Some Assembly Required (2 page)

Not that it would have mattered—they were visiting Betta’s sister in Florida until tomorrow night, so it wasn’t like they could just pop back by. Benji didn’t even know the husband’s name, but he’d heard all about his difficulty keeping a job and a laundry list of his other faults from Betta. Not that he enjoyed the gossip. He frankly didn’t care, but it was impossible to shake Betta once she’d sunk her claws in. Plus, it would be rude not to take her up on her offer to come in for a cup of tea when she saw him in the hallway, right?

Patches jumped up on Benji’s leg, spreading mud from outside all over his pant leg. At least, Benji hoped it was mud. Was it even raining? He looked outside, grimacing when he saw it was bone dry. So probably not mud. Perfect.

Benji crouched down and scratched behind the border collie’s ears. “Hey, bud, I don’t suppose you know where your owners hide a spare key, do you?”

The dog stared back, its tongue lolling out for a second before swiping across Benji’s cheek. Ugh.

Benji wiped his sleeve against his face and stood up. He doubted the Lancasters would hide a key outside their door, and he knew from Betta’s bitchfests that she hated her neighbors in 2A and 2C, so there wasn’t much chance she’d have given one of them a key for safekeeping. The guy in 2D was a possibility, but he worked third shift so he wouldn’t be home till the morning.

“Guess you’re coming for a sleepover, Patches.”

Luckily he’d already fed the dog earlier, so he wouldn’t have to worry about going out to get him food tonight. He could figure that out in the morning after he had a chat with 2D to make sure he didn’t have a key. The Lancasters would be back tomorrow night anyway, so it wasn’t a huge deal.

The dog trotted along behind him, following the leash without a moment’s hesitation as Benji ran up a flight of stairs to his own apartment.
If only Mr. Whiskers could be half this obedient,
Benji thought as he opened his door.

“Sit,” he said firmly to Patches.

The dog plopped down on the new TUSCANY area rug Benji had brought home from his last pilgrimage to CASA. It looked perfect under the new TRENTO coffee table, and so far Mr. Whiskers had left it alone. Maybe he found the vibrant red pattern as offensive as his previous owner would have.

Patches bolted as soon as Benji unhooked his leash from the collar, which left Benji muttering about the utter uselessness of
all
pets. At least this confirmed he didn’t want a dog. He just wasn’t much of an animal person. When Mr. Whiskers went to the big scratching post in the sky, there was no way Benji would be replacing him with another pet.

That might be sooner than anticipated, given the way the dog went straight for him. Mr. Whiskers let out a howl the likes of which Benji had never heard before and lunged toward the bookcases, which were full of fragile glass knickknacks and irreplaceable art.

“Dammit, Patches,” Benji growled as the dog tried to scale the bookshelves as well in pursuit of the cat. He dove forward and managed to get a good hold on Patches’s collar, pulling him back.

“We don’t eat the cat,” he said sternly.
“
He’s old. That means he’s probably too stringy to taste good, even if you could catch him.”

He didn’t let Mr. Whiskers in his bedroom, which was one huge improvement he’d made after Charles moved out. It was a cat-free zone, which meant he no longer woke up with his eyes half-swollen shut thanks to his allergies.

Patches could stay in there with him until he figured out what to do with him in the morning. The dog seemed a bit ashamed of himself, since he didn’t fight Benji as he dragged him over to the closed door.

“Don’t get on the bed,” he said as he pushed Patches inside and shut him in.

Mr. Whiskers had knocked over a vase and a picture frame in his frantic ascent, but other than that, the bookcase looked relatively unharmed. Benji could leave him there, but Mr. Whiskers wasn’t declawed, and he’d probably scratch up the finish if left to his own devices to get down.

“You’re a royal pain in my ass, you know that?” Benji said as he tried to grab him.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Whiskers wasn’t in the mood to come sedately. A whip of his tail sent Benji’s collection of Avengers figurines spiraling to the floor before the cat scurried to the far end of the shelf, just out of Benji’s reach.

Benji stood on his toes and managed to grab a bit of Mr. Whiskers’s fur before all hell broke loose. Patches ran into the room, probably thanks to the loose bedroom door latch that Benji hadn’t wanted to bother the building super about, and jumped up, nipping at Benji’s elbow.

Instead of climbing up higher, Mr. Whiskers apparently decided his best hope of survival was on Benji’s head. He made a flying leap and connected with a painful scrabbling of claws against Benji’s scalp.

It was enough of a surprise to send Benji stumbling into the bookcase. He heard the sound of shattering glass as something hit the floor, and his stomach swooped with the familiar sensation of falling as he started to go down.

A warning hum vibrated low and deep inside Patrick’s ears. The metallic scent of ozone followed. He rolled over in his MILAN bed, savoring the MODENA memory-foam mattress.
Five more minutes. C’mon, just five more minutes. The CASA shoppers can hold their horses.
The would-be Martha Stewarts and Nate Berkuses were the worst with obsessing about color coordination and feng shui. Because they saw it in a magazine, they were all of a sudden the next HGTV Design Star.

He tucked the black-and-gray duvet up under his chin and kicked it off his legs. Optimal for regulating body temperature, though never logical.

Click-click-hmmmmm
. The overhead fluorescent lights announced their unwelcome luminosity into Patrick’s darkened sanctuary.

“Goddammit,” he groaned and buried his face in his pillow. He had at least ten minutes before the shoppers arrived. Fifteen at best. It always took them ten minutes minimum before they trickled into his showroom.

The fluorescent light wasn’t as kind in letting Patrick have his blessed ten minutes more of solace to relish the happy ending of his dream about the cute guy in the café he’d seen for all of three seconds last week. His gut clenched with the last bits of recollection of the dream. The cutie had been a screamer, for sure. It was always the innocent-looking ones.

He was dancing on the edge of drifting off once again when he had an unfortunate sense of spatial relations and tumbled naked ass over teakettle onto the floor.

“Fuck,” Patrick mumbled with his face planted in the thin carpet.

“What do you think of the MILAN frame?” an older woman said just over his head.

He scowled, eye-to-eye with her obnoxiously blingy and blinding Yellow Box flip-flops. It was way too early for this bullshit.

“It’s on special,” a young, bubbly blonde said, her neon pink Converse sneakers coming across his line of sight.

They both stood over him, dangerously close to kicking out his teeth, blissfully unaware of the crumpled pile of sleepy naked man between them. By the power of elementary-grade deduction, Patrick put together the mother-daughter connection.

“The frame color needs some tweaking, but the mattress is perfect. And the gray-and-black duvet makes a great accent,” the daughter said.

Did no one notice the guy in the middle of the CASA showroom?

Out of one dream about a sexy rendezvous, and waking up naked in CASA. Terrific. Just what did he eat last night? Must have been the meatballs, and the sweet tomato jam was probably laced with opiates from that one weird guy who got fired a week ago.

Patrick pulled himself up, standing between the pair as they considered his MILAN bed. He scrutinized the mother with a myopic squint, close enough to see the stray white hairs on her chin. She didn’t give him a single glance.

The mother brightened. “Let’s see what the delivery fee is.”

And then the daughter committed the ultimate atrocity of lying upon his bed. She rolled over to her side, her body meshing into the impression left by his.

Oh no.

Oh hell no.

“It seems a little… lived in?” The daughter wiggled on the mattress, trying to get comfortable. “I think a CASA employee has been sleeping here.”

Patrick crossed his arms. “You get your happy ass out of my bed and go feel happy inside somewhere else.”

Neither of them blinked. Mother. Fucker.

They went on obliviously chattering as the daughter continued to smear herself across his beloved bed. He had broken in the mattress perfectly. There was a notch at his shoulder and knee he had carefully cultivated.

The mother scrawled through thumbnails of room plans. The daughter gestured, and the mother nodded. She pointed at Patrick, and he tensed his grip on his upper arms. They made eye contact, and he counted the seconds until recognition.

“I think it’s too big,” the mother said regretfully.

Patrick took a quick downward glance at himself and then back at her, unamused. “For you? You bet it is.”

“What do you think of the PALERMO frame over in the corner?” she asked her daughter.

He palmed his face. Seriously? This was seriously happening?

“Ooh, I do like that,” the daughter said, and together they headed to the far corner of the showroom.

Patrick offered a two-finger salute as they stepped past him without so much as a thank-you, good-bye, or
holy Jesus
. CASA shoppers ebbed and flowed around him. Their voices like a dull cresting wave underscoring the Muzak drifting over the sound system. He ran his hands through his messy dark hair and sucked in a long breath.

“Can we bring back the cute guy?” he asked the fluorescent lights, as if they were distant gods. “We liked the cute guy.” He pointed at the lights. “He did that thing with his tongue. You
know
, that thing.”

Of course, the lights didn’t answer. Ah, well. The employee showers beckoned.

For the humor and variety of it, Patrick followed the completely opposite path through the CASA showrooms. His bare feet slapped the concrete floor with a confident gait. It was like an absurd fever dream born from too many benders on fish-bowl margaritas. Every day he awoke in CASA, and every day no one ever noticed him.

At first, he’d panicked. Of all the places to wake up in every day, CASA wasn’t exactly in his top five. Or top two thousand, for that matter. If he had to spend all of eternity somewhere, could it at least have been Tahiti? He’d worked out the theories hundreds of times. Too many CASA meatballs before bed seemed like the most plausible one.

It was like he was living the punchline of a joke but didn’t know what the joke was supposed to be. Now, he strutted about with his dick out for all to see.

He dodged a harried mother carrying her toddler to the nearest restroom. She muttered under her breath to her husband that the poor little girl had messed herself. The husband nodded and hurried with their overfull shopping cart of items that they’d never find a use for.

Turning a corner into the living room displays, he saw little old Agnes sitting primly on the GENOA sofa. Her tiny silver bifocals sat at the proper angle on her sharp snooty nose. Her knitting needles flew fast and furious as she knitted and purled her way through yet another scarf. The woolen baby-pink scarf flowed from her needles to her feet.

He felt the scalding jab of her judgmental sideway glance.

He stopped next to her and looked out over the showroom as a young woman considered sofa coverings and her husband wilted with her unending indecision.

Agnes didn’t look up from counting her stitches. “Patrick.”

“Agnes.” He watched the couple.

“Don’t you have work to do?” She knitted another row.

“Always.”

The young woman thrust the fabric samples at her husband, forcing him to act remotely enthused.

“There’s someone in the café,” she said and then counted the stitches again. “He’s a darling.”

“Darling, eh?” Patrick crossed his arms. “That code for something?”

Agnes looked up at him over the rims of her bifocals. “Meaning you better not be inappropriate.” She shot a pointed glance at his crotch. “Well. More than you already are.”

Patrick smirked. “Of course. I’ll take a shower, at least.”

“You’ll need more than a shower.” Agnes resumed knitting, the universal gesture of old-lady dismissal.

Patrick continued on his way. “Agnes.”

“Patrick.”

Over his shoulder, he extended his middle finger in the universal gesture of “screw you.”

Lisa from Kitchens stepped through the entryway of the employee lounge as Patrick stepped past her, barely brushing shoulders. She shivered and recoiled from the slight touch and then hurried on without a word.

On his way to the showers, a young, freckle-faced teenager practiced his greetings in his locker mirror. “Welcome to CASA! How may I help you? Did you find everything all right?” He tried his most chipper smile.

Patrick winced. So perky it resembled Barbie’s dead-eyed Cheshire grin. He checked the kid’s name tag. “Tommy,” he told himself, committing the name to memory. “You poor bastard. You haven’t succumbed to the depravity of rabid consumerism yet.”

Tommy tried smiling again in the mirror, and Patrick appraised his new effort.

“Better,” Patrick said, thumbing his chin.

“I can do this.” Tommy clapped his hands like a wrestler ready for a match. In the case of a skinny eighteen-year-old, it just appeared adorably dorky. “I got this.”

“Totally got it, bro.” Patrick waved behind him and headed into the showers.

He bit his lip as he forced the stubborn faucet to turn. Patrick was rewarded with the deliciously scalding and delightfully high-pressure water. Mist rose from the floor and banished the chill of the overworked air-conditioning.

Patrick groaned deep in his throat as the water hit just the right spot between his shoulder blades. He reached for the shampoo dispenser and took more than enough for his short hair. Eyes closed, he imagined a place in the tropics with a cabana and drinks with little paper umbrellas. He worked the suds into his hair and let himself drift into the space of a dream within a dream.