By the Book by Mary Kay McComas Read Free Book Online Page A

your bed to your new date?
    Dinner in Quincey—no matter which restaurant they went to—never required much dressing up. Sand-colored slacks and a white silk blouse were her first choice, the choice she would have normally made. She replaced them and, with a designing smile she didn’t even know she owned, chose a low-cut spaghetti-strapped sheath she’d ordered from a catalog and never worn, instead.
    She was dressed and finishing up her makeup—and getting a little nervous—when she heard a rap at her door. Strange how your hands can be so cold and your cheeks so hot when you have the jitters, she thought, placing one against the other to even them out. She left the bathroom mirror, checked herself in the hall mirror, then tidied herself at the door once more before opening it.
    “Zowie! Will you look at you!”
    “Oh. Hi, Eugene,” she said, attempting a welcome smile for her neighbor and missing by a mile. Not that he noticed.
    Bubba came to stand in the door beside her, took one look, then scurried down the stairs and out of sight.
    Eugene occupied the other second-floor apartment. For the most part he was a quiet tenant who worked days in the local fan factory and spent much of his free time surfing the Internet in his darkened apartment. In the name of charity she tried not to liken him to a mole, but truth be told, he not only acted like one, he looked like one. Pinched face. Thick glasses. Dirty nails. Dark unkempt fur ... uh ... hair.
    “Looks like someone’s got a date,” he observed astutely. It might have been her nerves, but there was something about bugging eyes behind thick glass focused on her overexposed chest that made her want to scream and run.
    “Someone does.”
    “Dinner?”
    “Yes.”
    “No ... leftovers, then?”
    Oh yes. Along with his other rodentlike mannerisms, Eugene also scrounged for food. Too nice by nature, she’d found it extremely difficult to refuse him—despite the fact that accommodating him was extremely annoying and distasteful. His one saving grace was that he wasn’t picky. He was delighted with the scraps in her frozen dinner trays; he thought a hastily made peanut butter sandwich and an apple a king’s feast, and an unopened can of spaghetti set her up in his book of saints.
    The mere mention of food was her cue to fetch him something to eat, but if what you’re doing isn’t making you happy— and it wasn’t— try doing the exact opposite.
    “No. No leftovers. None.”
    “None?” His gaze rose from her chest to meet hers.
    “Nope. No leftovers tonight, Eugene. Sorry,” she added. She wasn’t, of course. She felt liberated in an outlandish fashion. But old habits were so hard to break.
    He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his face twitching, sensing that something was wrong. When she didn’t scoot off to find him something, his instinctive need to feed took him elsewhere.
    “Want me to take your trash down for you?”
    “What?” she asked, taken back. It wasn’t an extraordinary question. He frequently took her trash down with his. It was a neighborly thing to do. Right?
    “Your trash? Want me to take it down to the dumpster for you?”
    “Ah. No.” She motioned behind her with a finger. “Felix. He’s here. He can take it down in the morning. But thanks.”
    “Felix?” He tried to look into her apartment. Clearly he hadn’t seen the car parked on the front lawn as yet. “He’s here? Is he your date?”
    “No,” she said, her voice taking an offensive tone. Her dates and her brother were none of his business.
    “Isn’t he going to eat?”
    “No,” she said, an octave higher. She didn’t need to give him an explanation, she knew, but the insanity of the situation was getting to her. “He’s ... under the weather ... a bit.”
    “Drunk,” he said in a holier-than-thou tone she couldn’t appreciate from a ratlike creature.
    “Plastered,” she said, picking her own adjective. “He couldn’t eat with a feedbag