Page 21 of Heavy Petting

I licked her essence off my lips and waited for her to recover. Finally Mabel pushed up onto her elbows and looked down at me with a bemused smile.

“If that’s what you do when I fix your QuickBooks, wait until you see what I can do with spreadsheets. I’m a whiz at Excel.”

Mabel

Iwalked home half in a daze. Joshua and I had done a lot of making out the last two weeks but other than some ass squeezing we hadn’t even gone to third base. I wasn’t expecting him to make a run for third – and in his office no less -- but damn I was glad that happened. I couldn’t remember the last time I had an orgasm so strong it made my eyes roll back in my head.

I wouldn’t have minded having another round and maybe making an attempt for home base, but Joshua was working the late shift at the clinic and had to get back to his patients. They kept a skeleton crew on until nine pm for emergencies since the closest emergency animal hospital was over forty-five minutes away from Starlight Bay.

As the orgasm glow wore off I became slightly embarrassed that I’d let Joshua eat me out right in his office, where any of his staff could have walked in. Thank God I wasn’t a screamer. The instant his tongue touched my pussy I had lost all sense of where I was. We could have been in the middle of the town square during the Fourth of July Festival, and I wouldn’t even had noticed.

When I got home from the clinic I made myself a bowl of cereal for dinner, wrote two thousand words for my novel, then went upstairs to read in my bed for a while. I’d just fallen asleep when I heard it. Something was scratching on the ceiling over my head. What the hell?

I turned on the light and looked around. Esmerelda was sitting perfectly still, her eyes fixed on the ceiling as her body vibrated with concentration.

“What is it?” I asked.

My dog didn’t answer.

I heard something running overhead and then some more scratching. What the hell was up there? Was something on the roof?

I pulled on a coat and a pair of rainboots I had near the door and headed outside, Esmerelda at my side. I walked the perimeter of my house, shining a light up towards the roof but didn’t see anything moving up there. Meanwhile Esmerelda was straining to go back indoors.

The minute we got back in the house, Esmerelda tore up the stairs, planting herself at the end of the hall where there was a square cut out of the ceiling, and what looked like a door in the insert. I couldn’t see a handle or anything, but it had to be an attic. I’d never even noticed it before.

How did I not know I had an attic?

The scratching came right over our heads again, and Esmerelda barked in warning. My little protector. There was definitely something – more than one somethings I was afraid – walking around inside my ceiling. From the sounds of it, they were trying hard to get down to this level.

My heart thundered in my chest as I stood there frozen in terror. Crap, what was I supposed to do? I was pretty sure that only an inch of plasterboard was protecting me from whatever was up there.

Without a second thought I grabbed the phone that I’d slid in my pajama pants when I got up, and scrolled until I found Joshua in my contacts. He answered on the second ring, his voice heavy with sleep.

“Mabel? Are you okay? It’s one a.m.”

“Something’s here,” I whispered, like I was afraid whatever was in the attic would hear me. “It’s scratching inside the ceiling. I looked and it’s not outside, it’s definitely inside, in the attic.”

Esmerelda barked again, jumping up and down a couple of times underneath the attic door.

“It’s in the attic!” I whisper-shrieked. “There’s more than one of them, and they’re trying to get down here!”

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Stay away from them, okay? Go downstairs with Esmerelda where it’s safe.”

“Okay.”

Eight minutes later I saw lights in my driveway. Joshua rushed in, looking adorably rumpled. He was wearing navy sleep pants, running shoes, and a faded old sweatshirt, holding a baseball bat in one hand and a gardening shovel in the other. A canvas shopping bag was looped over his shoulder, like the kind you used to go grocery shopping.

“What are those for?” I asked, nodding towards the bat and shovel.

“In case I have to kill something,” he explained.

“Kill something?” I screeched. “You’re a veterinarian. You’re not supposed to kill stuff.”

“Depends what it is,” he said grimly. “Show me where the access panel is for the attic.”

I took him upstairs, then brought him a stepstool. Joshua dug in the canvas bag, bringing out a thick knit hat which he put on his head before covering his face with a N-90 mask, the kind we’d all been wearing during the pandemic. Then he put a headlamp around his head, turned it on, and pulled on some thick gardening gloves. He looked ready to do battle.

“Stay back,” he said, “until we know what we’re dealing with. They might come down when I opened the door.”