Zen doesn’t seem to connect thesomething’s wrongdots.
I look behind me.
Why are there six cars in my usually empty lot?
What the hell’s going on?
“Yes, yes, do the dishes,” they say perkily. “Look at me. Who am I?Oh, I’m so excited! I have piles and piles of dishes! I’m going to sing my heart out at the top of my lungs like I’m Cinderella to see if it’ll annoy my new boss so he quits looking at me like he wants to strip me out of my clothes!”
“You’re fired again.”
“You’ll have to do the dishes.”
Is it possible to have a permanent cramp in your eyelid?
All I wanted was to hear everything they could tell me about Sabrina, and then they did it, and now I don’t know which way is up and if they just insulted me or not.
“Who’s here this early?” I ask Zen, as if they’ll have any more of an idea than I do.
“My powers of deduction tell me someone who’s messy,” they reply.
“Your powers of deduction are so acute this time of day.”
They grin and head for the dining room.
I hang up my coat, which is beginning to smell exactly like the café, peek inside Jitter’s doghouse and come up disappointed that he’s not there, and then I follow my nibling.
“Zen!” an unfamiliar woman’s voice says. “You made it. Good. We were getting worried.”
“Morning, Iris,” Zen replies cheerfully.
“Come sit by me,” someone else says. “Look. I got the special Guatemalan coffee beans from my friend for you to try. Here. Have a cup.”
“You are a goddess.”
What onearth?
I stop in the doorway and survey the Bean & Nugget dining room, which is housing roughly a dozen people at five in the morning, all of them drinking coffee and enjoying pastries.
There’s Devi who owns the art gallery and her grandmother who runs House of Curry, which makes delicious food when you’re not wearing it. Shirlene, the health department inspector. Marley, our neighbor with the little girl who knocks on Sabrina’s door regularly looking for Jitter. Bitsy, who dropped by a mouth-watering casserole the other day that was just as good as her English Sunday dinner, which is a sentence I never expected to come out of my mouth, but is still true. A few other people look familiar, but I can’t immediately place their names or where I’ve seen them.
And then there’s a woman who’s so startlingly similar to Sabrina, but with a few more crow’s lines at her eyes, that it must be her mother.
Her mother.
That’ll make a guy nervous this early in the morning.
I take an extra breath, tell my dick to staydown, and let myself look at Sabrina too.
Naturally, she’s here.
Naturally, she’s gorgeous. Sipping coffee and laughing at something Devi said. Completely in her element. Her hair’s slightly damp, like she didn’t have time to dry it all the way after her shower, and now I’m remembering her request to see what I could do in the bathtub.
I shoot a glance at her mother again, and that helps get my cock back under control.
Then I notice Jitter. He’s sprawled on his back by the fire with his fur and fluff and jowls so askew that he looks more like furry, mis-assembled IKEA furniture than he does like a hundred-pound not-still-a-puppy, but not-yet-a-dog dog.
“Oh, Grey, good, you’re here.” Bitsy smiles and waves me into the room. “We need some male input on the speed dating event next weekend.”
