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Four hands went up, and “Money” was written in beside the number six.
“Since this is fantasy,” Jaine said, “he should be good-looking. Not drop-dead gorgeous, because that could be a problem. Luna’s the only one of us pretty enough to hold her own with a handsome guy.”
“I’m not doing so good at it, am I?” Luna replied with a tinge of bitterness. “But, yeah, for Mr. Perfect to be perfect, you should enjoy looking at him.”
“Hear, hear. Number seven is: Good to look at.” When she had finished writing, Marci looked up with a grin. “I’m going to be the one to say what we’ve all been thinking. He should be great in bed. Not just good; he should be great. He should be able to make my toes curl and my eyes roll back in my head. He should have the stamina of a Kentucky Derby winner and the enthusiasm of a sixteen-year-old.”
They were still rolling with laughter when the waiter plunked their orders down on the table. “What’s so funny?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t understand,” T.J. managed to gasp.
“I get it,” he said wisely. “You’re talking about men.”
“Nope, we’re talking science fiction,” Jaine said, which sent them off again. The people at the other tables were staring at them again, trying to overhear what was so funny.
The waiter left. Marci leaned over the table. “And while I’m at it, I want my Mr. Perfect to have a ten incher!”
“Oh, my!” T.J. pretended to swoon, fanning herself. “What I couldn’t do with ten inches—or rather, what I could do with ten inches!”
Jaine was laughing so hard she had to hold her sides. Keeping her voice down was an effort, and her words shook with hilarity. “C’mon! Anything over eight inches is strictly for show-and-tell. It’s there, but you can’t use it. It might look good in a locker room, but let’s face it—those extra two inches are leftovers.”
“Leftovers,” Luna gasped, holding her stomach and shrieking with laughter. “Let’s hear it for l-leftovers!”
“Oh, boy.” Marci wiped her eyes as she scribbled rapidly. “Now we’re cooking. What else does Mr. Perfect have?”
T.J. weakly waved her hand. “Me,” she offered between giggles. “He can have me.”
“If we don’t trample you getting to him,” Jaine said, and raised her glass. The other three lifted theirs, and they touched rims with ringing clinks. “To Mr. Perfect, wherever he is!”
three
Saturday morning dawned bright and early—way too bright, and way the hell too early. BooBoo woke Jaine at six A.M. by yowling in her ear. “Go away” she mumbled, pulling the pillow over her head.
BooBoo yowled again, and batted the pillow. She got the message: either get up, or he was going to unsheathe his claws. She pushed the pillow aside and sat up, glaring at him. “You’re evil, y’know that? You couldn’t do this yesterday morning, could you? No, you have to wait until my day off, when I don’t have to get up early.”
He looked unimpressed with her outrage. That was the thing about cats; even the scruffiest one was convinced of its innate superiority. She scratched him behind his ears and a low rumble shivered through his entire body. His slanted yellow eyes closed in bliss. “You just wait,” she told him. “I’m going to get you addicted to this scratching stuff, then I’m going to stop doing it. You’re going to go cold turkey, pal.”
He jumped down from the bed and padded to the open bedroom door, pausing to look back as if checking to make certain she was getting up. Jaine yawned and threw back the covers. At least she hadn’t been disturbed by her neighbor’s noisy car during the night, plus she had pulled down the window shade to keep out the morning light, so she had slept soundly until BooBoo’s wake-up call. She raised the shade and peeked through the sheer curtains at the driveway running beside hers. The battered brown Pontiac was there. That meant she had either been exhausted and slept like the dead, or he’d gotten a new muffler on t
he thing. She thought the exhausted-and-dead part was more likely than him getting a new muffler.
BooBoo evidently thought she was wasting time, because he gave a warning meow. Sighing, she pushed her hair out of her face and stumbled to the kitchen—stumbled being the operative word, because BooBoo helped her along by winding around her ankles as she walked. She desperately needed coffee, but knew from experience that BooBoo wouldn’t leave her alone until he was fed. She opened a can of food, dumped it on a saucer, and set it on the floor. While he was occupied, she put on a pot of coffee, then headed for the shower.
Stripping off her summer sleepwear of T-shirt and panties—during winter she added socks to the ensemble—she stepped into a nice warm shower and let it pummel her awake. Some people were larks; some were owls; Jaine was neither. She didn’t function well until after a shower and a cup of coffee, and she liked to be in bed by ten at the latest. BooBoo was upsetting the natural order of things with his demands to be fed before anything else was done. How could her mom have done this to her?
“Just four weeks and six days more,” she muttered to herself. Who would have thought that a cat that was normally so loving would turn into such a tyrant when he wasn’t in his regular environment?
After a long shower and two cups of coffee, her synapses started connecting and she began remembering all the things she needed to do. Buy the jerk next door a new trash can—check. Buy groceries—check. Do laundry—check. Mow the lawn—check.
She felt a little excited at the last item. She had grass to cut, her very own grass! She had lived in apartments since leaving home, none of which had come with lawns. There were usually some tiny patches of grass between the sidewalk and the building, but maintenance always took care of mowing them. Hell—heck, they were so tiny the job could have been done with scissors.
But her new home came with its very own lawn. In anticipation of this moment, she had invested in a brand-new lawn mower, self-propelled, state-of-the-art, guaranteed to make her brother, David, turn green with envy. He’d have to buy a riding mower to one-up her on this, and since his lawn wasn’t any bigger than hers, a riding mower would be an expensive sop to his ego. Jaine figured his wife, Valerie, would step in before he did anything that foolish.
Today, she would have her inaugural grass-cutting. She could barely wait to feel the power of that red monster pulsing under her hands as it decapitated all those blades of grass. She had always been a sucker for red machinery.
First things first, though. She had to make a run to Wal-Mart and buy a new trash can for the jerk. A promise was a promise, and Jaine always tried to keep her word.
A quick bowl of cereal later, she pulled on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, stuck her feet in a pair of sandals, and was on her way.
