Joni wove her way through the evergreens, humming happily to herself. She sniffed the bushel of wildflowers clutched in her hand, thinking they’d make a lovely centerpiece on the kitchen table.
She entered through the back door and glanced at the clock on the kitchen wall. Nadirah would be home in an hour. Plenty of time to make dinner. Still humming the tune in her head, she rummaged through the kitchen cabinets, deciding on what she should make for herself and the new husband she adored so much. She decided on spaghetti and meatballs when she suddenly heard movement behind her.
Joni spun around fast.
There stood Nadirah, leaning against the wall between the entryway and the refrigerator. And she didn’t look the least bit happy.
“Nadirah!” Joni exclaimed. “You startled me. What are you doing home so early?”
Nadirah took a step toward her. “You didn’t think I’d find out, did you?”
“Find out what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, Joni,” Nadirah hissed in a dangerous tone.
“But I have no idea what you’re…”
“I said don’t play dumb with me! You’ve barely been my wife for five minutes, and already you’ve messed up! You really know how to blow a good thing when you’ve got it, don’t you?”
“Nadirah, please calm down and stop shouting.”
“The hell I will!”
Joni was scared. The look in Nadirah’s eyes alone was enough to make her heart stop. “What in the world did I do?” she asked, trying to keep the tremor from her voice.
“Come here!” Nadirah suddenly demanded.
Joni wasn’t in the habit of taking orders, but the fury radiating from Nadirah suggested she’d better make an exception in this case.
“Now!”
Joni followed Nadirah into the living room and stood in the center of it, trying to understand what was going on. Then Nadirah grabbed one of Joni’s wrists and a pair of handcuffs from the back pocket of her jeans in the same instant. Before it could register in Joni’s mind what was happening, the cold steel encircled her wrist tightly. She tried to pull away when Nadirah grabbed her other wrist and bound that one as well. The cuffs clicked into place around her slender wrists until they were painfully tight. “Ow!” Joni screamed. “Why are you doing this?”
Nadirah spun her around to face her. The forensics detective had amazing strength and speed. “I know what you were really doing in those woods, Joni girl,” Nadirah hissed.
“What? What are you talking about?”
“You were meeting someone!” Nadirah screamed.
“Bullshit! I was getting some exercise and picking flowers.”
“Oh, the hell you were!” Nadirah screamed, shoving Joni facedown on the bed.
“Hey, stop!” Joni screamed, growing more and more terrified. “I swear I wasn’t meeting anyone!”
“Yes, you were! You were seeing a woman that lives about a quarter mile away from here. I’ve seen her and the way she looks at you. She’s nice and tall, isn’t she, Joni? Just the way you normally prefer your women to be.”
“I wasn’t seeing anyone. I swear I wasn’t!”
“Oh, you’ll be swearing alright, little girl,” Nadirah said.
Joni heard Nadirah fumbling with something. She tried to turn around to see what she was doing, but every time she tried to move, Nadirah pushed her back down. Her feet were still touching the floor, but with her arms bound behind her and Nadirah pushing on her, there was no way she could get up from the bed.
“I’ll teach you real good, you bitch!” Nadirah threatened, flipping Joni’s short skirt up over her buttocks and yanking her panties down.
“Nadirah, no! Please! Please don’t hurt me! I swear I’m not seeing anyone! All I want is you!”
“You liar!”
Joni screamed as the first lash of what she now knew was a belt made contact with her tender skin. “Stop! Please just stop!”
“Fucking whore!”
Joni screamed some more.
“Tramp!”
And some more as the searing pain bit mercilessly into her.
“Slut!…”
Joni bolted upright, heart pounding furiously in her chest.
“A dream. Just a stupid dream,” she silently consoled herself.
Wiping the sweat from her forehead, she carefully slid out of bed so as not to wake Nadirah and went into the bathroom to pee and splash cold water on her face. She looked in the mirror and thought her ghostly pale face looked like hell.
The lack of moonlight or street lights seeping through the sides of the closed drapes rendered the place in total darkness once she flipped the bathroom light back off. Slowly, she felt her way back into bed and slipped in beside her new husband, who’d been kind enough to let her have the side closest to the bathroom and the only side with a nightstand. Joni had insisted she didn’t have to give up her usual side of the bed, but Nadirah had assured her she didn’t mind.
Joni let her eyes readjust to the darkness and looked over at Nadirah’s sleeping form, which was as silent as a mouse. She could barely make out her shape in the blackened room. No sounds of movement or breathing could be heard by Joni at all.
Joni mentally picked apart her nightmare in her mind and began to analyze it. It was the third or fourth violent dream she’d had involving Nadirah. Could it mean anything? While it was true that Nadirah had strength and speed where she had endurance and flexibility, she couldn’t imagine her doing something so vicious, despite having a bit of a temper. Besides, Nadirah wasn’t much bigger than she was.
Deciding Nadirah would rather protect her than hurt her, she eventually fell back to sleep, wishing she would comfort and hold her and that she could lie in her arms.
Once again, Joni sat upright in a flash. This time, it was because of the beeping. It took her a second or two to remember where she was as Nadirah jumped up and ran around to her side of the bed to turn the alarm off.
“I hate getting up so early. I am just not a morning person,” Nadirah moaned with a yawn.
“But it’s Sunday.”
“I promised my mother I’d take her to a friend’s place up in New Hampshire. I’ll be gone all day, just like when I go to work.”
Nadirah went into the bathroom, and a disappointed Joni became aware of the aroma of the coffee Nadirah had started brewing.
“Sleep okay?” Nadirah asked when she came out of the bathroom.
“Yeah, fine. Except for one strange dream where you were beating the living daylights out of me.”
“Oh, sorry about that. I heard you get up, and by the way you were breathing, I figured you might have had a bad dream, but I was too tired to really care about much of anything.”
Gee, thanks.
“When I get home later, we’ll discuss you seeing doctors and all that, okay?”
Joni nodded and pulled herself out of bed to do her thing in the bathroom before Nadirah took her shower. When she emerged, she had thought—or at least wished—that they would share coffee and breakfast rolls together at the kitchen table and chat about the day ahead. Instead, Nadirah took her coffee and roll into the living room, sat before her laptop, and ignored her.
Joni sat on the edge of the bed about ten feet away with her own coffee and roll.
Some minutes later, when Joni least expected it, Nadirah spoke again, though she kept her eyes on her laptop screen. “What are you going to be doing today besides staying out of trouble?”
“After my shower, I’ll be working online, cleaning, and that sort of thing… oh shit. I don’t have my laptop hooked up to your internet connection.”
“We’ll take care of that later on as well,” Nadirah said, standing up and yanking off her robe.
Great body!
“One day without it won’t kill you,” Nadirah added as she quickly began to dress, Joni unable to stop staring. “Watch TV or read some of the books I’ve got on the dresser over there.”
“I’m not a TV person, but I may read or go outside.”
“Don’t go far if you do because I don’t have a spare key to give you yet.”
“Okay,” Joni said, making a conscious effort to pull her gaze from the good-looking woman who was to be her temporary husband. Only that body was like a magnet that held her eyes steadfast.
Once Nadirah was dressed, she walked over to the nightstand and opened its only drawer, exposing the pistol inside it. “You see that?”
Joni nodded.
“Gifford said you know how to shoot and that you were with a policewoman at one time who taught you.”
“Yes, Rachel Dolores taught me well.”
“Well, you should never need to use it, as hardly anyone ever comes through here, but if you ever do, don’t try to reason or plead with any possible intruders; just shoot them.”
“Yes, boss. Anything else?”
Shaking her head and writing her cell phone number down for Joni, she said, “No. Just let Booty in and out whenever you hear him at the door.”
“Will do,” Joni said before she went to give Nadirah a kiss goodbye.
Nadirah quickly pulled away and said, “Don’t, Joni. Don’t go getting too attached to me. You know why we got married.”
“Fine. I’ll just concentrate on what a bitch you are. That’ll surely help keep me from getting too attached.”
“Good. You do that,” Nadirah said, slamming the door behind her on her way out.
“Yeah, right,” Joni muttered to herself, knowing it was far too late. She’d gotten attached twenty years ago and still was, although she had yet to figure out what it was about the seemingly heartless bitch that attracted her so. By many people’s standards, Joni was a bit of a bitch as well. She sometimes had a foul mouth and a quick temper and ran out of patience quickly. Maybe that was part of why they clashed; because they were too much alike at the same time they were too different.
Meow.
Joni looked down at the cat that had walked up to her. “So much for hoping I’d be her soft spot in life.”
Meow.
“I don’t know much about you cats, so you’re going to have to learn one of my languages if you want to get your point across.”
Preferring not to bother, the cat jumped up on the bed, curled up in a ball, and went to sleep instead.
Joni decided to tackle one room at a time, and so after her shower, she spent the better part of the morning scrubbing the bathroom to a shine.
She fixed herself a sandwich for lunch and then went outside for some fresh air after being cooped up all morning with the smelly chemicals of the cleansers she’d used.
She enjoyed the peacefulness around her; the only sounds were of birds chirping in the pines, evergreens, and the few aspens in the area. She’d hate to be around in the dead of winter, she realized, so that was one more reason right there to be glad she would no longer be with Nadirah once the new year started. November and December were bound to be plenty bad enough as it was.
She slowly circled the house. None of the neighbors could be seen from any point within the immediate vicinity of the house. She had to step away anywhere from fifteen to fifty feet, depending on where she was, in order to see parts of other houses peeking through the trees. Most of them, like Nadirah’s house, were either brown or green, as if they wanted to be camouflaged within the forest. The place definitely lacked in color despite the serenity, though she wasn’t surprised Nadirah didn’t have any flowers planted or anything like that. The forensics officer just didn’t seem like the type to go planting flowers.
Feeling a newfound burst of energy and not wanting to fall out of shape, Joni began to run around the outside of the house. A half-hour later, she was back inside the cool, air-conditioned house. It felt as good to escape the humidity as it had to escape the chemicals earlier.
Joni spent the bulk of the afternoon reading and writing in MS Word.
At four o’clock, she began to prepare their dinner and was delighted to find a package of incense in one of the kitchen drawers. Joni was a fanatic for good smells and always kept an array of incense and air fresheners handy. Roses weren’t her favorite thing to smell, but they sure beat bleach, even if it wouldn’t be long before the smell of chicken, mashed potatoes, and cheesy broccoli overrode it all.
The following Monday, an appointment was made for Joni to see a general practitioner, but the soonest she could be seen would be the Wednesday of next week, at which time Nadirah planned to try to take time off from work to drive Joni to and from the appointment.
“My job is usually pretty flexible,” Nadirah said, “but I’ll make sure you have bus money just in case.”
“While it would be nice having you with me and I always prefer cars to buses, I could just take the bus whenever I had appointments so you wouldn’t have to miss work.”
“No, I’d rather be there with you so I can hear everything the doctor has to say in case you forget to tell me something or think something’s not important that really is. You see, I’ve noticed something about you, Joni.”
“What’s that?”
“You’re just as dumb as you are intelligent.”
Joni laughed and said, “In most ways, that’s true.”
The days went on, and the two women fell into a routine of sorts. While Nadirah seemed to appreciate Joni’s cleaning and cooking, she didn’t seem to appreciate much else.
Joni would sometimes catch her looking at her, but Nadirah would quickly turn away as soon as she noticed.
The two spent half the time arguing, and Joni couldn’t deny that she was uncomfortable most of the time. She wanted to talk and to get to know Nadirah, temporary “husband” or not, but she was also afraid to strike up a conversation and say the wrong thing, something she seemed to be rather good at. Or be accused of being nosy instead of the naturally curious person that she was, lest Nadirah get fed up enough to throw her out on the street with nowhere to go and no means of support.
“She won’t do that to you,” Gifford assured her one Saturday night when Nadirah was out of earshot at a club they sometimes went to. “She may be a bitch, but she’s the responsible type. When she married you, she accepted full responsibility for you, as far as her old-fashioned self is concerned. She may be gay, but she’s still old-fashioned, you know?”
Joni nodded.
“Worst case scenario, she’d have you stay with Joe and me or someone else, but I wouldn’t worry. I threaten to throw Joe’s ass out half the time, but he knows I won’t, even though we do bicker a lot.”
“Do you?”
Now it was Gifford’s turn to nod. “I also wouldn’t count on divorcing in January.”
Joni’s eyebrows shot up. “What?” But before she could question him further, Nadirah came toward them, eyeing them suspiciously.
“What’s up?” Nadirah asked.
“Oh, we were just talking about you,” Gifford joked, even though he wasn’t exactly lying.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yup,” Joni nodded. “We were discussing how mean and crazy you are.”
“Your feminine counterpart here says you’ve turned her into a real sex slave,” Gifford said.
“No, I didn’t!” Joni insisted.
“The loony tune probably wishes that were at least somewhat true,” Nadirah said.
Joni and Gifford laughed.
“Other than discussing the truly horrible Miss Chief of Forensics, I was telling your dear little Joni about our loud, rude, and obnoxious neighbors that live upstairs.”
“You shouldn’t have done that, Giffy.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’ll just tell you to prank call them or something like that. Maybe even to egg their car.”
“Actually, she told me to fill a plastic bag with whipped cream or shaving cream, fit the mouth of the bag under their door, then step on it.”
Nadirah gave Joni a you-would-say-that look.
Joni just smiled.
A woman suddenly pulled Nadirah aside, but despite being somewhat hard of hearing, Joni was able to make out her asking Nadirah if she’d be okay with asking Joni to dance.
“Uh, no, I don’t think so,” Nadirah told her.
Joni was flattered that Nadirah turned the woman down on her behalf and wished it could be because the hot detective was jealous of the idea.
“What you really need to do is dump civilization altogether and come live out in the country with us,” Nadirah said, turning back to Gifford. Then she turned to Joni. “And if you slip one more slice of lemon into my soda when I’m not looking, I swear I’ll shove an entire lemon down your throat.”
Joni giggled playfully.
“Now back to the table with me, troublemaker!”
“Yes, boss.”
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