Werewolf Wedding(8)

Jeanette was shaking her head, smiling sadly. “Oh honey, men haven’t done all that at once since Studio 54 stopped being a thing.”

I picked up my chisel and took off a chunk of clay that had hardened wrong.

“David Hasselhoff?” I asked. “And he wears sunglasses all the time, too, even indoors. Triple threat.”

Jeannie looked at me for a long moment, considering what I’d said. “Okay, fine. I’ll grant you The Hasslehoff,” she pronounced his name like it was a title, “and I’ll raise you William Shatner.”

“Oh,” I said, drawing the word out into about twelve syllables. “She plays the Shatner card. And he even has that. Weird. Way. He. Speaks. Where. Every single. Word. Is. Incredibly. Important?”

Jeannie grabbed her coffee and took a long pull. I could smell the vanilla syrup all the way across the table that functioned as her desk. I have no idea how she drank those things – just the scent put my fingernails on edge. Then again, I put mayo on steak, so I probably don’t have much room to talk. For a few moments we just sat in silence as the plodding, lazy rainstorm that had been patting the windows with slow, fat drops since about eight that morning grew fiercer.

Just thinking that word – fierce – put a little twinge in my belly. As usual for the past several days, my thoughts went to Jake. I couldn’t stop myself from daydreaming about the heat in Jake’s fingertips and the goosebumps he raised and... Okay, yeah I’ll admit it, the tingling in my ladyparts; it was enough to distract me from what I was doing.

I bit my lip, sort of trying to concentrate, but I wasn’t thinking. For one damn second, my mind wandered – and that’s never a good thing when you’re hammering away at a statue that you’re going to be paid God knows how much money for. I thought about that, and then in the next second, my mind turned to that twenty five grand, and then...

It was like those stories you hear about someone’s heart stopping and their spirit flies up to the corner of the room and watches the doctors and everyone rushing around. Then, they blast them with a defibrillator, and the spirit’s vacuumed back up into the body. Except I wasn’t having a heart attack, I’d just screwed up like four days’ worth of work.

I watched my mallet swing.

The tip of the chisel slipped to exactly the one place where it could really do some damage – the delicate joint between the neck and the shoulder.

I bit my lip harder, for some reason completely incapable of stopping my hand as the mallet connected with the chisel, even though I saw the mistake I was making in a flash before I made it.

Thunk.

That ungodly, sickening, horrific sound reverberated through my entire body. I didn’t even hear it so much as I felt it.

The sound of a thousand nails on a thousand wet chalkboards would not make my teeth hurt any worse. The awful cry of a dying rabbit, or a trapped piglet, had nothing on the sound I heard a split second later.

The crack opened in slow-motion, like when your toe catches in a crack, you fall and try desperately to catch yourself but end up face-planting on the sidewalk. I saw every single event in the chain, but couldn’t stop any of them.

I heard Jeannie say “oh no!” with exaggerated slowness. The first thing that sprang to mind was a scene in a Friday the 13th movie where Jason, that hockey-masked lunatic, swings an axe and the whole world slows. The hapless teenager he’s about to dismember raises her arms, screams in slow-mo, and then...

Thunk.

It wasn’t the sound of an axe hitting flesh, but at that very second, it was a million times worse. The entire arm, not just a chunk, not just a piece, the whole damn thing fell. I squealed, Jeannie shouted, and then the clay hit the concrete floor and exploded in a supernova of dust, fragments, and lost work.

When the world sped back up to normal, I looked over at Jeannie, who was gawking at the formerly beautiful biceps and forearm, which was now just a mess on the floor.

Her voice was as flat as my pulse as she announced, “His arm fell off.”

The plaster dust hit my nose, my eyes squinted up involuntarily and I unleashed the most savage sneeze of my life. It felt like my brain rattled in my skull. If getting a concussion from a sneeze was possible, I’d never be able to play football again after that sneeze.

“Uh,” Jeannie broke the silence, and with it, chipped away slightly at the tension in the air. “I guess you can make it a Venus de Milo?”

I snorted, thankful for the laugh, but still sick to my stomach. “Better get started on the seashell then.”

We looked at each other for a moment longer before another voice intruded, one that I hadn’t realized was there until the owner stepped out from the shadows at the front of my studio like some kind of weird vampire cliché. I looked at him for a second before I remembered that he was talking.

“Whatever he’s paying you,” this new guy said, “I’ll double it.”

“Huh?”

Jeannie and I exchanged a glance. “What are you talking about?” I asked.

The stranger tipped his head toward the busted statue. “Him. Whatever he’s paying you for that ridiculously gaudy piece of self-aggrandizement, I’ll pay you double to turn him down.”

I shook my head. “Why? Although actually we haven’t finalized the cost yet. Er, not like I would tell you anyway. Client confidentiality,” I added hastily. I’m not sure why I thought he might be some kind of lawyer, or some kind of test, but there it is. I can be a little paranoid from time to time.