Phoning It In

(Excerpt from the WIP)

Not often a girl finds all the justification she needs for a complete nervous breakdown laying on the living room carpet.

The cat sniffed the glaive I'd dreamed of last night and looked up at me. Weren't you going to boil this baby in peroxide or something?

I was, if I could bring myself to touch it again, but the phone was ringing. I set down my mug and picked up the receiver. "What?"

"PMSing, sweetheart?" It was William, sounding smug.

How had he gotten my number? "What?"

"Oh, dear, are you busy? Is he big? Hung? Easily sedated?"

I took the phone away from my ear and stared at it. I was facing a manifested delusion, my judgment was impaired, I had now-you-seem-'em-now-you-don't injuries, I was hearing the guy who had done it, and William wanted to chat like a girlfriend with an itch?

I put the phone back to my ear. "What do you want?"

"All of the above, with a can of low-fat whipped cream and a king size four poster bed with a waterproof mattress protector," he told me. "But I digress. My love, much as I dislike whining, I have nothing but cold."

I imagined toddling over to his apartment and clubbing him over the head with the rod-end of the glaive. Now that would make a decent reality test. "Cold?"

"Water, darling, water. Pouring from yon taps. Can't you hear the cubes tinkling as they hit the porcelain?" He heaved a sigh. "I also have no cheesecake with which to bribe you, but there is this incredibly delish, tragically straight young man of my acquaintance who would adore making yours. Would you consider him an adequate substitute?"

I thought of Chane and swallowed a sudden mouthful of spit. "Not really."

"Not enough? Well, my trusty crotchometer indicates that on the veg scale, he’d come in around cucumber."

"Cucumber."

"The veg scale, sweetie. As in comparative sized vegetables. You know, starts at cherry tomato and ends at zucchini." William yawned. "An ivory, not ebony, cucumber, by the way, if that is a concern. Perhaps a tad on the wandish side, but certainly long enough to leave an impression."

He was talking about the guy's dick, I realized. Like to him it was a slice of the food pyramid. Then again, who was I to judge? I'd just been fondly remembering Frenching a snake-tongued demon version of my wacko ex-boyfriend, the mob boss. "Great."

"I'll trade an intro for thirty minutes of steaming bathwater, what do you say?" he wheedled. "Can you coax that basement monster to relinquish that much?"

"Maybe." Is there a monster in the basement? I wondered idly. I had Chane haunting my dreams. I had his voice in my head and, apparently, a thing for demons. I had imaginary bruises showing on and disappearing from my face. I had a freaking medieval dream weapon laying on the floor in the living room.

A monster in the basement would make a nice change.

"I know you’re a chick of few words," William said, "but this monosyllabic side of you is starting to worry me."