Chapter 1
The damn
dog.
The streetlight cast strange gray shadows across the lawn
grass on which I was sprawled. Shadows are such interesting things at this
early time before dawn. If the smell were any indicator, the dark smooshy
shadow along the left side of my body was the world’s largest skid mark. I’m a
six-foot tall girl. I stepped in the dog’s mess and slid all six of those feet
through it.
Adding insult to injury, the most incredibly delicious
looking man I’d ever seen in my life leaned over to see if I was OK.
I don’t know where this man came from, but I wished at
that moment he’d go back.
The lawn I was laying on was getting to me, and I was
having a hard time forming a coherent sentence. First, I was covered in poop.
Second, hot dude. Third, I hear bugs.
Actually, it’s not just bugs, it’s the entire
arthropod phylum, but most people don’t give a flip. I hear bugs, let’s leave
it there, and we’ll come back to the whole ‘arthropod’ thing when we get to my
spider.
Hearing bugs is not a fairytale movie. You don’t hear
one cute little ant, and you don’t have a conversation with one sweet little
bee.
At least, I don’t.
Everything that wears a skeleton on the outside of its
body is in my head, all at once. Most things drone according to their needs: Eat,
mate, flee, hide. Some of the more highly evolved species can talk. Sea
critters sing. Don’t even ask me about cockroaches, because, yes, they are as
scary in my head as they are in your house. Roaches are a big nope.
But ants, bees, wasps, and sometimes locusts, speak in
swarm. They group-think.
Everything within a five-foot radius of my skull, in
every direction, had direct access to my brain. It hurts. A lot.
This yard, the one I was laying in, had ants. The ants
were swarming in my brain.
Mr. HotGuy was speaking, but I couldn’t hear him. Not
really. He was muffled beneath the hundred thousand ants preparing to exit the
mound and defend the queen from me. I’d landed way too near the main mound. Mr.
HotGuy’s lips were moving, as the world lurched violently.
The pain wrapped itself around the outsides of my head
like a giant vice clamp, and I had to pinch the bridge of my nose to refocus. I
inhaled as the acid in the back of my throat thickened.
I sat up slowly, stomach rolling. It put me a little
farther from the ants, making their swarm-alarm a little dimmer. I could hear
Mr. HotGuy ask if I was OK.
I didn’t respond. I wasn’t quite there, yet. I just
gulped down air and avoided eye contact.
It never went away. The bugs. They never went away.
I heard thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands, of
voices in my head almost every minute of every day. There were two external
things that helped, and they were contact with my spider, Dorcia, and contact
with my twin brother, Gale.
I mostly hated Gale.
My brother was a twat.
Gale was the reason I was covered in dog crap.
“I’m sorry, my brother is an absolute twat, and I’m
feeling nauseous,” I said to Mr. HotGuy.
That was not an appropriate thing to say. But, when
you have thousands of voices in your head, there is usually no room left for
your own thoughts. Crunched for space, my thoughts usually just fell out of my
mouth.
Mr. HotGuy knelt gracefully, avoiding the mess I was
smeared with, and looked at me.
“Oh, good hell you’re hot,” I blurted out, scooting
back, smearing more dog poo along my pants.
It wasn’t like I was wearing the latest $200 jeans and
a designer cami. I wore sweatpants and a bleach-stained t-shirt. My hair was in
a ratty knot on the back of my head, mostly tucked under my yellow work ball
cap. I had to wake up extra-extra early to walk the dog and take my brother to
work, so I’d made no effort to look like I hadn’t rolled out of bed. It was my
morning off, I had rolled out of bed. I put on a bra, so I felt like I’d
showed some initiative.
I looked like crap, and I smelled like crap. This man
did not need to get any closer.
And I just told him he was hot.
He laughed at that and held out his hand.
“Thanks, people don’t usually tell me that the first
time we meet,” he said. “My name is Karl.”
I scooted a few more feet away from him. I winced as I
got closer to the ant mount. My thoughts fell out of my mouth again. Like they
always do.
My family and my best friend, Chelsea, tell me I’m
really pretty, but I feel like a hag beast in my own skin. When you feel like
everything you say, ever, is wrong, or weird, or harmful, when you feel like
people are embarrassed on your behalf all the time, well, it wears on your self-esteem.
I had no self-esteem.
If he smiled at me, I was toast.
When men smile at me, I fall in love with them.
“I’m engaged, and I don’t want to get dog poop on you,
also please don’t smile at me because that would be complicated,” I said.
Karl did exactly that. The heavens opened and the
angels played a heavenly ‘Hallelujah.’ Figuratively. Because literally
it was still dark, and his face was dappled in heavy shadows.
The sky was just starting to lighten, and even under
the crappy streetlight, I could see how absolutely perfect his features were.
There was something foreign there. He had a strong jawline, thick brown hair,
and dark brown almond-shaped eyes. At least I thought they were brown. It was
still dark.
But he wore a graphic t-shirt and jeans, and everything
I could see through the tight shirt, all the bulges, looked nice. Really
nice.
“Seriously, I’m fine,” I said. “You should leave. Are
your eyes brown?”
I felt my heart sort of flip over when he nodded. The
flirty-feeling and the insect-noise made me feel extra nauseous. I held a fist
to my mouth and tried to stifle a burp.
“Sorry,” I said, looking down. “I’m good.”
“Let me help you up,” he said.
I shook my head. He took my hand and helped me to my
feet anyway. His hand was warm, and firm, and I inhaled and tried to think
about nothing.
The farther my
head got from the insects, the easier it was to try to have conversations. I
live in Florida, so there wasn’t a ‘safe’ place. Every place had an insect, or
crustacean.
But my head was removed enough from the immediate
stimulus that I could attempt a spontaneous conversation with a stranger. I was
sure it would end in horror and humiliation.
Usually, I practiced conversations. My therapist told
me to. It helped.
But right now, I barely had anything in my head.
Which meant I was a total goober.
“If Chris Pine and a hot Latino guy had a baby, it
would be you,” I murmured a little too dreamily.
“I don’t think that works, genetically, but I’ll play
along,” Karl said. He reached up and plucked some grass out of the hair
straggling from under the ballcap. “If
Jessica Chastain and Ginny Weasley had a baby, it would be you.”
That was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about
me, and I loved this man. My fiancé would have to understand that we were now
polyamorous. Even if we weren’t.
He still held my hand. I hoped he wasn’t a serial
killer. I said so.
Karl laughed.
It made me laugh too.
“I have to get to work,” I said, smiling a little too
much. I didn’t know what else to say. “I mean, not like this. I’m going back to my parent’s place to shower,
and then I’m going to work. Damn, I mean, I don’t live there, but they live
close.”
I tugged my hand away.
“Thanks for helping me up,” I said.
Karl shook his head. It moved like the hair on a
shampoo commercial. It wasn’t light enough to see, but I’d bet light glistened
off his hair. Damn. The body in that
hair.
Damn. The body in that body.
Karl was a couple of inches taller than I was, but broad,
and he had a weird grace to him.
“Anytime…” Karl raised his eyebrows at me.
I raised my eyebrows back.
“Can I have the pleasure of knowing your name?”
The way he said pleasure made me feel sick
again.
“Greg. I mean, Gregory-Jane,” I said. I saw the
confusion and started into my pre-programmed explanation. “I’m a girl, my mom
decided to name her firstborn Gregory, after a tree, and I was her first born.
So. Greg. It’s a unisex name. But you can call me Gregory-Jane if that make you
feel more comfortable.”
Karl smiled again.
“Breathe, Greg, breathe. You said all that in one
breath, and I don’t want you to pass out,” Karl said, eyes motioning to the
poop-smears on the grass.
The sky was really getting light, and I could see his
features more. They just got better. His eyes were so dark it looked like he
had no corneas, and his teeth glinted when he turned his head.
I bet he flossed.
I always lied about flossing.
“I have to go,” Karl said.
It was abrupt, and I was sure it was because I was
weird and covered in dog crap. That was OK. He saved me the trauma of rambling
about the lies I tell my dental hygienist, and the overwhelming shame I felt
about it.
It’s a deep shame.
But hey, even if I never saw Karl again, I got to see
him today. He was that pretty. And leaving like this was kind of nice because I
hadn’t messed anything up.
“But, I have no doubt that I’m going to run into you
again,” Karl said.
He took my hand and pressed his warm, dry lips to the
back of my hand in an old-fashioned gesture that made me sigh out loud. He
dropped my hand and walked around the corner.
I followed him three or four steps because that ass,
and then I remembered I lost the damn dog.
I took a deep breath. The night songs of the insect
world were receding, and I dimmed the noise as much as I could.
The damn dog.
I looked back one more time to catch a glimpse of
Karl, but he’d had vanished in the pre-dawn morning like the fantasy he was.
Maybe he was a psychotic episode. I’ve had a few of
those, and they feel like reality, so any given moment could just be my brain
crapping the bed.
But seeing Karl, as the morning loomed in the
background, felt really real.
I wished I could see him again.
Someone should have told me to be careful what you
wish for.
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