Werewolf Wedding(3)

“The guy from Journey?” I searched my karaoke memory banks. That might go along with the drinking a little too much. “Isn’t that more of a wail?”

She nodded, still with that blank expression on her face. “Call it whatever you want, it’s hot as hell. Anyway, the guy said he’d come by later. Didn’t want to... wait, I already said that, didn’t I?”

I patted her on the back and gave her neck a little squeeze. “It’ll be okay,” I said. “Somehow, we’ll pull through a growly-voiced man who is apparently very rich who wants to pay me a shit-ton of money for an unknown project.”

I remembered that she said there were a bunch of calls, but not any orders. “What else was there? You said there were a bunch?”

“Oh, yeah,” Jeanette said, shaking out the cobwebs. “It’s just that is so many zeroes it was hard to focus. It was just some random junk. You have a dentist appointment on Thursday, and they said if you didn’t show up for this one, they’d have to start charging you for no-shows. Your therapist said the same thing, but your appointment with her is Friday at four.”

She seemed to drift off again. “God it was so growly. I felt his voice in my ladyparts.”

I arched an eyebrow. “Which, er, ones? I’ve got a few parts that are lady-only.”

“In my crotch, Dilly,” she said. “His voice made my crotch tingle.”

“I... see,” I said. “I can’t say I was expecting that sort of honesty.”

“When have I been anything but blunt?”

“Fair enough.”

I nodded slowly, unable to un-arch my eyebrow. Jeanette, with her slightly too-big horn rimmed glasses, and tightly pulled-back bun, just sat and smiled, longingly. She opened her mouth, and I expected something else about crotch tingles, but instead she relayed that the electric bill was three days past due, I had a meeting with a regular client who wanted another statue of her dog, and something about how she was starting to get hungry. And then she mentioned tingling again, which I chose to ignore, not because it bothered me, but because I needed to focus on the important parts.

Not that sort of part.

“Did he say when?” I sailed right past her tingling bits, the dentist, my therapist Dr. Brundall, the dog statue and the electric bill, which I made a mental note to pay before I had to fork over ten extra bucks for a late fee. “The growly guy, I mean.”

“No,” she said. “Just later. You know how billionaires are. They don’t like schedules. They live at their own pace, or some other macho alpha thing. At least, that’s what I learned from romance novels. Also they are apparently all into spanking and tying women up.”

I thought for a moment. “That doesn’t sound all that bad, huh?”

“Nope,” she answered. “Wait, which part? The not having schedules, or the being tied up and spanked?”

I took another second to think, because honestly it all sounded pretty good. “You know,” I said, “I’d take pretty much anything I could get at this point. That sounded kinda desperate, didn’t it?”

She shrugged. “When in Rome.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Narrowing her eyes, Jeanette took on a very grim, very serious look. “Dilly,” she announced, with way too much gravity for what she’d said, “I have no idea.”

*

In the back of my mind, I knew I should’ve waited to talk to Mrs. Brubecker about her dog statue, but I figured making the eighth Scottish terrier statue for her was a fairly safe bet. Each time she got a new dog, she commissioned a half-sized statue of them, and each time she got a dog it was a Scotty.

Except, of course, the one time I decided to try and get ahead of life for once.

She showed up with Rufus, a very dopey, but very sweet, creature that seemed to be about half German shepherd and half, I dunno, wiener dog or something. He was tall, fairly cylindrical in shape, and unfortunately for me, nothing at all like a Scotty. One of his ears perked, while the other flopped. His tail was curly, but sort of cocked off in one direction, and he didn’t seem able to close his mouth all the way.

Still, he was lovable as all hell, I have to give him that. And it wasn’t his fault that he wasn’t a Scotty.

The front door clanged open just as Mrs. Brubecker and I were finishing our meeting in my studio, and I heard Jeanette talking to someone who, in retrospect, did have a very growly voice. I was neck-deep in sketching though, so I didn’t pay any attention to Captain Sexy Voice for quite a while. Everything I did, when I finally got around to doing it, was highly regimented. I met with a client, took some sketches, took some measurements, sketched some more, and did a lot of frowning before I finished.

Usually when I finished something, I’d look at it and frown some more. It’s always a thing I’ve done – I’m way, way, way too self-critical. Everything I do, I think is complete garbage. I learned about halfway through my twenties that no one else seemed to think that, and when I hit the big three-oh, I realized how much time I was wasting with the self-doubt. That didn’t stop me from feeling it though, like a slow, driving, punch in the gut. You know when you watch boxing, and one guy gets a knockout, so they show the punch in super slow motion? The waves that go through the, er, punchee? Ripples that you’d never see if you weren’t watching in super slow-motion?