Crazy for You Read online

  “Our lease says no pets.” Bill put the plate on the table and stood beside it, his arms folded, a nonjolly, nongreen giant.

  Quinn poured chow into a bowl and put it on the floor. “Come on, baby. Dinner.”

  The dog sniffed the food and began to eat cautiously. Quinn filled a second bowl with water and put it beside the first. Katie bent to eat, and she looked so sweet that Quinn stroked her head.

  Katie squatted and peed.

  “Quinn!” Bill yelled, and the dog cringed away from his voice.

  “I’ve got it.” Quinn grabbed a paper towel from the roll beside the sink. Katie looked apologetic and distraught, and Quinn murmured her consolation as she mopped up the urine and then took a bottle of spray disinfectant out of the cupboard. “She’s a submission pee-er,” she told Bill as she scrubbed. “I didn’t know because I’ve been holding her all day. She gets nervous when people pat her and—”

  “Well, obviously it can’t stay here,” Bill said, triumph in his voice. “We can put paper down in the bathroom tonight, but tomorrow it goes.”

  Quinn finished mopping without saying anything. When she’d washed her hands, Bill extended his peace offering. “Your stroganoff’s getting cold.”

  Quinn slid into her chair and picked up her fork.

  Bill smiled at her, approving. “Now Edie will take the dog—”

  “I’m keeping the dog.” Quinn put her fork down.

  “You can’t,” Bill said. “It’ll ruin the carpet and there goes our damage deposit. Plus you’re at school all day. Who’s going to take care of it then?” He shook his head, calm in his own logic. “You’ll give it to Edie.”

  “No.”

  “Then I will,” Bill said, and began to eat.

  Quinn felt cold. “That’s a joke, right?”

  “You’re being irrational,” Bill said when he’d chewed and swallowed. “This dog would drive you crazy in no time. Look at it. All it does is shake. And pee.”

  “She’s cold,” Quinn said, and Bill shook his head and kept on eating. “Are you listening to me?” she said, as she felt the heat rise in her.

  “Yes, I’m listening,” Bill said. “And I’m taking care of you by taking it to Edie.”

  Quinn went dizzy for a minute with rage and then bit back her anger because yelling would only create a problem she’d have to fix.

  “It’s the sensible thing to do,” Bill told her. “Eat your dinner.”

  Looking at his smug, sure face, Quinn realized she’d created a monster. Bill thought she was going to give in because she always had; so why should he expect anything else? She’d trained him to be smug. She looked around. This wasn’t even her apartment. Bill had picked it out and moved them in, and when she said, “It’s too beige,” he’d said, “It’s five minutes from school,” and that made so much sense she’d given up. And he’d bought furniture, everything in minimalist stripped pine, and when it was delivered and she said, “I don’t like it, it looks cold and modern,” he said, “I paid for it, and it’s here. Give it a chance, and if you still hate it in a couple of months, we’ll get something you like.” And she’d said okay because it was just furniture, not worth fighting over.

  Katie leaned against her leg, her butt rolling on the carpet. Katie was worth fighting for.

  And maybe the furniture had been worth fighting over, too. All that damn beige.

  Bill smiled at her across the table, equally beige.

  In fact, right about now, anything was worth fighting over.

  “Now, don’t sit over there and sulk,” Bill said. “Edie will be good to the dog.”

  “I hate this furniture.” Quinn shoved herself away from the table and got up to get her coat.

  “Quinn?” Bill sounded a little taken aback. “What are you talking about?”

  “All of it.” She shrugged into her peacoat. “I like old stuff. Warm stuff. I hate this apartment. I hate beige carpet.”

  “Quinn.”

  She turned her back to him to pick up Katie. “And right now, I’m not too crazy about you, either.”

  The last thing she heard as she went out the door was Bill saying, “Quinn, you’re acting like a child.”

  Nick was just getting into Carl Hiaasen’s latest when somebody knocked on his door. He’d only been home an hour, the cubes in his second Chivas hadn’t started to melt yet, and now company. One of the many benefits of being single was that he got to be alone a lot in a quiet place, so he dropped the book on the floor and pushed himself out of his ancient leather armchair, determined to get rid of whoever it was.

  But when he yanked the door open, it was Quinn, swathed to her nose in a thick, fuzzy blue scarf, her copper hair shining under the porch light, and shutting the door on Quinn was never a possibility. She was holding a skinny black dog that looked at him with imploring dog-orphan eyes, so he said, “I don’t want a dog,” but he stood back to let her in.

  Quinn brushed by him and put the dog down as he shut the door. She pulled the scarf from her mouth and said, “That’s good because you can’t have her.” She smiled down at the dog, who was cautiously surveying the apartment, and then she turned to him, all shining eyes and glossy hair, her cheeks glowing red in her round little-girl face. “I’m keeping her.”

  “Dumb idea,” he said, but he said it without heat, smiling at her from habit and from pleasure because she was there. “Drink?”

  “Yes, please.” Quinn unwound her scarf and dropped it on the hardwood floor next to his mother’s old braided rug, and the dog immediately curled up on it, looking at Nick as if it expected to stay. Don’t even think about it, dog.

  “Boy, what a day,” Quinn said.

  “So tell me.” Nick went out to his tiny kitchen and she followed, taking a glass down from the pine shelves over his sink while he cracked ice from a tray in his ancient fridge.

  “I don’t even know where to start,” she said.

  The kitchen was a tight fit for two, but it was Quinn, so it didn’t count. She held the glass to her chest because they were too close for her to hold it out, and he dropped the ice into it and then reached past her for the Chivas on the shelf, absent-mindedly enjoying her nearness. “Start with the worst stuff,” he told her, as he poured about a quarter inch in the glass for her. She was driving home, so that was all she was going to get. “That way we’ll end on an up note.”

  She grinned up at him and said, “Thank you. Can I have some more?”

  “No.” He nudged her toward the living room with his hip as he put the Chivas back. “You’re too young to drink anyway.”

  “I’m thirty-five.” Quinn dropped to the rug beside the dog, all long legs and bright hair above her paint-stained sweater and jeans. “I’m allowed to do anything I want.” She stopped as if she’d just heard herself say something radical instead of sarcastic, and then she shrugged. “Okay, the worst is that I had a fight with Bill.”

  Nick appreciated the color for a moment, the copper in her hair, the honey of the oak floor, the soft blue of her sweater and the faded greens of the rug, and most of all Quinn herself, everything she was, glowing in the middle of all that warmth. Then he registered what she’d said. “What?”

  “I had a fight with Bill. At least, I think it was a fight. It’s hard to tell because he never gets mad. I told him I was keeping this dog and he said no. Like I was a little kid or something.”

  Quinn was so flustered, widening her big hazel eyes at him, that Nick grinned. “Well, you act like a little kid sometimes. You live in an apartment. Where are you going to keep a dog?”

  She shook her head, her hair swinging like copper silk. “That’s not the point. The point is that I want it, and he just said no.”

  “Well, he doesn’t want it.” Nick settled back into his armchair, determined not to get sucked into Quinn’s fight but not worried about it. He could resist getting involved in Quinn’s life. He just couldn’t resist her company. “He shouldn’t have to live with an animal if he doesn’t want to