Undead 11, Undead and Unstable - MaryJanice Davidson Page 0,73
my neck was resting on the step, and he still had his tie on although his shirt was in shreds, and I was pretty sure one of his buttons had fallen into my bra and when my bra went flying so did the button but I had no idea where, and someone was still
“Dick, don’t! Use the side door, the side door! Do not go in there if you value your sanity!”
yelling from somewhere.
We thrashed and wriggled like a couple of bass yanked from the Mississippi and tossed on a dock. Horny bass. On a deck that was carpeted and looked a lot like six thousand stairs. Then Sinclair once again got to his feet, hauled me up with a yank on my elbow, kicked the part of the banister just below where my ankle had gotten lodged, freed said ankle, then slung me unceremoniously over his shoulder in some sort of undead fireman’s carry, and staggered up the rest of the eight thousand stairs.
“Oh thank heavens,” someone said at us. “They’re … I think it’s safe. They’re going to their room. We can all have the courage to start our lives over and work past this domestic trauma.”
I had to sort of clutch Sinclair’s back to keep from jouncing off his shoulder and tumbling back down the stairs, so I dug in
(ouch! Beloved, you have the curved talons of a tree sloth)
and wondered: had I ever felt so happy, so horny, so relieved, so delighted, so insulted, and so loved like this before, ever, in either my old life or the new?
Not even close. And speaking of close—ah! The melodious sound of Sinclair kicking our bedroom door open drove all other thoughts out of my head. He nearly tripped on the sizable piece of wood that had detached at his kick, then tossed me on our bed and turned back to make sure the board was moved and the door as shut as it could be. Unfortunately, it was a brand-new mattress (we went through them pretty often), and still chock full of sproinginess. In his lusty haste, Sinclair had tossed me pretty hard. If we’d tried to re-create it a hundred times we couldn’t: the new mattress spit me back out, ejected me like it was a damned launching pad, and I hit the carpet.
(—the hell?)
What was it with inanimate objects keeping me from banging the vampire king today?
Sinclair turned back from the door, surprised to see me on the carpet, but too horny to care, or speculate about physics, or discuss attempts to re-create what just happened, or wonder why every inanimate object in our house was determined to keep us apart.
“My own.”
“Yes. Mine, too.”
He fell on me. Or I fell on him. We didn’t know. And we sure didn’t care.
“You’re really moving out?”
“Yup.”
“I still can’t believe it.”
“I couldn’t believe all the shrill bitching about a piece of glass. But you bitched.”
“Three-thousand-dollar piece of glass,” I muttered. “And you knocked over Mrs. Hemze’s Christmas tree during your rampage.”
“I went back and fixed it the next day.”
“And Mr. Peterberg’s.”
“Fixed that one, too.”
“And the Katzes’.”
“Crybabies.”
I had mixed feelings about Antonia and Garrett leaving … me, who got off on complaining about the open-door policy for roomies. But I hated to see the two of them head off into the world that had treated them badly, with no one to lean on but themselves. What was kind of cool (but I would flambé my summer sandals before admitting it to Antonia) was that the solitude was the point, for them.
They hadn’t made that much of a mess of the neighborhood … frankly, people who put up their Christmas lawn stuff before Thanksgiving deserved whatever happened. But we found out later they’d been talking about moving out for a while, even before the full moon madness hit … they just weren’t sure how to ask me about leaving.
Ask me. Like I was their boss or their … their … well. I wasn’t, was the point. They never had to ask. They just had to tell.
So there was that.
But on the other hand, Garrett was weird and Antonia was bitchily blunt. So it was harder to stay sad … assuming I even was sad. Like I said, it was hard to know how to feel about this latest development. It had been a weird few days. Even by our standards.
“Can you wipe that sappy expression off your jowls, Betsy?”
My point! Right there in a nutshell. “Antonia, you bitch, I do not have—”