Chapter 3

Chrissie dropped to the nearest available, horizontal surface...the floor.  The broom clattered alongside her, and immediately, both men were rushing toward her.  “Chris, honey, are you alright?”

Her head swam.  Her eyeballs ached.  Her limbs shook.  No, she wasn’t alright!  Dena married her last night!  “Get out,” she whispered to both of them.  “Get out of my house.”

“She doesn’t look too good,” Officer Walker said, and they each grabbed an arm to pull her upright.  Race -- if that was really his name -- picked her up in his arms and carried her to her bedroom.  Chrissie thought about fighting him, but she couldn’t.  Her body refused to listen to her arguments, and for some very odd reason, leaning her head against his shoulder felt...right.

“She went out drinking with her sister last night,” Race said to the policeman.  

“That’s not good,” Officer Walker said as Chrissie was gently placed on her bed and her hair smoothed back from her face.  She still felt dizzy and had a hard time following the conversation.

“Yeah...Dena will get an earful later on,” Race said, gazing down at her, and she could only gaze up at him, lost in those midnight blue eyes.  “I’m not very happy with her.”

Right there with you, buddy, Chrissie thought, but her brain still chanted, Married, married, married...  And if she spoke, she might throw up.

“Well,” Officer Walker said with a smile and a clap on the other man’s shoulder.  “I’ll leave you to it.  Try to keep her from calling 911 again.  They have this thing about wasting taxpayers’ money on your wife’s temper tantrums.”

Race nodded, and the policeman left.  Chrissie swallowed, confused out of her gourd, and since the police wasn’t arresting the man, and she couldn’t get him to leave, she turned on her side and said, “Leave me alone.”

“Chris...”

“Go away,” she tried again.

“Can’t we talk about this?”

“There’s nothing to talk about because I don’t know you, and we’re not married, and I just want you to go away.”  She shot him a look over her shoulder.  “Please, just leave me alone.”

He stood up, stared down at her for a long time, and then walked to her closet.  A few moments later, he wore a pair of dark denim jeans that matched his eyes to perfection and was pulling a t-shirt over his head.  Chrissie refused to think about why he had clothes in her closet and was just thankful that he was finally leaving.

“I’ve got some things to do at the shop, so I’ll leave you alone,” he said.  “But when I get back, we are talking about this.  And promise me you won’t call the police again.  Sarah’s supervisor gets teed-off when you do that.”

She turned back to her pillow because she had never called the police before in her life and this was all just part of Dena’s practical joke, and she wrote a mental note to call up her hideous sister as soon as her head cleared from the shock.

The man bent to kiss her cheek, but she jerked away from him.  He sighed and padded out of the room.  A few moments later, the front door slammed, and Chrissie squeezed her eyes shut, wishing she could go back to sleep and wake up to find this was all a very bad nightmare.

*****

Race held his racing ledger in his hands, not really seeing it.  Shit, he really screwed up this time.  Chrissie told him not to go to Philadelphia.  Mike told him not to go.  Dena told him not to go.  But it’d been the final leg of the Triple Crown, and he’d placed twelfth overall, and that wasn’t small potatoes for a thirty-four year old cyclist that had endured two knee surgeries and a skin graph due to a nasty tumble going down Manayunk Wall three years ago.  

It wasn’t his fault a freak hurricane tore up the Eastern seaboard and postponed the race to the day before her thirtieth birthday.  He asked her to come with him, but she declined, saying she didn’t want to spend her birthday cooped up in a hotel room, massaging his sore muscles.  So, when he said he’d just go without her, she flew into a rage, denying his very existence.  This wasn’t the first time she’d done that, but it was her sassy temper that he fell in love with the first time he met her.

He sighed and set the ledger on his desk.  How in Wonderland was he going to fix this mess?  He’d done it before, but now, he just didn’t know if all those old tactics would work.  Chrissie seemed very adamant on not being married to him this morning.  For a second, he seriously thought that maybe she hit her head last night, and this denial thing was real for her...but then she relaxed in his arms when he carried her to bed, and he knew she was just faking the whole thing.  

No other woman ever felt so completely right in his arms like Chrissie did.  No woman had ever gazed at him with those big blue eyes like she did.  No woman ever made him feel tied up in knots and tickled pink at the same time the way she did.  He asked her to marry him after only three days of knowing her, for crying out loud.  She said no and threw a snowball at his face, but she’d been smiling when she did it.

In fact, he mused, she threw a lot of things when she got upset.  The coffee was a first, but he could clearly recall her pounding him with balled up socks, his tooth brush, a bicycle tire, and once, a whole bag of dry cat food.  And every time, he battled his way through the flying projectiles to scoop her up in a crushing embrace and kiss her mindless.  

That won’t work this time.

The front door of his bike shop jingled and he glanced through the office doorway.  Mike walked in whistling, currently devoid of his uniform, and grinned at him.  “I thought I’d find you here.  She still in a huff?”

“Yeah.”  Race left the office, rubbing his sore shoulders.  After a race, he always looked forward to one of Chrissie’s massages.  She had some magical fingers, but today looked like a Bengay kind of day.

“So, you’re gonna hide out all day?”

“No,” Race replied with a scowl.  “Just giving her some time to calm down.”

“Well, anyway...congrats on the race.  Twelfth...”  Mike whistled again.  “That’s pretty darn good for an old man.”

Race lost his scowl and grinned.  “Yeah, surprised the hell out of me, too.  A good way to enter retirement.”

Mike came to a dead stop.  “Retirement?  What the hell are you talking about?”

Race sighed and spun the wheel of an overturned Gavin Triathalon he was modifying for a guy in his training group.  “It’s not like I kept it a secret.  I know Chrissie’s tired of traveling all over the world with me just to sit in the blistering sun and watch a ‘bunch of overgrown boys ride their big wheels,’ as she calls it.  This fit she’s throwing right now...well, it’s made me see what I’m doing to her...to our marriage.”

“Hell, man, she knew what she was getting into when she married you.”

“Yeah, but I love her too much to keep putting her through all this.”  Race met his friend’s eyes.  “In the end, when my knee finally gives out and I can’t even get up from the pavement because of all the muscle cramps...Mike, she’s all I got.”

“I still think you were crazy to marry an anally retentive home decorator.  Sure, she’s hot, but Christ, man!  The woman doesn’t even ride.”

Race grinned again.  “Well...maybe not a bike...”

Mike held up his hands in surrender.  “Save me from the boasting.  You know I’m jealous of your sex life.”

“Marriage isn’t sex life,” Race snorted.

“Yeah, tell that to the silly twinkle in your eye.”  Mike looked around the bike shop and grunted.  “I ain’t been rode in--”

“I’d rather not know,” Race commented dryly.  “Why are you here, exactly?”

Mike hitched a shoulder.  “Eh...didn’t want to go home.  Who knows what Ginna took with her this time.”

Race felt sympathetic toward his friend.  Going through a messy divorce was hard on a lot of people.  Mike might seem like he wasn’t bothered by it, but Race knew the truth.  Mike’s soon-to-be ex-wife moved out last month without a word to anyone.  Apparently, she got tired of being a policeman’s wife.  Especially one that worked the graveyard shift, leaving her alone in the house all night.  And Ginna found the perfect way to pay Mike back for all those lonely nights.  She went back to their house when he left for his shift and took things.  One night it was the ice cube trays.  Another night, she stole all the toilet paper -- that one mildly pissed off Mike.  And then last week, she took the dishes...all of them.  But did Mike bother to change the locks?  No.  Mike just shrugged and went on with his day as though nothing was happening.

Race shook his head.  His wife threw things.  Mike’s pilfered.  What’s wrong with women these days?  If he didn’t love Chrissie so much it physically hurt to be away from her, he’d chalk her up as a chapter in his life he needed to stop reading.

But he couldn’t do that.  It must be those big blue eyes...  They sparkled when she was happy, burned him to a crisp when she was angry, and turned to pools of liquid cobalt when she was sad.  And he drowned and smoldered and ignited every time she looked at him.

“So, what are you going to do?  Hang out at my bike shop all day?”

Mike raised his brows.  “Isn’t that what you’re gonna do?”

Race thought about Chrissie at home, in bed, still wearing her clothes from last night, and looking more rumbled and chaotic than he’d ever seen her, and his lips twitched with a delighted smile.  What he really needed to do was dope himself up on potassium and electrolytes for his sore muscles and take a quick, three-mile ride to work out the kinks from his recent race.  A hot soak in his Jacuzzi, a soothing massage, and a few hours of making love to his wife would help, too.  But seeing as how Chrissie didn’t want him at home -- much less in their bathtub -- and she wasn’t in the touching mood, the massage and probably the lovemaking parts weren’t going to happen either.  

Too bad, he thought.  He’d been gone for five days, and he’d rather just be at home right now.  There were other rooms in the house for him to relax in.  “Nope,” he told Mike with certainty.  “I’m going home as soon as Cheryl gets here.”

“Yeah, I guess I will, too,” Mike scorned.  “If she didn’t take my recliner and television, I’ll be happy.”

“Good luck with that,” Race called as Mike left, waving tiredly over his shoulder.  A few minutes later, Cheryl, his store manager walked in, and Race went home.

Unfortunately, Chrissie had been busy while he was gone.  She’d wedged a chair under the knobs of every exterior door, locked all the windows, and he could see her scurrying around inside, talking animatedly on the phone while she furiously vacuumed the rugs in the dining and living rooms.  That was Chrissie.  She wasn’t a clean freak, per se -- evident by the jumble of make-up and hair products on the bathroom vanity and the pile of shoes on the closet floor -- but she liked things a certain way, and when agitated, she tended to seek out every speck of dust and dirt in the house.

He sighed and knocked.  Something crashed inside.  Then her face appeared briefly through the glass of the front window before jerking back again.  “Go away!” she screamed.  

“Chris, open the door,” he yelled back.  

“No!  Go away!  Leave me alone!”

Tired, muscles aching, suffering from a small dose of jet lag, and stomach growling from lack of nourishment, he inhaled a solid breath.  “Chrissie!  If you don’t let me in, I will break a window!  You’re taking this a little too far!”

“Hey, Race,” someone said behind him.  Race turned, saw their postman, Zachariah, and said, “Oh, hey Zach.  How you doing?”

“I’m good,” Zach replied, placing their mail in the box by the door.  “Heard about the race.  Good job.”

“Thanks,” Race said, shifting his weight as he studied the house in front of him.  He could break the glass in the back door to get in.  He’d have to put some wood over the break until he could get it fixed, but maybe Chris wouldn’t get as upset about the back door being broken as she would the front.

“Chrissie at it again?” Zack asked as he stepped off the porch.

“Yeah,” Race said.  “What am I going to do with that woman?”

Zack snorted.  “Don’t ask me.  I’ve been married twenty-seven years, and I ain’t got a clue what to do with my own wife.”

“Thanks for the help,” Race muttered, and Zack chuckled and said, “Anytime,” as he crossed the yard to the neighbor’s house.  Race went around to the backyard and trotted up the steps to the back deck, grabbing the scrub brush from under the grill as he passed it.  Without pausing to think of the hell he’d have to pay for this, he swung the handle of the brush and broke the lower pane of the door’s window.  Chrissie screamed from inside the house.

Quickly, before she could stop him, he reached through and knocked the kitchen chair aside and flipped the dead bolt.  As he entered the kitchen, something red whizzed past his head.  He ducked as another red coffee mug smashed into the wall.

“Dang it, Chris!  That could’ve hurt, you know!”

“Good!” she screeched from across the kitchen.  She threw another badly aimed mug and dived for the phone she dropped when he broke the glass.  In a wink, he was there, snatching it out of her hands.

“Don’t you dare call the police again,” he said.  “They’re going to arrest you one of these days.”

“You broke into my house!”  Another mug filled her hands -- she had a pile of them ready on the center island -- but he grappled for that, too, and managed to lock her hands by her sides and secure her struggling body against the refrigerator.

“Help!  Some one help me!”

“Chrissie, stop that!”

But she continued to fight him and yell at the top of her lungs.  Race silenced her with a forceful kiss, which startled her so much, she bumped her head against the refrigerator and yelped into his mouth.  Even angry, she had the sweetest tasting pair of lips on God’s green earth.  

Her combative efforts gradually slowed and faded, until she leaned weakly against him and kissed him back.  Jacuzzi tub, here I come.