Like Coffee and Doughnuts. Elle Parker
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and buy you dinner,” I said, starting up the car and backing into the alley.
“Sure, but that’s for services rendered.”
I gave him a sideways glance. “Yeah, that makes it sound much better.”
Seth smirked and hung his arm over the side of the car. Clearly, he wasn’t traumatized by the incident.
“What did you do to set him off, anyway?” I asked.
“Oh shit, I was just flirting with the waitress a little. It was harmless. I told her those jeans must be from outer space because her ass is out of this world.”
“Oh my God, did you really bring a lame line like that?”
“Sure,” he said. “Us goofy little guys can get away with shit like that. People think it’s cute.”
“Cute and goofy are not what I’m generally going for when I approach women.”
Seth rolled his eyes. “Because you’re such a ladies man.”
“I can be. I just have standards, is all. I’m very selective about who I choose to spend time with, whereas you’ll fuck anything that moves. And several things that don’t.”
“Touchy, touchy,” Seth said, reaching over to pet my hair. “It’s all right, honey, you have a nice ass too.”
I shoved his hand away. “Shut up and figure out where you want to eat.”
“Aw...come on, Dino,” he purred, crawling across the seat to breathe on my ear. “You chased off my sure thing for the night. The least you could do is take her place...”
A shiver ran down my spine in spite of myself, and I turned to give him the stony look I usually do when he gets this way. When I said he’d fuck anything that moved, I wasn’t kidding. He’s game for anything and anybody, and it doesn’t matter what goodies they have on their plate.
“Dinner?” I reminded him. “Ideas?”
He sighed. “How about...the Oar House? I could eat a burger.”
* * * *
After dinner, we went back to Ed’s. My car was piled with the last load of boxes and suitcases from my apartment. The building was being torn down to make way for more condos, and Seth offered me his couch until I could find a new place to live.
The garage is a small red, white and blue auto shop located right next to the marina on the Intracoastal Waterway, between Madeira Beach and St. Petersburg. Seth more or less runs the place, since Ed has taken to spending all his time buying stuff at junk auctions and selling it on eBay.
When I pulled in, Ed’s dogs were yapping and running around the parking lot. One is a pug with the coloring of a Siamese cat, and the other is an old mutt whose forehead is so flat she couldn’t possibly have a brain inside.
I shut the engine off, and Seth got out of the car. He cast a glance over the mound of stuff in the backseat and shook his head. “Matilda looks like a pack mule, man. That is no way to treat a venerable old lady.”
“Although you are absolutely correct, I would like to point out that this car is the exact same age as me, so watch it with the ‘venerable old’ talk. Where in the hell did you learn to use the word venerable, anyway?”
“I use words like venerable,” Seth said, mildly disgruntled. “And Matilda is forty-one, that’s like...ninety in car years.”
“She may look like an old lady, but inside she still purrs like a kitten.”
“Same as you,” Seth said with a wink.
“I have never looked like an old lady.” I grabbed the nearest box, shoved it into Seth’s arms, and took another for myself, following him through the shop to the back room where the rest of my stuff was stashed. It took us three trips to get everything inside. The only things left in the car were my suitcase and garment bag, a box of stuff off my desk, and my laptop computer.
Seth took the box and I grabbed the bags, and we climbed the wooden stairway that ran up the outside of the garage to an apartment built over it. This was Seth’s place. And mine, for the foreseeable future.
The steps creaked alarmingly and bounced more than I generally liked in my climbing apparatus. “Don’t you worry about these falling off?”
“Naw,” he said, pausing to lean on the railing and look back at me. “I used to, but that bugged me, so a couple of years ago, I spent about half an hour out here jumping up and down for all I was worth to see what would happen. Turns out they’re more solid than they seem. Here I’ll show you—”
“Do not jump on these steps right now, or I will smack the shit out of you.”
Seth grinned and ran the rest of the way up.
Seth’s monkey-like qualities extended to his living habits, and I never failed to be a little dismayed when I went into his apartment. Junk was littered everywhere. Magazines, pizza boxes, beer cans, laundry. Dirty dishes and open cereal boxes covered the counter in the kitchenette. The coffee table was spread with newspaper and sported a vast array of engine parts and beer cans. Behind that, against the wall, was a massive brown sofa with fat, low slung cushions. It was...pristine.
“You cleaned it?” I asked, disbelieving.
“Yup.” Seth beamed. “I even pulled out the cushions and vacuumed all down in there. I knew you’d freak out about sleeping on it if I didn’t.”
“Since when do you own a vacuum?”
“I brought the Shop-Vac up here. Does the same job, right?”
“It would appear so,” I said, putting my bags down on the one clean surface in the entire apartment. “Now all I have to worry about is what might crawl out of the darkness to get me in the night.”
“Yeah, well, I think there’s a box of doughnuts under the chair. You can toss those to distract it.”
“You are disgusting, you know that?” I unzipped my garment bag and laid it out on the sofa. “Where can I hang my clothes up?”
Seth stared at me blankly.
“Got some space in a closet? I need to hang these up or they wrinkle.”
“Um, right.” Seth pivoted on his heel and kicked a path to the tiny coat closet by the door. He pulled a few computer boxes out of it and bounced them into a corner. “You need me to make some space in the bathroom for your curlers and make-up?”
“Fuck you. Normal people hang their clothes up. This is the usual way in which grown-ups do things.” I bent down to look under the chair. “Are there really doughnuts under there? This is not a healthy way to live. Seriously.”
Chapter 2
“There’s a lot of apartments for rent in St. Pete,” Seth said, reading the classifieds and taking a sip of his beer.
We were in the Blue Bottle, a dumpy place done in some kind of attempt at a beach house-sea shanty motif, which ended up looking more like an Italian crab shack. Worked for me. They had the typical seaside stuff on the walls, like starfish and life preservers, but the tables were covered in checkered red and white cloths and empty mayonnaise jars with candles in them.
“No way, I hate it over there. Hell, you couldn’t get out of there fast enough, now you think I should live there? It’s too bland. I came down here for the beach, and I want to stay by the beach.”
“Too bland? You’re worried about too bland?”
“Well, yeah. I gotta’ live in a place with a little style, you know?”
“O-kay...” Seth said with a low whistle. “Dino needs a spicy apartment.”
“Stylish,” I corrected him. “Charismatic.”
“Charismatic?