. He wore a dark overcoat and had a thick head of silvery hair and was reaching
And then it hit me. A trip to the vet. Only Skiball didn’t have a veterinarian in town. Not anymore. I would have to find a new one. It was a sad thought for many reasons. Gail Pilsner had been gone just a few hours and life was already moving on without her.
I frowned. I didn’t want to dwell on that before going to bed, not unless I felt like tossing and turning all night. The best thing would be to take a nice, hot shower and then add some cleaning tips to my new Grime Solvers blog. I always found cleaning therapeutic, and thinking about cleaning worked nearly as well. I’d sit down to work on the blog entry till I tuckered out.
A half hour later I was at the little desk in my bedroom, a fluffy white terry-cloth bathrobe wrapped around my midnight blue New York Yankees pajamas. When I turned on my computer and checked my e-mail, I saw that I’d gotten one from Mike. I looked at the time stamp on the e-mail and saw that he’d sent it at midnight his time. If I was right about the time difference, that would have been about six o’clock in the evening my time.
I stared at my computer screen. The e-mail header read, Missing You Tonight .
My finger hovered over the mouse button as I did some more silent calculating. I can add and subtract as well as any second grader, math whiz that I am. In Paris, it was now about five o’clock in the morning. Almost wake-up time for Mike. Almost bedtime for me. It underscored that we were a wide world apart. Or at least half a wide world.
Half a world seemed far enough.
Missing You Tonight.
Swallowing hard, I started to open the e-mail, but my finger wouldn’t cooperate. I couldn’t click the mouse button.
I hadn’t missed Mike tonight. I’d thought of him, but I hadn’t missed him. About when he’d been writing the e-mail, I’d been getting ready for dinner with Alejandro Vega. Wondering how slinky I ought to dress. Wondering if I might go to bed and wake up in his arms, and knowing there wasn’t really much to wonder about. Because whenever I looked into his eyes, I wanted him to make love to me. And whenever we were together, I couldn’t stop looking into his eyes.
If our night had gone as I’d planned, it would not have ended with a kiss in his Range Rover. If it had gone as planned, I would have let Alejandro Vega’s kisses sweep me off to a world that was ours and ours alone.
Since it was pretty clear from how he kissed me that he’d been prepared to risk catching my cold, I thought.
I sat staring at the screen for another second or two, sighed, and closed the e-mail program with Mike’s message unread. Once, I’d have felt guilty about not feeling guilty. Maybe I still did, a little. But just a little.
I opened a new document file in my Grime Solvers folder and started typing away:
Rough night tonight. Don’t ask how come, because I don’t want to think about it right now. My goal is to lull myself into sleepiness, and I’m sticking to the subject of cleaning since it relaxes me. And since I figure that’s mostly why we’ve
Three and a quarter sentences into my entry, I suddenly stopped clacking at the keyboard. I’d heard the sound of a car pulling up outside.
My bedroom window overlooks Carriage Lane, which runs along the north side of the house to cross Main Street. Chloe’s garage and one of the Fog Bell’s entrances (there are three) face the lane. My window’s almost directly above the entrance. The car sounded as if it had pulled up right in front.
I got up, went to the window, pulled back the edge of the blinds, and peeked out.
A black Lexus idled almost directly below me on the street, its passenger door facing the curb, the beams of its headlights lancing out toward the corner. As I watched, its door opened wide and the interior lamp went on to allow a glimpse of a man behind the wheel. He wore a dark overcoat and had a thick head of silvery hair and was reaching
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