Page 29 of Breaking the Ice

“Oh, Sam…”

Vincent the funeral director was just plain creepy. His handshake was cold and limp and he looked like he was wearing cadaver make-up. Nick was going to die laughing.

Hehadto be punking her now.

She really needed to talk to him about vetting her blind dates better. What was wrong with his brothers? Didn’t any of their wives say:Oh no darling, you couldn’t possibly set anyone up with Vincent, he sleeps in a coffin. Or maybe they were just sickof having a stiff around to dinner and glad to ditch him on any unsuspecting female.

And when it came to the inevitable kiss test, she just couldn’t do it. He was zeroing in and she couldn’t bear the thought of lips as cold as his hands touching hers.

She made a big show of thanking him and held out her hand, pumping his vigorously. He gave her an insipid smile and left and Samantha started to think that eerily white teeth perhaps weren’t so bad after all.

It was quiet in the apartment as she let herself in, quiet enough to hear her eggs shrieking in despair. “You like me just the way I am, don’t you, Godzilla?” she murmured as she walked into the kitchen to chat with her rather unusual-looking goldfish.

His bowl sat at the end of the kitchen bench and Samantha thought again how she really ought to buy him a bigger house. A tank, even a small one would surely make Godzilla’s proportions less noteworthy. Maybe if she removed the toys it’d have a slimming effect?

“Here,” she said, uncapping the fish food bottle and sprinkling a few flakes.

Godzilla lumbered to the surface, mouthed at it a little, stared at her with a black fishy eye and swam away. “I know, I know, I’m an enabler.”

Oh God, how sad. She was standing alone in her apartment talking to her gland-challenged goldfish. She had way too much time on her hands these days. At least when she’d worked for Bob she got in so late most nights she’d been too tired to realize how pathetic her life was.

Samantha threw herself down on her couch and stared at the wall, depressed as hell. If she had a baby her life would be different. The yearning to fill the emptiness with someone in herown image intensified until it was a physical ache in her chest and she flicked the television on to distract herself from the pain.

A doctor was pointing to a chart hanging on his office wall of the female reproductive system, explaining the anatomy to a couple and where their baby was going to be implanted.

Great – an IVF documentary.Just what she needed.

Suppressing the urge to hurl the remote at the television, she switched it off in disgust, preferring the wall and its flocked velvet wallpaper to yet another reminder of her empty womb. Although suddenly, it seemed to be taunting her as well. Why had she never noticed how strikingly similar the pattern was to the chart she’d just seen on the TV?

The beige and green swirls, which she’d always assumed to be floral in origin, now looked like empty uteruses flanked either side by a fallopian tube which curled at the ends, just like the chart, to cup what looked alarmingly like ovaries.

The more she looked at it, the more obvious it became.

She’d never really given a thought to the wallpaper before other than to wonder what the hell they were thinking in the fifties. But it went with the original Lino and Laminex in the kitchen and the ancient locks on the double-hung windows and suited the whole retro feel to the building. To have renovated with more modern décor, as many of the tenants had done over the years, had seemed wrong.

But, oh dear God! She was surrounded by fallopian tubes. On every wall! The empty velvet uteruses mocked her. The bud-like ovaries stared down at her accusingly.Listen to your eggs, they seemed to bellow.

“Screw you,” Samantha muttered belligerently as she glared defiantly at the walls.

She would not be intimidated by crap 1950s décor.

“I have a bone to pick with you,” Samantha said, marching through the shop to the back room the next morning. She was even crankier about the Vincent debacle after a fitful night’s sleep where visions of baron velvet uteruses had danced in her head.

Nick looked up from lifting a box of books. He was wearing soft faded jeans that hugged his thighs to perfection and a navy tee that showed off his very nice biceps. A pen was wedged between his teeth and she had a sudden image of him holding a dagger there instead.

“Another disaster?” he asked around the pen as he set the box down.

“You have got to be kidding me! Nick, where are you getting these guys from? Surely there must be one out of all the men your six brothers know that is… I don’t know… normal!”

If she thought he might sympathize, she was wrong. He was trying and failing – miserably – to suppress a grin.

“Bad, huh?”

“Have you ever met Vincent?” she asked through gritted teeth.

“No. He’s supposed to be a great guy. Edward plays golf with him.”

“He’screepy.”

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