Page 64 of Dirty Laundry (Down and Dirty)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

When Carine’s eyelids sprang open, her heart was already pounding. The room was dim, and her surroundings didn’t resemble her bedroom at the model house. She was half on top of something too firm to be her body pillow.

The something shifted.

The something’s breath tickled Carine’s forehead.

Oh shit. Oh shit. Wait. Don’t fuck it up. Just chill.

She rolled off of Heidi, imitated a log, and held her breath.

Just be cool. She didn’t notice.

She remembered that Heidi had told her to respect their assigned sides of the bed the first night Carine had visited. Although Carine had been triumphant then, she trampled all over the boundary in her second effort. She invaded Heidi’s side to an extreme.

Heidi didn’t move beyond rolling her right shoulder in its socket, sighing, and letting her head fall onto its other side.

Then Carine heard the grunt and dull clink outside.

Heidi remained still, but Carine gritted her teeth.

Kettlebell. You’ve got to be kidding me.

She patted the nightstand until her hand landed on something phone-shaped. Snatching it up, she looked at the time.

6:58.

She would have bet her designer purse that the condo association had a stricture about quiet enjoyment hours and that they ended at seven a.m.

That grunt hadn’t been a 6:58 grunt, though. That had been a “Warmed up fifteen minutes ago, so now let’s lift heavy shit” grunt.

With the wrath of Khan bubbling and reincarnating inside her, she eased carefully out from beneath the covers and stood. As a courtesy, she rubbed the sleep crust out of her eyes and scraped her flattened hair out of her face before heading to the great room.

The sun wasn’t even good and up yet, but that was all right with her. She may have been a hopeless case in bedroom situations, but out in the world, she knew how to put people in her places when she needed to.

“Six fifty-eight. What the hell is wrong with people?”

Grumbling, she pushed the curtains aside, twisted the vertical blinds’ swivel rod, walked the slats all the way to the left, and then opened the patio door.

Shoeless and braless, she stepped outside in the borrowed nightshirt. She immediately spotted the first sunrise meathead next to the stone half-wall barrier between the units.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked before he even had time to properly assess her.

The woman beyond him rose from the downward-facing dog pose she’d taken and gave Carine an aggrieved, Late-Gen-Y stare.

She could try to cow Carine all she wanted to with the look, but Carine was impermeable. She’d been born before Elizabeth City got decent cable, and not once in her life did she ever get a participation trophy for anything beyond Vacation Bible School.

“Has it maybe dawned on you that there’s a reason why there are rubber mats at gyms beneath the weights?” she asked. “Or that maybe some folks like to rest in the mornings?”

He opened his mouth, but Carine made a slashing gesture. She didn’t actually need to hear him talk.

“Nuh-uh. No, sir. If you’re fixin’ to tell me that you didn’t think you were being that loud, don’t bother. You know exactly how loud you’re being because you wait until just close enough to seven that you think no one will say anything to you. And maybe neither of your neighbors have up until this point, so you thought you’d just wear them down and keep on getting away with it. But I see now why they haven’t said anything.”

The condo was probably the starter home they’d moved into straight out of their first apartment together. They were old enough to know there were rules and to have a vague idea of what they were. They were also young enough to think the boundaries of the unspoken social contract didn’t really matter that much.

She gave him the same glower that she gave Shora’s home cleaning contractors when they claimed they’d finished but had actually neglected to clean the greasy fingerprints off the windows or vacuum the sawdust off the baseboards. It was her“Don’t try that shit on me”look.

Valerie had taught her how to make it, and it had yet to fail her.

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