After Hours (InterMix)(46)

Normally I’d have been a temperate gal and proclaimed it too early to drink, but my nerves told me to make an exception. “I’ll have a beer, thanks.” Kelly’s home, Kelly’s beverage of choice.

He grabbed two bottles from the fridge and shut the door with his hip, twisting off each cap and handing mine over. We clinked and drank.

He showed me the would-be guest room next, which he’d turned into a minimalist home gym, with a weight bench and barbells and a treadmill. It was pretty stark, one step up from what I imagine you’d find in the shadiest corner of the penitentiary exercise yard. Which seemed fitting, considering Kelly possessed the physique of a violent convict serving a very long sentence, meditating on visions of vengeance as he worked through his thousand daily chin-ups.

Next he pointed out the bathroom, then we reached the end of the short tour—his bedroom. There were no surprises, not of the pink satin heart-shaped pillow variety, nor the f*ck-swing and bondage props variety. Just a queen-sized bed, made up with a black-and-gray-striped comforter. No shackles or straps to speak of. I released a held breath. Wooden blinds on the windows, and simple red curtains. Hardwood floors bare save for a red throw rug that matched the drapes, walnut dresser and side tables and a chest, and little else. I eyed the chest, wondering if it was full of winter’s wool clothes or crazy sexcessories.

“It looks very normal,” I said.

“The invite was strictly B.Y.O. gimp mask, if that’s what you mean.”

I laughed.

“I’m not much for theatrics.”

“No, only directing.”

“More like dictating.”

“So,” I said, looking around the room. “When does my domestic slavery begin?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Looking forward to it, then?”

“I’m here, aren’t I? I’m looking forward to finding out what I’ve gotten myself into.”

Kelly led me back through the living room and out the sliding doors, and he dragged two patio chairs together on the slate tiles, facing the backyard. Struck by a thought, he gave me his beer to hold, and trotted across the grass, whistling.

A flurry of barks answered him, and Kelly leaned over his neighbor’s fence a moment, then straightened with the dog hugged to his chest like a sixty-pound baby. He let her free, and grabbed an old tennis ball from a corner of the yard. He tossed it for the dog, and it was neatly returned just as Kelly took his seat and accepted his beer. Another toss, the dog shooting off in hot pursuit, tongue fairly flapping in the wind with bliss. Clearly, this was the highlight of her life.

“So,” I said. “What’s the agenda?”

“We hang out. You get comfortable. We mess around a bit, then you tell me when you’re ready for the good stuff.”

“The good stuff?”

He smiled, whipping the ball again. His eyes looked pale green this afternoon, the color of corroded copper. “Trust me.”

“I must, if I came this far.”

We chatted for a little while, about what we’d done that morning, about the repairs he’d made to the house since he’d moved in four years earlier and found the attic full of squirrels and two decades’ worth of moldy Hustler issues stacked behind the boiler. Kelly told me he wished he had a dog of his own, or could take Sadie off his neighbor’s hands, but the twelve-hour shifts would make a neglectful owner of him.

As self-interested as Kelly was, I decided he’d be a stellar pet owner. Patient, protective, reliable. He’d probably make just as good a father, if he went down that road. Kids today could use more Kelly Robaks in their parental dugouts. He might not let his daughters date until they were twenty, but they sure as shit wouldn’t come home after curfew, tattooed, carrying the baby of some burner they’d let finger them behind the gym in exchange for a cigarette.

“You think you ever want kids?” I asked casually, as Sadie returned the tennis ball for the fiftieth time.

“Hell if I know. Not unless I got married, and I don’t think I’m cut out for that.”

“I bet you are. With the right woman. One who’d put up with your bossy ass and go in for all your old-school man-of-the-house patriarchy bull.”

He laughed. “That ain’t you, I take it.”

I felt my cheeks warming. “No, that ain’t me.” What did it make me, then? Some good-time girl, an equally antiquated notion. Still, I’d rather be Rizzo than Sandy, no question. Rizzo found love without changing a thing about herself. Sandy had to dress like a skank and get that horrible perm and take up smoking.