Playing Games. Dianne Drake

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      “Ten.”

      “Then I’ll be here at eight.” He grinned at her. “G’night.”

      “But what about the leak?”

      “Wrap a towel around it, for Pete’s sake.” He pulled the pipe wrench out of his waistband and handed it to her. “I’ve changed my mind…be my guest.”

      The wrench slipped from his hand and landed with a hollow thunk on the old wood-and-linoleum countertop. “Well, now you’ve done it,” Roxy warned, her face poker-straight.

      “Done what?” he asked.

      “Ten…nine…eight…seven…” Pounder next door started up on the five count, and the beat went on for nearly half a minute. “That,” she said, smiling. “That’s what I was warning you about. And this.” She opened a drawer then shut it, not particularly loud, either. With that came the encore, a sequence half again as long as the first chorus, accented, at the end of the performance, by one last clap that knocked an old, black trivet right off Roxy’s wall and into the sink. “So like I was saying, Ned,” Roxy continued, without missing a beat, “it’s driving me nuts—the dripping—and I have a lot of work to do tonight, and if you can please stop it for me, I’d be grateful.”

      “How often does that happen?” he asked, nodding at the wall.

      Roxy shrugged. “Not more than three, four times a night.” Grinning, “Someone over there’s a Listening Tom. Too bad for them it’s only my kitchen and not my bedroom.” Yeah, right. Sounds from the Roxy Rose boudoir were guaranteed to put anybody to sleep, including Roxy Rose herself.

      Ned cleared his throat, turning back around to face the sink. “And what do you do every night to annoy her? Georgette Selby’s her name, by the way. She’s eighty-two. Sweet. Bakes chocolate chip cookies. Used to be a schoolteacher.”

      “Normally, it’s just breathing.” Roxy grabbed up the pipe wrench, but he yanked it away from her. “Once in a while I eat Twinkies, and I have this little TMJ thing in my jaw…it sort of pops occasionally.”

      Stepping back over to the sink, wrench in hand, Ned bumped into Roxy. “I’m going to bend down now, Miss Rose. Take a look under the sink. If you don’t mind moving back…”

      Did she mind stepping back to get a better look at him bending down? About as much as she minded chocolate and orgasms and lots of money. “Just trying to see what you’re doing so I can do it myself next time. So tell me what you’re doing,” she said, struggling to reign herself back in.

      “Turning off the water at the valve. That’ll stop the drip and when I get back over here at seven-thirty…”

      “Eight.”

      “Seven, I’ll get everything fixed up the right way.”

      “Think it’s gonna work for tonight? No more drip?” The valve handle was tight and she watched him put extra muscle into his next twist—translating into something so sexy on his backside that it almost made Roxy squirm right out of her skin. Damn those baby-making hormones, anyway. They sure were in overdrive tonight. Success now, the rest later, she reminded herself. “Need another…” a slight tuchus wiggle caused her to gulp “…another tool?” she sputtered. Okay, Rox. Success now, blah, blah, blah. Remember?

      “There!” he declared, rather than answering her question. “That should hold it, temporarily.” Ned’s head had barely cleared the open space under the sink when the valve groaned a plumbing obscenity, then let the full force of a geyser rip, shooting water everywhere—the walls, the ceiling, Roxy, Ned. Springing to his feet, Ned yanked the faucet handle, only to have it break off in his hand. No simple fixes now. It was a full-out water cataclysm in need of some instantaneous plumbing surgery, and Ned’s only surgical instrument or know-how, it seemed, was a pipe wrench that clunked to the floor when he leapt back from the deluge.

      Scrambling to avoid the fat force of the spray, lest she be caught up in a full-frontal wet T-shirt look, Roxy darted into the bathroom, grabbed up an armful of towels, and dashed back into the kitchen only to find Ned standing there in the middle of Niagara Falls clutching a cell phone, staring down at his pipe wrench. “Don’t just stand there,” she cried. “Stop it. Turn something. Or plug something up.”

      Ned shrugged. “The plumber will be here in a few minutes.”

      Shaking her head, Roxy stared at the kitchen wall, awaiting the inevitable. And sure enough, before she could even blink, Georgette “Pounder” Selby commenced doing her thing, this time, it seemed, with two fists, and perhaps, a foot.

      3

      Monday Night and All Is Dry

      “WELL, HE’S NOT BAD to look at, but with a pipe wrench he’s lethal, and not in a good way.” Three nights since the great flood and Roxy’s apartment still wasn’t back to normal. To his credit, Ned had sent in a water damage restoration crew, and nothing was permanently ruined. Just soggy.

      “And he didn’t come back after he did all that?” Astrid handed Roxy the broadcast notes for the night. Nothing out of the ordinary—a new sponsor, a proposal from station management to add another hour of programming at the top end of her show, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense since her show was called Midnight Special and not Eleven o’clock Special. “They might as well make me drive-time,” she snorted. Drive-time, either morning or afternoon, was a coveted slot. But a deadly one for Roxy’s show since her late-night topics weren’t even close to drive-time subject matter.

      “They know you won’t do it,” Astrid said, “but they keep hoping.”

      “They’re lucky they get two hours of me a night. And they know that!” Of course, she was lucky to get those two hours, and she knew that. Hiring someone who’d jumped right from clinical counselor to talk-show host in the blink of an eye, and without any radio experience, had been a big risk for her station owners. And now, backing her in a syndication deal, and letting her continue to broadcast from their facilities was a heck of a nice thing to do. Of course, she would own that show, with a piece of it going to Astrid and generous compensation to her station owners, so it was a win-win thing all the way around. She hoped. Gosh, did she hope.

      “So you said he wasn’t wearing a shirt when he came over?” Astrid waved at Doyle who was settling into his chair in the engineering booth, ready to scarf down a pizza.

      “Nothing but jeans, and I swear…” she raised her hand into the air as if swearing a solemn oath “…I was good. I mean this guy is…like…the best thing you’ve ever had in your dreams—or fantasies—right there in my apartment in the middle of the night. And all I can do is stand there practically drooling. Not that he would have noticed.” Roxy waved at Doyle, too, then sat down in her chair. Still thirty minutes until air. She spread out her latest house plans on the desk. Coming along pretty well, except that aviary where the kitchen should go. “Then I didn’t even see him in the hall all weekend. Not once. I mean, he’s right across from me, so I kept watching, but I don’t think he even opened his door all weekend. Worse than that, he sent this big, burly plumber over—the kind whose pants didn’t quite make it up to his belt line by a good four inches. Believe me, that’s not the bare butt I wanted to be seeing in my kitchen. But it’s fixed, so I may never see him again. The handyman, not the plumber, who I never want to see again.”

      “So СКАЧАТЬ