Lineage(33)

The slam of the door was like a bold exclamation point at the end of an angry sentence. Lance stood with his hand pressed against the cool wall and waited for the boiling anger in his center to subside. It didn’t.

With a yell, he spun, grabbing the closest object at hand—a vase he had received as a gift from Andy when his second novel won a Bram Stoker award—and flung it as far and as hard as he could. The heavy blue vase glittered in the sunlight as it flew and shattered into a thousand sparkling pieces on the far wall. The tinkling patter of the shards hitting the floor snapped the trance of his anger. The rage that had been so sharp and crystalline seconds ago now seemed foolish and alien, as if he had been playing surrogate to someone else’s emotions.

Sighing deeply, Lance went about vacuuming up the glass on the floor, and then remembered the broken lamp from the night before. I’ll have to redecorate entirely if I don’t get a handle on this, he thought idly, and a halfhearted smile surfaced on his face. When he went to clean up the lamp, he found that Ellen had already swept it up and disposed of it, seemingly while he slept deeply that morning. The sight of the clean floor made his heart sink a little as he returned the vacuum to its place in the closet downstairs.

Lance shoveled the lonely egg along with the turkey bacon into the garbage, and set about making a protein shake in the blender. He had consumed half the shake when his iPhone buzzed briefly. When Lance picked it up, the text message that graced the screen didn’t make sense for a moment. You ready? Andy was nearly always short and to the point in his messages, but even this was succinct for him. Then the date came to Lance’s mind: a picture of the number 24 on his desk calendar and the words Meeting w/Ellington & Field scrawled in blue ink just below it.

“Shit,” he said to the empty room. His voice sounded flat, his emotions only fumes of before. How had the meeting slipped his mind? The morning just kept getting better. Another sigh escaped his parted lips as he mounted the stairs yet again and heard the sliding of tires on the concrete drive outside his house, which coincided with two short beeps of a horn. Andy’s here, Lance thought as he ignored another impatient burst of sound from his best friend’s car and tried to decide what shirt went best with disappointment.



“You said you wanted me to pick you up, and then you make me wait out here for fifteen minutes?” The door to the Audi had barely opened an inch when Andy’s voice started to pepper him with accusations. “I suppose you forgot all about the meeting, didn’t you? Typical f*cking writer. Typical.”

“It wasn’t fifteen minutes, you *. I got your message at ten and now it’s ten twelve—you do the math.” Lance slid into the black leather interior of the car and looked over at the man who sat in the driver’s seat. Andy could have passed for a young Aidan Quinn if the actor’s hair had been a lighter shade of brown and he swore almost constantly. Andy’s eyes were the only feature that ruined the likeness; color was nearly nonexistent. It seemed as if a blue-green had tried to bend the irises to its will but had lost and settled for a watered-down gray. Andy’s slight build looked out of place in the Armani suit tucked into the plush interior of the car. A joke about being a malnourished limo driver surfaced in Lance’s mind before being shoved away. He was pretty sure Andy wouldn’t appreciate it.

“Yeah, excuses. Always excuses. Sometimes I wonder if the world would be a better place if everyone was an Aspie,” Andy said, monotone, as he deftly flipped the car into drive and tore out of Lance’s turnaround as fast as he could go. The tires spun and caught as the landscape fled outside Lance’s window while he struggled to buckle his seat belt.

“Christ, can you slow down? I’m gonna get air sick over here,” Lance said as he finally snapped the buckle home.

“No time, my friend, no time. We’re late and your publishers are going to be very angry when we get there. What’s the expression you like to use? ‘Crawl up your ass’?”

“Jump down your throat, seriously. I’m surprised you haven’t picked that one up yet.”

“Yeah, well, I have more important things to do than learning expressions that don’t really make sense. Like figure out why my star author isn’t done with his rough draft that should’ve been turned in to his editor a month ago.”

Lance turned his head away from his friend and watched the small neighborhood that he resided in mesh with an on-ramp and then transform into a bustling divided two-lane. He opened his mouth and a loud snap filled the car as his jaw clicked into place.