Excerpt: Reading in the Dark / Unsettled

From Reading in the Dark

Althea felt off balance, rushed, and over the verge of irritation. After a week of marital bliss, her small apartment had changed from the calming oasis of her artistic making into an overstuffed storage closet with no alone time at all. She mopped her forehead after she took her experimental concoction out of the oven. She heard John swearing in the bathroom. There was an old George Carlin skit her mother liked to listen to on CD about the seven words you can’t say on the radio. John had exceeded the seven words and had come around again to the beginning of the list.

She shivered, the hairs rose along her spine. John had never raised his voice in her presence before. He had never said any of those words in her presence before either. He jogged into the kitchen wearing jeans and a scrub shirt, his lab coat tossed over his shoulder. He grabbed her cell phone from the counter and disconnected it from the charger.

“I dropped my phone in the toilet,” he said. “It doesn’t work now. They just paged me, gotta go.”

“Wait,” she yelled at his back as he slammed through the kitchen door.

He turned, hand on the door, and looked at her questioningly. He reminded her of a predator, sleek and balanced, taught and energetic, caught in mid stride.

“You said you’d be here,” she accused. “I have a bunch of strangers coming over and I was counting on you to be here.”

“You’ll be okay,” he said, “they’re a bunch of old ladies who write romances, how bad can they be?”

“What if they’re axe murderers just pretending to be little old ladies that write romances,” she asked. “Are you ready to come home and find a blood bath waiting here for you? Maybe with an axe waiting to come down on your head when you come in the door?”

He exhaled sharply and scowled. “Come on,” he said, “I don’t have a choice. When they call, us slave labor types have to come running.”

She gave him a look that said he was exaggerating.

“I am worried,” she said. “I am worried about meeting these people I’ve never met before except on the internet. I have a lot to do and I was counting on you helping me get some of it done. I was also hoping you’d be here in case one of them brings her gang member boyfriend or her criminally insane son along with her. They were all talking to each other about what a scary neighborhood we live in and how they felt uncomfortable coming here.”

“I have to go,” he said. He closed the door and she heard him running down the metal stairs behind the building.

She locked the door, listening for the solid thunk of the deadbolt, then turned the handle and gave the door a tug to make sure it was locked.