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She turned back to the street. Yep, Mom’s cheerfully red Camaro was parked in front of the house.
Turning to the driveway, she saw Pop’s Road King but not Reed’s Breakout Or Zach’s Fat Bob, which he’d started riding again the day before, despite still having staples in his belly.
So only Pop was home, but Mom was here? That had not happened since Lyra was in high school. What the fuck?
As she put her hand on the doorknob, an answer occurred to her: Mom had come to yell at Pop some more about the Bulls. Oh, goody.
Shoring up her patience, Lyra opened the door and stepped in.
The house was quiet. Brutus didn’t even come to see who was home.
“Pop?” Lyra called as she set her bag on the hall table and kicked off her pumps. High heels sucked. “Hey, Pop? Mom?”
Nothing. Weird.
She went to the kitchen, which was also quiet, and to the patio doors to check the back yard. Nobody was out there, not even the dog.
“Brutie?” she called. “You here, boy?” In answer, she heard a faint, pathetic whine. Sounded like he’d trapped himself in a bedroom again.
Setting aside the mystery of her parents’ location, and the idea that they’d gone off somewhere together, apparently on foot, Lyra went to the staircase and up.
At the top landing, she found the dog curled up against the closed door to the master bedroom and looking about as forlorn as a wolfdog could look. Pop had closed him out of his bedroom and apparently locked the door, and there was nothing that caused Brutus more agony than being separated by a door from his human.
Thinking to cajole the dog to her room, where he was invited and could get condolence snuggles, Lyra took two steps toward her father’s bedroom.
And then she heard “Ohfuck, Ben!”
Her mother’s voice. But not flouncy or cheery. Or angry. Earthy and breathless. She remembered that voice.
Back in the day, Reed and Lyra used to complain to each other about their parents’ bedroom activities. It got to be a running joke between them. All the way up to the divorce, their parents had fucked like oversexed bunnies. Pop was quiet, thankfully, besides an occasional grunt of exertion, but he routinely got their mother to basically do operatic scales.
“Ben, yes! Ohgod! More!”
Frozen in the second-floor hallway, Lyra comprehended that her divorced parents were, at that very moment, fucking.
They were fucking.
They’d hardly been alone in a room together in nearly nine years, but they sure as hell were alone in a room now.
There was a time, in the first years after their split, when Lyra would have done a Snoopy dance in the hallway if she’d come upstairs to this discovery. Now, she was quite stunned, extremely confused, and a little scared.
Brutus whined again.
Lyra patted her thigh and whispered, “C’mon, boy.”
He looked at the door once more, then got up and padded to her.
She scratched under his chin. “Yeah, I don’t know what to think, either. Let’s go hide.”
He seemed down with that plan, so she led him into her bedroom and closed the door.
What the fuck?
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~oOo~
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