Only Uni (16 page)

She smoothed back her hair, shining gold-brown in the light from the picture window. Trish damped down a sigh of envy. Not quite as long as Trish’s cousin Mimi’s — the bane of her life, that little tramp — and not as smooth and kink-free. When Marnie turned to face Trish, the light silhouetted her plump form. Her eyes, large and velvety dark beneath angled brows, glinted with a strange hint of triumph.

“Welcome back.”

Marnie’s full lips curved into a mirthless smile. “I’m finally free.”

Her husky voice flowed like molasses, but her odd sentence made Trish blink and straighten. “Huh?”

“From him.”

Her ex-boyfriend, she guessed. “Oh. Good.” She didn’t know how else to respond to that. Her nose itched. Strange, she thought she had dusted.

Marnie hauled her basket and suitcase into her room.

Trish hesitated in the doorway and reached up to play with her earring, feeling pressure to fill the silence. “So where did you go? No, no, you don’t have to tell me. You, uh . . . look good.” What was that silver thing Marnie pulled out of her pocket? “Did you see? I cleaned the living room. I didn’t get a chance to clean the kitchen, yet, though — Wait, are those cigarettes?”

Marnie’s sidelong look brimmed with disdain and a swirl of defiance. “So?” She drew the word out like a challenging drawl from a Wild West gunfighter.

Whoa. This was a different Marnie. “No smoking in the apartments — that’s general policy. You know that.” Marnie’s expression made Trish feel like a stuffy Sunday school teacher. “You could smoke out on your balcony.” She gave a weak smile, then a resounding sneeze. Hadn’t she vacuumed the living room enough?

Marnie glared balefully at the tiny, rickety balcony. She inhaled deep, then snorted out a drawn-out sigh. “Oh, all right.” She turned fierce eyes at Trish. “I would have thought you’d be more understanding.”

Trish recoiled from her vehement complaint. “Uh . . .” That was the longest sentence she’d ever heard from Marnie.

Marnie turned away to unlatch the basket lid. As Trish started hacking and wheezing, she realized she was mistaken. She had dusted and vacuumed perfectly.

Marnie had brought home a cat.

“Marnie!
A-choo!
No roving —
a-choo!
— pets —
a-choo!
— in the building.
A-choo!
” Trish scrambled from the room to snatch a handful of tissues from the box on the coffee table. She gave a resounding honk as she blew her nose.

“No . . . pets?” Marnie lengthened and enunciated each word like a kindergarten teacher. Instead of putting the black and grey feline back in the basket, she stood like a statue while it squirmed in her vicelike grip, sending cat hairs flying in a cloud around her.

Tears streamed from Trish’s eyes. “Put the cat away, Marnie —a
-choo!
”

Marnie’s basilisk eyes speared Trish as she dumped the cat back in the basket amid yowls and mewls. Her full pink lips pulled together in a sulk. “What am I supposed to do with him? Drown him?” Her sarcasm bit like a length of barbed wire. She stood with arms crossed, glaring an insolent challenge.

“You know the rules. If they find out, we’ll be evicted. You’ll have to give him away or move out.” She ruined the effect of her firm comment with a piffling sneeze.

Marnie’s mouth narrowed. Then she turned around and addressed Trish over her shoulder. “Fine. I’ll give him away.”

Trish blinked. She felt as if her stomach had been stretched tight and then deflated. “Uh . . . good.” She marched out of Marnie’s room and shut the door behind her.

Oh, she had been real smooth. She’d handled that brilliantly.

But she couldn’t be blamed, could she? This was a completely different Marnie than the woman who’d run out the door last week. That Marnie had been quiet and considerate, if a little taciturn. This one talked back and smoked and brought a cat home.

Trish escaped to her bedroom and flopped backward onto her bed. She traced the faint stains on her ceiling while she heard the rustling sounds of Marnie unpacking and crooning to her cat. Would she really get rid of it?

Oh, well. She’d wait and see.

Spenser leaned back in his desk chair and tried to peek around the cubicle wall between them. “Trish — ”

Her telephone rang. Again.

He glowered at his monitor while she answered. He had been trying to oh-so-casually start up a conversation all morning, but she kept getting phone calls. If it wasn’t the representative for the cells she had ordered, it was Diana, who was writing an IND report and needed clarification on some study.

“Hello? Oh, hi Mrs. Navarre.” Trish’s desk chair squeaked as she swiveled back and forth. Then the chair screeched as she jerked to a halt. “Uh . . . what smell? No, we haven’t smelled anything in
our
apartment . . .”

Spenser heard a faint gag, then silence. After a few seconds, it started to concern him. It didn’t sound like she was breathing . . . Oh wait, there was a gasp. Huh. That sounded like a croak.

“Cigarette smoke?” Her voice had jumped an octave and cracked at the end. “Your nephew smelled it in your bathroom? Oh, that’s terrible. No! Don’t tell the manager. I’m sure, um, that the smell will go away soon . . . maybe the guys in the apartments upstairs . . .”

Then her panicked tones calmed down. “Oh yes, I’m sure they’re doing something illegal . . . Yes, they do look like gangsters . . . Well, thanks for calling . . . Yes, I’ll tell you if I start smelling it, too. Bye.”

Spenser jumped in before her phone hit the cradle. “So, Trish, I was wondering — ”

But she picked up the handset and dialed. “Marnie, it’s Trish. Are you smoking inside the apartment?”

She had ignored him. Not to be conceited, but girls never ignored Spenser.

“Don’t lie to me. Our neighbor called me complaining about a cigarette smell in her bathroom, which shares a wall with your bedroom and shares a vent hole . . . How should I know? I didn’t design the building . . . You need to smoke outside . . . We had this argument yesterday. It’s the apartment rules . . . Excuse me, but I didn’t write those, either. You have to stop or else Mrs. Navarre will call the manager, and he’ll come and smell the smoke and know it’s from our apartment . . . Because we could get evicted, that’s why! . . . Okay, fine. Bye.”

“So Trish, I was wondering — ”

The phone trilled again. “Hello? . . . No, Marnie, we don’t have any more spoons . . . No, they didn’t disappear. We only have eight and you used seven between yesterday and this morning. You’ll have to wash one . . . Well then, just stop using spoons. Bye.”

“Spenser, you were saying?” Trish’s head popped around the cubicle wall.

He glared at her.

“What?” Her brow furrowed.

Spenser, don’t irritate her. You’re supposed to be pursuing her, not letting her get to you.
He impressed himself with his self-control as he forced his face to relax into a smile. “Um, so have you seen the trailers for that new movie
Beowulf
?”

“Oh. Yeah.” The annoyed glitter in her eye dulled to blankness. “But I hate epics.” She drew back into her cubicle.

He did a double-take and stared at the empty space where her head had been a second ago.
What happened? That was quick.

Okay, bad move. He hadn’t even started turning on the charm, and he alienated her with his movie choice. Huh. Trish wasn’t like the other girls he knew. She wasn’t about to give him the time of day if his conversation didn’t interest her.

He’d have to figure out her preferences, then. He heard her yakking on the phone.
Well, I guess tomorrow . . .

The next day, Spenser found her early in the lab, perched on a chair at the workbench where she had tossed a stained nitrile glove next to a half-coated ELISA plate. One gloved hand held an Eppen-dorf pipettor, while the ungloved hand held her cell phone to her ear. Wasn’t the woman ever off the phone?

“I know you spilled the sugar because the counter was fine last night, but I had to clean up the mess this morning.” Trish swung her legs, which dangled a good twelve inches from the floor because of the tall lab chair, and kicked the cabinets under the lab bench. “No, it isn’t just that one time. You also spilled grape juice on the carpet and didn’t clean that up either . . . The big deal? The big deal is that when I finally saw it and tried to clean it up, it had already set and stained the carpet. That’ll get taken out of the deposit, you know . . . Just clean it up when you spill it from now on. Bye.”

The time was now. Spenser injected himself into the space right next to her, relaxing against the edge of the workbench and invading her personal space. Trish straightened her back to ease away from him, but her pupils dilated.

He was close enough to smell her perfume — something light, not flowery, more like a sophisticated fruit scent. Acqua di Gio? If he could catch her perfume, he was certain she caught his — Aramis, the new, expensive cologne he’d picked up this weekend.

He reached out to take the cell phone from her hand, letting his fingers brush an “inadvertent” caress over her fingers. Her breathing hitched, then continued at a faster pace. Her eyelids slowly closed and opened over dazed eyes.

Then her gaze flickered. She blinked. In the next second, she turned back to the workbench and reached for a fresh glove.

How had he lost her? “So what kinds of movies do you like?”

Trish quirked a suspicious eyebrow.

He met it with whiter-than-snow innocence.

“Romantic comedies.” A hint of defiance colored her tone.
Blech.
“What’s your favorite?”

“I like them all.” She wasn’t making this any easier for him.

“What have you seen recently?”

“I watched
Pride and Prejudice
again.”

Eeeewww.
Wasn’t that movie ten hours long or something like that? “So you like that actress . . .” What was her name? “Gwyneth Paltrow?”

She nailed him with a glare like a spear thrown at his head. “She wasn’t in
Pride and Prejudice
.”

“I was asking about Gwyneth Paltrow’s movies in general.”
Oooo, way to think fast on your feet.

She jumped down off her seat, and the wheeled lab chair skewed sideways with her violent action. Spenser leaped back to avoid getting rolled over. She darted her thick-heeled boot out and hooked one of the metal legs to stop it from wandering away.

He’d lost his personal space advantage. Then again, she looked pretty dangerous, standing with her weight on one hip, menacing him with flattened eyes. Her mouth, however, had pursed into an annoyed pink rosebud.

The rosebud opened and snapped, “Are you patronizing me?”

Spenser’s brain deserted him. “Uh . . .”

“Go away.”

Trish had her back to him as she stepped on the footrest to launch back onto the seat, so she didn’t see his face, which probably reflected his thunderstruck reaction. He closed his mouth before drool slipped out, then exited the lab. Quickly.

THIRTEEN

S
penser attacked — er, approached Trish outside their building the next day. The wind tangled the wisps that escaped her ponytail, and she swatted at them with one hand while she snapped at someone on her cell phone, “Yes, it was serious! I sliced open my foot on that broken mug . . . Well, I wouldn’t have needed to be careful if you’d cleaned it up when you first broke it . . . You’re lucky it wasn’t very deep . . . No, you’ll have to fix the garbage disposal by yourself . . . Because if we call the manager, he’ll smell the cigarette smoke and see the cat and we’ll get kicked out . . . Well, I told you to — hello?” She stared at her cell phone, mouth gaping. “I can’t believe she hung up on me.”