Mummy Dearest: The XOXO Files, Book 1 Read online

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Why?” He looked so disappointed, I felt guilty. More guilty than I already felt, which was not a bad trick.

  “Because…well, because.”

  “Because you had a fight with your boyfriend and you let me—”

  I put a hand up and he stopped. “Could you not keep saying that? Anyway, we didn’t have a fight.”

  “Oh.”

  My stomach suddenly growled so loudly that I half-expected to see an alien poke its head out of my belly.

  Fraser gave a short laugh. “Well, if he gets a vote, he wants dinner. So do I. I’m starving. Let’s grab something to eat and you can tell me why you were looking shell-shocked when I walked out of the elevator.”

  I opened my mouth to tell him…whatever I was going to say, offer an excuse as to why, despite the fact that I’d let him suck my cock, I couldn’t confide anything personal to him, but my stomach interjected again with such an outrageously rude rumble that we both started to laugh.

  “I guess I do need to eat something,” I admitted. I heard the echo of that and blushed, but Fraser let it go.

  “Great. Grab your jacket. I saw a steakhouse about half a block from the hotel. We could walk it, if you want. Talk.”

  So that’s what we did. I grabbed my jacket and we walked over to the Carving Knife. We passed dimly lit shop windows decorated with paper goblins, piles of carved pumpkins and mannequins dressed as witches. Now and then we spotted kids dressed like cartoon characters or superheroes flitting across streets. No one went for gypsies or witches or ghosts anymore. It was all Harry Potter and Lady Gaga and the blue people from Avatar.

  Fraser and I didn’t talk about anything more important than the weather—clear and cold—and the old-fashioned architecture, and the fact that Walsh seemed to be well on the road to becoming a ghost town.

  The restaurant was busy but not packed, and we got a table right away. The waiter arrived to take our drink order.

  Fraser ordered another Jack Daniels. I said, “I’ll just stick with the iced water.”

  “Water?” Fraser asked after the waiter departed with our order.

  “I don’t really have a head for alcohol,” I admitted.

  “Are you an alcoholic?” He asked it in such a straightforward, understanding way, as though he really cared and would be willing to accept any confession, that the question wasn’t offensive.

  “No. Nothing so interesting. I just have a really low threshold for alcohol. A couple of drinks and I’m dancing on tables.”

  “That sounds promising.”

  I laughed. “Slight exaggeration, but I’ve learned the hard way to go easy on the booze.” Especially because Noah had zero tolerance for the silliness alcohol brought out in me.

  Noah.

  It was like getting slammed from the side. What the hell was I doing? What the hell had I done?

  My expression must have said it all because Fraser said, “Why don’t you tell me what did happen tonight?”

  I didn’t have the energy to pretend I didn’t know what he meant. As much as Noah would loathe the idea that I sat here spilling my guts to a stranger—never mind everything else I’d spilled—I did need to talk. I felt like I hadn’t talked, really talked, to anyone in two years. Not since Noah and I got together.

  “I think I broke up with my lover.”

  “You think you broke up with him?”

  “I broke up with him, but I don’t think he believes it.”

  “Do you?” Fraser’s eyes were intent.

  “I think…maybe I do.” Unexpectedly my eyes stung, and I had to reach for my water. I took a couple of sips.

  “I’m sorry,” Fraser said. He sounded comfortingly sincere. “What happened?”

  “You mean aside from the thing that happened in my hotel room?”

  He snickered. “Sounds like a fifties B film. The Thing That Happened in My Hotel Room.”

  I laughed too, but feebly. “The sequel to It Came from Outer Space.”

  “No pun intended, right? Anyway, I get the feeling that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t already broken it off with…what’s his name?”

  “Noah.” My throat closed and I said huskily, “Dr. Noah Chadwick. I’ve been in love with him practically since I started teaching at Claremont McKenna College.”

  “How long ago was that?”

  “Four years.” Just like that I was telling Fraser everything. How much I’d admired Noah long before we ever met and how kind and supportive he’d been to a very junior professor and blah, blah, blah.

  The waiter came with Fraser’s drink in time to stop his eyes from glazing over.

  “Sure you won’t have something?” Fraser asked.

  “Maybe a glass of wine with our meal.”

  “Then I guess we better figure out what we’re eating.”

  The waiter sighed. We looked hastily at the menus again. I was too hungry to be picky. I went for the porterhouse with mushrooms, a side of baked potato with the works, and grilled veggies. Fraser started by ordering an onion loaf. Then he went for the prime rib, rare, and added a lobster tail as an afterthought.

  “Lobster in Wyoming? Brave man,” I observed.

  “I am brave,” he assured me seriously.

  He proved it by adding garlic mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and a dinner salad—with blue cheese crumbles.

  The waiter and I were respectfully silent.

  “You were going to order wine,” Fraser reminded me, handing his menu over at last. He didn’t say it as though I was scatterbrained and needed a keeper, but like he was attentive and looking out for my comfort.

  “You know, I think I’ll have a cosmo after all.”

  The waiter removed the menu from my hand before I could do further damage and retreated. Fraser took a hearty pull on Jack Daniels. “Wow. So your dream guy is a fifty-five-year-old anthropologist whose idea of a rip-roaring time is his mother’s garden party?”

  “He looks like George Clooney.”

  “Oh. Well, that does clarify things.”

  “And that’s not fair about Mirabelle’s garden party. It’s an annual event, not something we do all the time.”

  “I’m just teasing you.” His eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled. It was pretty attractive.

  I started in again. I told him about the huge scandal of Lionel’s affair with his TA, and how I’d basically got Noah on the rebound, and how everyone said it wouldn’t last, and how afraid I was that Lionel wanted Noah back—and that Noah wanted Lionel too.

  “Hmm.” Fraser was noncommittal on that point. “Did you ever go out with guys your own age?”

  “Of course.”

  “But…?”

  “Nothing. It was fine. I never fell in love until Noah. Noah was…”

  “Handsome, rich, cultured, and your boss.”

  I stared at him. “It wasn’t like that,” I said shortly.

  “Why wouldn’t it be? That’s not criticism. I can see why you fell for him. He sounds perfect. Too perfect, if you want my opinion. I can see you don’t. So, what went wrong with this idyllic life you worked so hard to build?”

  The waiter brought my drink, and I had a couple of sips thinking over that telling comment. Worked so hard to build. Not that all relationships didn’t take work, but should they take so much work? So much work that other people commented on it.

  I explained how Lionel and a few other instructors in our department felt that I was up for tenure because of my relationship with Noah, and I explained why I had made the trip to visit the princess a priority, and then, haltingly, I told him about calling Noah and finding out he was having dinner with Lionel and my probably—I could see that now—sort of extreme reaction.

  “What a shit!” Fraser interrupted. “You’re out of town working and he’s having a quiet, intimate dinner with his ex? The same jealous prick who’s stabbing you in the back? Dump his sorry ass.”

  I have to admi
t his instant and fierce bias on my behalf was heartwarming.

  “You don’t think I overreacted?”

  “I think you’ve been underreacting for two years. I think you’ve been brainwashed. You’re smothering your personality to try and adapt yourself to this old geezer.”

  “Fifty-five isn’t exactly—”

  “I’m not talking earth years. I’m talking stick-up-your-butt years. He’s, like, seventy-five in stick-up-your-butt years. My God. Next you’ll tell me he drags you to the opera or flower shows or some shit like that. How many times a month does he make you visit his mother?”

  I started to laugh. As a matter of fact, we visited Mirabelle every other weekend. Fraser’s gaze was still indignant but sympathetic too.

  “If he wasn’t your boss and you didn’t live together, you’d have been out of there a long time ago. But it’s complicated, so you’ve put it off until tonight when you couldn’t take it anymore.”

  I absorbed that silently. As much as I instinctively rejected the brutality of his assessment, I couldn’t deny there was truth to it. Breaking up with Noah was liable to have far-reaching consequences in every aspect of my life.

  To my relief, our dinners arrived. I’d forgotten how much I loved steak. Noah was pretty much off red meat, and I tried to respect that by not indulging in front of him. This was quality beef perfectly cooked. The first bite seemed to melt in my mouth.

  “Good?” Fraser inquired, grinning.

  “Oh my God.”

  He laughed and unabashedly shoveled in a forkful.

  I began to feel quite cheerful. Part of it had to be the drink. I knew that. I was more than half smashed, delicately balanced at the point where everything was bright and funny and things were moving fast but not so fast that I couldn’t keep up. We talked and we ate and we ate some more and we talked some more. We avoided the subject of Noah.

  Instead Fraser talked about himself. He’d grown up in San Diego, attended San Diego State, majoring in TV production and broadcast journalism.

  “How did you get interested in…?”

  “In?”

  “Reality TV.”

  “We’re not exactly reality TV. That is to say, we’re a hybrid. Part documentary, part reality TV.”

  “Okay. How did you get interested in that?”

  “Ack.” He pounded his fist against his forehead.

  “Ack?”

  “I know what you’re going to say.”

  “What am I going to say?”

  “I grew up watching The X-Files.”

  “Why would I say that?”

  “No. I grew up watching The X-Files.”

  “Oh. So?”

  “So…the truth is out there. I want to know what it is.”

  “You mean you love scary stories and scary movies and wanted to be Van Helsing when you grew up.”

  “Hell yeah!”

  That struck me as one of the funniest things I’d ever heard. When I stopped giggling, Fraser said, “Hey, I’m not college professor, but I’m not the dumb schmuck you pegged me for the minute you laid eyes on me, either.”

  “I didn’t peg you for a dumb schmuck.”

  He chuckled good-naturedly. “Yeah, you did. You looked at me like a snail had just crawled out of your escargot.”

  I was momentarily distracted. “Snail is escargot.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Arugula? Endive? Endigia?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “You kind of put my back up,” I conceded.

  “I tend to come on too strong when I’m…” He lost track of that thought in his apparent interest in capturing the last crumb of onion loaf.

  “Too what?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You come on too strong when you’re too what?”

  Fraser looked blank.

  I realized belatedly that maybe I didn’t want to know. We finished our meal more quietly than we’d begun it, although we did relax again over the hot fudge brownie desserts.

  When the bill arrived we argued briefly.

  “I invited you,” Fraser insisted.

  “Yeah, but this feels kind of one-sided.”

  “I invited you.” He was scowling.

  “Okay, okay. My turn next time.”

  “Deal.” His eyes gleamed, and I played back what I’d just said. Next time? Was there going to be a next time?

  Fraser paid the bill, and we pulled on our jackets and went outside.

  The sidewalk sparkled with frost. A Volkswagen Beetle sped past, demons and goblins yelling out the window.

  “What now?” Fraser’s breath was warm in the cold night air.

  Our gazes tangled. I knew what I wanted to do, but sex seemed more complicated now that I knew Fraser and, well, liked him.

  Fraser stared right back as though he could read my mind. “Well,” he said casually, “we could always see a movie.”

  Chapter Six

  Believe it or not, when I finished laughing, we went to the movies.

  We arrived in time to catch the second feature, which was the 1932 version of The Mummy starring Boris Karloff. I bought a giant tub of buttered popcorn which Fraser and I shared as we watched the film.

  “Did you know this was filmed in Mojave?” Fraser whispered.

  I shook my head.

  He snickered over Ardeth Bey’s “Excuse me… I dislike being touched,” and downright guffawed over “Maybe he got too gay with the vestal virgins in the temple.”

  I watched him out of the corner of my eye and smiled. I liked that he shared my same loony sense of humor. I liked his lack of self-consciousness. And I really liked how much he was enjoying himself. I tried to remember the last time I’d had such an uncomplicated good time.

  I didn’t let myself think about my article. I didn’t let myself think about Noah. I watched Ardeth Bey try to reclaim his reincarnated true love and concentrated on nothing but the warmth of Fraser’s shoulder pressing against mine, the occasional brush of our hands in the popcorn barrel.

  It could have been any first date. But that was also something I didn’t let myself think about.

  When the movie was over we walked back to the hotel along quiet and by then mostly deserted streets. The scent of wood smoke drifted in the sparkling night air. Every so often someone in costume appeared in the distant peripheral of our vision, as though at the far end of a telescope. Kids. Teenagers. Milking the last few minutes of the spookiest night of the year.

  “What time is it?” I asked as we walked past a house where a jack-o’-lantern sat on the porch steps, eyes glowing eerily, yellow mouth laughing silently.

  Fraser checked his wristwatch. “A quarter to midnight.”

  “The witching hour.”

  “Yep.”

  After that we seemed to be out of things to talk about. I was coming down from the booze, and I felt tired and depressed when I remembered the fight with Noah. Which was every couple of minutes.

  Fraser seemed preoccupied with his own thoughts.

  It took a while for the dull, shuffling noise behind us to register. In fact, I don’t know that I would have registered it if Fraser hadn’t stopped walking.

  “Did you hear that?”

  “What?” I stopped too.

  “That.”

  I listened. I could hear the power lines buzzing softly overhead, leaves scratching along the sidewalk…

  “I don’t hear anything.”

  “It’s stopped.”

  I expelled a long breath. “Not funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny. I heard something.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like…something scraping, no…dragging along the sidewalk.”

  I shook my head and started walking again.

  Fraser caught me up in a few steps. “I’m serious!”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Wait.” He hooked a hand around my arm, halting me. “Listen.”

  Once again I listened. Onc
e again there was nothing to hear but the whine of the power lines and the wind shaking the trees lining the street.

  I made a sound of impatience. “Not funny, Fraser.”

  “I’m not being funny!”

  “You’re right about that.” But then I heard it too. A sound like a bag of wet cement being dragged along the sidewalk.

  “Hear that?” Fraser exclaimed. “You hear that, right?”

  I nodded.

  We both stared through the tunnel of trees. The shadows wavered across the sidewalk. Moonlight and shadows…

  The shuffling sound was moving toward us.

  Fraser murmured, “What the hell.”

  I shook my head, wanting him to be quiet. My eyes strained to see through the gloom.

  “There.” I pointed at the pale form shambling toward us. “What the…”

  “Fuck,” finished Fraser, and launched himself at the thing.

  At the mummy thing.

  Okay. At the mummy. The glowing-red-eyed, bandage-trailing mummy that was apparently following us down the quiet residential streets of Walsh, Wyoming.

  As Fraser pounded down the sidewalk toward it, the mummy turned and sprinted away with un-mummy-like sprightliness. I raced after Fraser.

  “Fraser!”

  He gave no indication he heard, barreling along ahead of me like a TV cop in pursuit of a felon.

  Where the hell were they going? What did Fraser plan on doing if he caught the thing?

  The mummy cut through the trees, darted across a neatly trimmed lawn, flew down a driveway and scrambled up and over a wooden fence. I’ll be damned if Fraser didn’t fly right after him.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I shouted after him.

  Once again, if Fraser heard me, he gave no sign. He disappeared over the fence. I reached the gate a few seconds later, totally out of breath. I tried it. It swung open and I went through. I was in a backyard. An ordinary backyard with a large Doughboy pool and a lot of trampled flowerbeds.

  From the other side of the brick wall at the back of the yard I could hear crashing sounds. I added my footprints to the flowerbeds and heaved myself up, scrambling over the wall as lights in the house behind me went on.

  The lights were already on in the house next door. House lights and backyard lights blazed brightly, illuminating the bulky white form disappearing over yet another wall—and the soles of Fraser’s Converses diving after in close pursuit.