“News flash,” I said. “I’ve got better. Right here.”
Michael and I clinked glasses, and toasted our survival.
However long it lasted.
LUNCH DATE
I rarely wrote stories from Claire’s point of view, mainly because she’s the main character in the books, so it seemed redundant to have her take the lead in the shorts, too. But I did enjoy it from time to time, such as in this short story (free on the Web site) that just gives us a taste of the romance building between Claire and Shane. This is set in that late-romance period somewhere around Feast of Fools when things are hot . . . but not yet reaching the boil that they would in Carpe Corpus.
One of Shane’s many terrible jobs is featured, which is always fun for me. Poor Shane. Poor bosses.
Lunch was always an iffy proposition at the Glass House. Some days all of Claire’s housemates were in; most days nobody was. Some days, there was food in the fridge. Most days, not. Claire had made a fine art out of scrounging up crackers and cans of soup. Her favorite was cream of tomato. Yum.
She was slurping up her soup, alone as usual, when she heard a thump from upstairs. Odd. She knew for a fact that Eve was at her job on campus, and Michael was off teaching guitar lessons. Shane . . . Well, she never knew for sure where Shane would be, but she’d looked for him before making lunch and there hadn’t been any sign of him.
Not another visitor through the portal. Honestly, having one of those mystic doorways in the house was getting to be a royal pain. “Grand Central Station,” Claire said, then sighed and gulped down the rest of her lunch before dumping the bowl in the sink and heading upstairs. The house was a comfortable mess, but it was slowly creeping toward the Oh my God, who lives here? kind of mess, so she’d have to get on everybody’s case to do a little picking up. Just to show she wasn’t immune, she picked up a stack of books she’d left on the dining table and carried them upstairs with her.
Once she’d dumped the books on top of—well, all the other books she’d been meaning to find a shelf for, Claire grabbed the miniature baseball bat Shane had bought her—aluminum, but electroplated in silver. Good for vampire-whacking, should the need come up. It was surprisingly heavy.
The thump came again. Not, as she would have thought, from Amelie’s private room upstairs, or from the attic.
It was coming from Shane’s room.
Claire took a firm grip on the bat, and flung open the door. “Freeze!” she yelled. Stress made her voice sound too high, like the squeak of a little girl on helium. Embarrassing. And not intimidating.
There was a half-naked man standing in the middle of Shane’s room.
Oh.
Shane, in his underwear, tried to get into his jeans so fast he staggered and tipped over onto the bed. “Hey!” he protested. “What is it with girls busting in on me when I’m getting dressed? Out!”
Claire couldn’t help it—she burst out laughing. It was ridiculously funny, the way he was rolling around on the bed trying to wiggle into those jeans, and also—well, yeah. Hot.
She lowered the bat and turned her back. “Sorry. I heard noises. I thought—wait. Girls, plural? Somebody else busts in on you besides me?”
She heard the bed creak, clothes rustling, and he said, “Well, yeah. Eve kind of walked into the bathroom once while I was in the shower. Which is when I got rid of the clear shower curtain and got the dark one.”
“Eve’s seen you naked?”
“Um—behind a sheet of plastic with water all over it? There’s no safe answer to this, is there?”
Claire turned, unasked. He was just pulling on his old gray T-shirt. “Not really,” she said. “Anyway. Why are you changing clothes?”
Shane tried for an innocent look, which didn’t go well on his face. “Got bored?”
“Shane, I’ve never seen you change clothes in the middle of the day, ever. You were gone when I got up, and you just got back. What happened?” Because she was thinking the worst. She supposed that the worst in places other than Morganville probably had something to do with him seeing another girl. Here, she was assuming he’d gotten blood all over himself.
He thought about lying to her; she could see it flash across his face. But then he sighed, shook his head, and opened up the closet door. He took out a plastic bag and held it out toward her.
Inside were his Nike cross-trainers, a pair of worn blue jeans, and a shirt that might have once been red, a hundred washings ago. And they stank. Claire pulled back with a choking sound. “What the heck is that?”
“You know how I said I was going to get a job?”