Page 75 of A Light in the Dark
“I knew what you were doing from the first time you baked me a cobbler,” Joel grumbled.
“But you ate it anyway. You ate the entire damned thing, because pride said you had to. Then you were too damned dumb to tell the paramedics you ate an entire basket worth of strangleberry, resulting in chaos. I ended up having to come over and fibbing about how you’d gotten some baskets of berries, that way they’d know what to check for.”
“Joel,” I complained, planting my hands on my hips. “You have no grounds to be scolding me, sir.”
At the street level, my boss busted a gut laughing. “Please don’t feed me any cobbler, ma’am.”
“You’re a local, so you better know your berries by now.”
“I know my berries,” he promised.
Joel eyed our neighbor. “Why am I taking her home and tucking her intomybed?”
“The pretty girl and the pretty boy will make pretty babies together, and the only way that’s happening is if you at leasttryto get her into your bed.”
While the luna moth shifter gaped, I gave Elenora a hug, thanked her, and headed in the direction of home. “You mayas well come with me, Humphrey. He’s going to be there a while, probably stunned senseless for the rest of the night.”
Joel spluttered.
My boss came with me, shaking his head the whole time. “You’re taking being poisoned rather well.”
“I figured she’d get me in one way or another, which is why I wait until Friday to see what she’s up to. I hadn’t realized I was earning points with her being sensible. I was trying to make sure I didn’t give her an excuse to actually try to kill me.”
“Except you kept eating the cobbler.”
“Well, not this one. It was clearly beyond my ability to handle. I’m not looking forward to seeing if the amount I got on my hands is sufficient to poison me.” I stopped on my steps and hollered, “Move it, Joel!”
The luna moth shifter obeyed, hustling up the street. “They called you a hussy.”
“That’s normal. Stop complaining. It doesn’t bother me. You’re also slacking, as you should be working to keep the hussies on the street happy and at home, probably pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. If you ignore it, the problem goes away the instant you can’t hear them flapping their lips anymore.”
“Valerie!”
I laughed at him, headed into my kitchen, and cooed at my new baking dish. “Aren’t you just the prettiest little dish? You’re going to be my presentation dish, and I’m going to make you a cozy, and you’ll sit in the middle of my table and hold things for me when you aren’t doing your other presentation duties.”
“That must be the poison talking,” Joel muttered.
“No. I’m just a little crazy after a long week at work. I’m off, I have something new I really like, and I’m welcoming her into my home. You saw me cuddling with my project holder. This should not be surprising you right now.”
“I didn’t think it applied to any treasured inanimate objects,” he admitted.
“How long do you think the poison takes to kick in? I got another bonus, Joel. I want to go to a night store and play with my bonus.”
“It took her a few days to accept her bonus, Joel. But if we have to haul her to the doctor, letting her run around and spend some of her bonus isn’t a bad idea, especially if we visit night stores near the hospital.”
“My SUV or yours?” Joel asked.
“We’ll take both. Take Valerie. Yours is larger. I’ll also give Meri a call, tell her about the situation, and have her meet us at the store of Valerie’s choice. Let’s have a paramedic on hand just in case.”
“Meri is a paramedic?”
“She is. She’s part of our flutter.”
“We could call Lois,” Joel muttered, and he dug out his keys and twirled them around a finger. “Between Meri and Lois, she’ll be fine even if we do have to take her to the hospital.”
“And you literally have the recipe for the cobbler, so we can take a picture of it, send it to Lois, and have her handle the treatments while Valerie gets to blow off steam before we sort through resumes. Actually, I’ll go drop the resumes off at work and meet you wherever she wants to go. Where do you want to go while we wait for your symptoms to start showing up?”
I could think of one way to spend some time while waiting to see if I had an adverse reaction to being poisoned. “Furniture shopping for my craft room and my basement, please. I also need to pick flooring and paint for my basement, and I may as well irritate Joel and his employees through the installation of new walls they will need to shore. I want a bathroom down there. The plumbing is already in place, but I didn’t actually do the install yet.”
