LOVE AT FIRST DATE

Chapter 15: Her Horror

Michelle was still alive, though sleeping like a dead person, when Tony had awoken, dragged on some clothes, and quietly crept out of the apartment. He wasn't thrilled about having to haul it to the store, but somewhere along the line someone had convinced him that making scrambled eggs with anything other than whole cream was equivalent to a crime against humanity. Rather than find himself up on tribunal charges in The Hague, or struck down by lightening, or whatever the penalty might be for such gross culinary violations, he'd decided to make a run to the small Italian gourmet store a few minutes away.

Normally, he would've called Mrs. Sanchez the night before and asked her to pick up whatever items he needed, but he hadn't been thinking about food last night and it was too late to get hold of her now. It was early Sunday morning, which meant that she was either gathering the family for Church, in which case she'd be too busy to answer the phone; or was already at Church, in which case it would be a sin to answer the phone; or had already left Church and was presently in transit to his place, in which case it would be too dangerous to answer the phone while driving. She would also get a brain tumor, Mrs. Sanchez was convinced, if she used a cell phone excessively, which in her mind meant more than once or twice a month.

"Tony, ya hunka chunka burnin' love! Where ya been keepin' yourself, sweet cheeks?"

"Hey, Millie," Tony grinned, dumping the items in his arms onto the counter.

"Whole cream. Uh-huh... You're cooking for some Saturday-night chickie, aren't ya?... How come ya always manage to find the time to boff every other babe in this town but me, huh? That's what I wanna know..."

"I've already told ya a hundred times, Millie. You're too much woman for me," Tony reminded the eightysomething as her shaky hand placed his change in his cupped palm.

"Ya better believe it, sugar butt," she croaked out a sassy growl to the grins and chuckles of the people on line behind him. "Tell that hunky doorman of yours that since you won't throw me a hump, I'm gonna have to settle for him..."

"Will do," Tony promised with a warm smile, seductively sliding his change into the back pocket of his jeans for the express purpose of taunting her as he moseyed toward the exit.

"Bye, sugar shanks," Millie's creaky voice growled after him, thick trifocals glued to his glutes.

"Bye, baby," he softly crooned over his shoulder with just enough volume for her hearing aid to pick up the sensual lilt in his voice as he made his departure, throwing a little extra sway into his swagger.

He grinned on his way to the car, checking the small grocery bag to see what she had slipped him this time: Perugina hazelnut chocolates, his favorite. He always wished Millie's tiny, skeletal hand were just a little bigger and less arthritic whenever she would grab him a fistful from behind the counter and the owner's back.

As he stuffed two of the chocolates into his jacket pocket for Michelle, his grin slowly morphed into an apprehensive sigh at the thought of having to soon explain the bottle of barbiturate-laced spring water to her. He prayed she wouldn't be furious with him for not having eyed the broken seal on the cap with a little more suspicion and scrutiny. He dreaded the possibility of spending their Sunday — their last precious twenty-four hours together before work would gear itself up again — with her royally steamed at him for having exercised such uncharacteristic carelessness.

Michelle was feeling confused and frightened. It was dark; she felt cold; intimidated; threatened, like danger was lurking in the shadows around her somewhere. She couldn't identify its source. She just felt a presence of gloom and wished that Tony were with her.

She picked up the sound of a distant buzzing, but wasn't sure at first if it was some kind of ringing in her ears or the sound of a small private aircraft flying just a little too low over the neighborhood. Her first thought was of a terrorist attack: a small plane crashing itself into a high-rise apartment building. It was just the sort of mass-high-anxiety result that small, independent cells were seeking to achieve these days. Her feet felt like lead, which worried her, given the eerie feeling that she might have to bolt from the scene at a nanosecond's notice. She wondered again where Tony was, just in case her feelings of impending calamity weren't a product of her imagination, but a sixth-sensory warning of legitimate danger.

The buzzing was quickly getting louder, intensifying, as if the aircraft were coming in closer at an accelerated speed. Her fear level instantly rocketed. She wanted to grab her phone and call CTU to see what the satellite had, but she couldn't find it. Her vision seemed blurred; everything looked gray and white and oddly out of focus, like she was peering through fog or mist or a billow of smoke. She didn't smell smoke, but something was nevertheless definitely wrong. Her entire environment reeked of wrong.

Dragging along on her lead-like legs, she struggled to at least see from which direction the sound was approaching. Her vision was obscured, but the plane sounded like it was nearly upon her now. The hum of its engines roared in her ears. She felt her mouth involuntarily open, anticipating the worst and readying itself to react. Her body was breaking into a sweat. Why couldn't she see clearly? And where in the world was Tony?

Michelle turned her head to the right and jolted back in shock at the sight of huge, black eyes staring directly at her, immediately reminding her of the classic drawings and film representations of UFO aliens she'd seen in documentaries and offbeat scientific journals. A blood-curdling scream leapt from her lungs, instantly jarring her wide awake.

She bolted from her dead sleep straight upright in the bed, gasping in shock, then immediately found herself screaming again at the sight of a small boy leaning against the side of the bed only inches away from her, with a model airplane in his hand, a terrified look on his face, and a scream of his own roaring out from his lungs in reaction to hers. Another slightly taller figure directly behind him reeled back in fright, compelling Michelle to release another blood-curdling scream.

Tony was through the bedroom door in a flash.

"Hey!" he hollered furiously at the top of his lungs, prompting Mrs. Sanchez's five-year-old grandson, Miguel, to scream even louder than he already was. He dropped the P-47D Thunderbolt model plane that he'd been playing with onto the bed and made a mad break for the door, his equally panic-stricken seven-year-old brother, Basilio, glued to his heels.

"Didn't I tell you two to stay outta here!" Tony thundered, spinning around in enough time to clip the tail of one of the brothers — which one, he couldn't tell, given the lightening speed at which they'd made their petrified exit, but safely assuming it had been seven-year-old Basilio, judging from the high-pitched wailing he was now performing for Mrs. Sanchez in the kitchen, as if Joe Frazier had just flattened him with a left hook.

"Who... who...?" Michelle gasped in near-hysteria, ghost-white, disoriented, and visibly traumatized.

"I'm sorry, honey," Tony calmed her in as soothing a tone as he could muster under the flabbergasting circumstances, scrambling across the bed. "I'm so sorry, baby. C'mere," he profusely apologized, sweeping her into a kneeling position and encompassing her trembling body in a warm embrace. "I told them to stay the hell outta here... Are you alright?" he rued, gently kissing and fawning over her while she struggled to orient herself to her surroundings.

"Who are they?" she gasped with saucer-sized eyes, feeling nearly sick to her stomach from the overload of adrenaline now saturating her system.

She closed her lids to catch her breath, curling her arms up between his chest and her own, unconsciously clutching two fistfuls of his shirt. Her heart pounded wildly as Tony's hands gently swirled around her back and shoulders and hair, pressing her cheek against his chest, which was pounding nearly as violently as hers.

"You're okay... Everything's okay," he sought to reassure her in a soft, comforting voice, chastened by the look of sheer panic and confusion on her blood-drained face as he tipped her head back to measure her recovery stage, the first phase of which had yet to kick in.

"I thought we were being invaded," she panted breathlessly in a groggy haze. "I didn't know where you were. I was searching all over..." she struggled to explain.

"I'm right here," he calmed her. "You were just having a bad dream," he said in a gentle murmur, laying a few curative kisses against her clammy forehead before returning the side of her face to his chest.

His heart ached and oozed sympathy. She had been sleeping so soundly, and he had been so successful for nearly an hour in keeping Mrs. Sanchez's two grandsons away from the bedroom, but had evidently turned his back on them for just a couple of minutes too long.

"I became so frightened when I couldn't find you... and I screamed," she skittishly recounted, gulping down a throatful of much-needed oxygen.

"I know. I heard you," he tenderly cooed, stroking his fingertips against her hair and listening quietly as she chronicled, in horror, the details of the nightmare that had jarred her awake.

"I thought it was a — like, a small plane at first," she debriefed herself, fighting the grogginess blanketing her brain. "Possibly a terrorist attack on a... on a building. This building. And then I saw the little one, with the big eyes. And I thought he was an alien."

"Nah, they're both citizens, honey," Tony cluelessly allayed her fears.

"No, I mean... I... But how — Where did they come from?" she stammered in a haze of confusion.

"Well, the family originally crossed over from a small Mexican border town," he slowly began the saga of the Sanchezes, swiping some curls off to the side.

"No, no," she interrupted. "I meant, why are they here?"

" I, uhh... I don't know, honey. I would guess for the same reasons most migrate. Poverty levels. The lousy job market..."

"No, I meant here. How did they get here? In this room? Who are they?"

"Mr. Tony me golpeó!" seven-year-old Basilio's voice could be heard ratting Tony out at top volume, his wails falling upon Mrs. Sanchez's proverbially deaf and disinterested ears.

He hated when they called him that — "Mr. Tony." It always made him feel like a hairdresser. Pressing Michelle's cheek close to his chest with his hand shielding her exposed ear, he turned his head toward the open door.

"English!" he bellowed out, saving his housekeeper the trouble of correcting the boy, which she was forever constantly having to do every couple of sentences, it seemed. "They're Mrs. Sanchez's grandsons," he turned back to Michelle and explained in a considerably lower and gentler tone. "She comes by Sunday mornings for the dry cleaning and laundry, and drops the clean stuff off... does up a grocery list... That kinda stuff. They'll be outta here in a minute, honey, I promise..."

As if Michelle's grogginess hadn't already been certain to disorient and upset her upon arising, he could murder those two for making matters a thousand times worse now, reintroducing her to consciousness in a state of pure terror.

"Sorry, baby," he atoned again. "I would've called her last night and told her to skip this morning, only..."

He halted himself from referencing any more of "last night," remembering his Dad's suggestion to "keep things vague," like his Mom always did, in the hopes of sparing Michelle needless embarrassment. The fewer questions he answered definitively, the fewer details she would come to learn about statements, lyrics, visitors, and other assorted highlights of the evening, which could only serve to mortify her.

"What time is it?" Michelle asked, noticing daylight peeking through the thin slats of the drawn window blinds as Tony coaxed her head back against the pillows. "I don't even remember going to bed... It's really Sunday already?" she double-checked in surprise. "Sunday morning?"

"Yeah, somewhere around eight-thirty," he said softly, twisting his body sideways, half on and half off her with an elbow on either side of her shoulders. She continued unconsciously white-knuckling his shirt, holding on for dear life as if it were a life preserver. "I almost woke you up a hundred times last night," Tony confessed. "I missed you..."

"Where was I?" she asked through a deep, arresting yawn that had suddenly overpowered her. As she worked to blink the thick sensation of sleepiness from her eyes, she struggled to recall anything beyond blow-drying her hair the night before. "Why do I feel like I've been run over by a truck?"

He knew that he owed her a full and honest accounting of everything that had transpired in a physiological sense, including Max's professional assessment and prognosis; it was all of the rest of the night's events that he felt she could probably live without knowing.

"Yeah, uhh... Y'see, it's, umm..." he hesitantly geared up, rubbing the sides of his thumbs lullingly against the corners of her brow. "Look, I, uhh... I don't want you to be alarmed about anything, 'cause you were never in any real danger, Max said," he wanted to assure her up front.

"Max?" she asked, quizzically.

The same eyes that were fighting to drift back to sleep just seconds earlier were now suddenly wide open and attentive at the sounds of the words "danger" and "alarmed."

"He's, uhh... Now, don't over-react," Tony reiterated, abruptly interrupting himself and straining his neck to call out to Mrs. Sanchez for some coffee.

"He's what? Who is he?" she queried again, with growing apprehension.

"He's a doctor," Tony explained with total calm, seeking to set a good example.

"Huh? Why did I need a doctor?" Michelle gawked, startled and struggling to sit herself up. "Did I hit my head?... Oh, God, do I — do I have amnesia? I can't remember anything... except that I remember my name. Is that amnesia? Does that count?"

"It's okay," he gently shushed her, coaxing her back against the pillow. "It was, umm... Remember that spring water I gave ya? When you were drying your hair last night?"

"It was poison?" Michelle gasped in horror, struggling a little harder to sit up this time, but quickly lying back again upon sensing that her tampon had outlived its usefulness approximately a half a day ago.

"No, no... no... It's just that, umm... the bottle of water... well, it turned out to belong to one of my Mom's friends. That woman 'Joyce'... That one who was pinching me at the party, remember?"

"They were all pinching you," Michelle said, relieved that she was at least able to recall the flock of women surrounding and subjecting him to assorted cheek pinches, pats, and lipstick-laden pecks.

"Yeah, well, uhh... she was pinching a little more than my face," he frowned with an element of pain and light nausea, recalling the disquieting feeling of having his butt blatantly worked over by the mid-sixtysomething, who'd had enough plastic surgery to look like a fortysomething going on sixtysomething. "She'd stuck the bottle of water in the refrigerator to chill and apparently forgot to take it with her, and... umm..."

He paused for a moment, thinking of how to best put it.

"And?"

"And she's, uh... Well, her husband's been known to sign her into a rehab on occasion."

"For?" Michelle asked slowly and guardedly, with her head cocking a little to the side, wondering for a frightening moment if she'd just had her first experience with heroin, given how remarkably groggy she felt.

"Sedatives, honey. Barbiturates. You slept really well," he sheepishly allayed her worst fear with forlorn eyes, quickly leaning in with an apologetic peck to her lips. "I got on the phone with the doctor, just to be on the safe side," he assured her, resourcefully eliminating the part about his Dad having actually placed the call. "And, so, uhh... So, Max came right over and checked your pulse and irises and heartbeat, and stuff, and said that it looked like ya chugged down a pretty healthy dose, but that there wasn't anything to worry about — that it would just knock you out for the night, and you'd probably wake up pretty groggy and, umm... Well, I'm just really sorry, honey. I hardly even know what to say."

Which was the first fully truthful statement he'd made thus far. Men were supposed to protect women, according to how he'd been raised; not compromise their health and welfare exposing them to dangerous doses of controlled substances.

Michelle stared at him, stunned.

"You angry?" he contritely inquired, with caution and a slight wince in his eyes after a few moments of deadly silence had passed.

"Well, I'm — I'm not pleased," she answered as truthfully as she was able, still processing not only the surprise of having been drugged, but shocked that she had been evaluated by a doctor she'd never even heard of, much less met, and whose face she couldn't even bring front and center in her mind.

She looked away from him momentarily, shifting through a morass of blurry, hazy images lumbering lethargically around in her head. "Were we... Did you have the Navarone Guns on last night?" she asked, her eyes squinting hard into the distance as if trying to focus in on a snapshot of the evening's events that were nailed to a tree about a mile away. "I seem to remember something about... World War II, or... or maybe it was World War I? I can't quite—"

"Uhh... There, uhh... there might've been something on TV," Tony nervously suggested. "I wasn't really paying attention," he added, with technical accuracy.

"Did I...?" She paused and frowned and squinted hard for another moment, shaking her head back and forth as if not quite knowing what to make of the next mental image that fought its way up to the front of the line.

"What, baby..."

"Did I — did I shove my hand... down your jeans?" she frowned in confusion.

"I, uhh... I think I would remember that," he replied — evasively and deliberately misleadingly, yes, but it was a perfectly true statement when you dissected and analyzed it: Indeed, he would remember an event like that. He was merely neglecting to elaborate upon whether or not he did.

"It's so weird," she frowned in frustration. "I... After a certain point, I can't seem to — I can't remember anything. I was kissing you. That I remember. And then I thought — I could've sworn my hand somehow got into the front of your jeans. And then I was laughing about something..."

"Not about what ya found in my jeans, I would hope," he self-deprecatingly jested, knowing better, however, based upon her own huuuuuuuuuuge declarations on the subject last night. But she didn't respond to his lighthearted quip, her mind already lost again in deep thought. "Just relax, honey. It's not important," he urged her, peripherally catching the appearance of Mrs. Sanchez's grandsons at the bedroom door.

They made their entrance with baby steps, the older one carefully clenching a mug in each fist with eyes glued to the steaming coffee wobbling perilously on the surface; the younger one glued to his heels, with a hand clutching each side of his brother's polo shirt, slowly and steadily steering him in the direction of the nightstand.

Their sudden appearance startled Michelle, compelling her to take note of her excessively jittery nerves.

"Usted me golpeó," the seven-year-old, Basilio, seethed at Tony with a brooding frown and dark, angry eyes glaring icily as if telepathically promising to return someday to exact revenge for the demoralizing swat he'd earlier received.

"English," Tony snarled with an intentionally imposing and overly firm tone, taking the mugs of coffee from Basilio's tight fists and setting them down on the nightstand. "And ya wouldn't have gotten smacked if you'd stayed outta this room, like I told ya," he was quick to remind him of how the world worked.

"You'll regret this day, gringo," the miniature Pancho Villa vowed with a steely stare, hands to his sides and standing his ground firmly and fearlessly while his little brother peeked out from behind his back, quaking in pure, unmitigated fear.

"You'll regret the next minute of your shrimpy life if you're not outta here by the count of three," Tony vowed him back, watching Basilio slowly and belligerently turn, bravely taking all three seconds to leisurely saunter over to the door, with pride and nobility in his stride, while five-year-old Miguel concurrently bolted out of the room at warp speed, screaming for his grandmother to get herself in there before Mr. Tony massacred his brother.

Tony returned his attention to Michelle, who had since immersed herself in another round of ruminations.

"Was Gilligan's Island on TV?" she turned her head and hesitantly asked with a small, worried frown notched into her brow.

"I, uhh... I couldn't tell ya, honey. Like I said, I wasn't really paying attention to the TV," he cagily sidestepped, again safely within the bounds of technical accuracy, legally speaking.

Michelle stared at him warily for a moment. The evasive, noncommittal nature of his every answer had not escaped her. She wasn't a highly skilled or experienced interrogator by any means, but she had received the same rudimentary, basic training at Quantico as every other federal officer; certainly enough to recognize when a subject was repeatedly and intentionally supplying vague answers to clear, straightforward questions.

"That's a pretty distinctive tune," she reminded him. "Wouldn't you remember if it had been playing or not?"

"Uhh... geez, honey, I don't know. That kinda stuff doesn't really register with me," he sheepishly stuck to the story, wondering just how transparently his bald-faced deceptiveness was coming across.

She eyed him for a brief moment longer until a red warning light flashed in her head, signaling that her tampon had about four seconds of staying power left before she'd officially be on her own.

"Where are ya going?" he asked.

"I can't tell you. It'll upset you," she confidently assured him, pushing herself into a seated position to mentally test and assess the gravitational state of affairs.

"Tell me," he insisted.

"Just stand back. This could get ugly," she muttered fair warning, guesstimating the number of steps to the bathroom.

"Oh, uhh... Oh," he mumbled nervously after finally catching on. With the usual deer-in-the-headlights expression frozen on his face, he swiftly moved from the bed and off to the side, figuring he should probably give her some room for whatever reason women seemed to require it. "Give her some room, dammit" and "quick, boil some water" were the two golden rules men were to follow whenever they didn't know what the hell was going on. He had learned them ages ago, but had never clearly understood either; especially the boiling water one. What was that for? Tea?

"So, uhh — so what should I do? Am I supposed to do something?"

She closed her eyes and shook her head in her usual dismay.

"Just don't yell at me if you end up having to replace this mattress... and carpet... and nightshirt," she warned, eyeing the relatively short distance once again before launching herself from the bed and beating a hasty retreat to the bathroom.

"We go now, Anthony!" Mrs. Sanchez called out to him from the living room as Michelle safely rounded the corner and vanished from his view.

"Y'got everything?" he hollered back on his way down the hall, hearing the doorbell ring, immediately followed by a stampede of footsteps as the five- and seven-year-old brothers scrambled into action, like war-footed fighter pilots responding to a red alert, engaging in a shoving battle along the way over whose turn it was to unlock the bolt as opposed to the less-exciting task of turning the doorknob. By the time Tony had entered the living room, Mrs. Sanchez had accepted a long-stemmed rose box from the florist delivery boy and was laying it to rest on the table.

"Carry those things down for your grandmother," Tony firmly ordered Basilio after physically separating the battling brothers by their collars, then reaching into his pocket for the handful of dollars Millie had given him earlier and stuffing them into the delivery kid's hand.

Basilio stewed with an angry sulk, averse to taking orders from his nemesis of any kind, on any level, for any reason, which Tony was more than aware of. It's precisely why he would always go out of his way to issue them. He and the kid had just never taken a shining to each other; not even when Basilio was a baby. The minute his first tooth had grown in, he had promptly bitten Tony with it. It was as though the two of them had been custom-made to clash with each other, like water and oil; like centuries-old arch-antagonists who kept reincarnating, over and over, for no other reason than to seek the other out and annoy the hell out of him.

"I see you again someday, gringo. This I can promise you," Basilio brashly glared up at him with the fearlessness of a miniature Yul Brynner, tossing the lighter bag of dry cleaning to his little brother and dragging the substantially heavier laundry bag behind him to the door.

"Anytime, any place," Tony reiterated his longstanding open invitation, subconsciously foisting his chest outward an inch or two.

"The lovely señorita — tell her she has my pity," Basilio paused to smoothly sneer, like a Tattoo-sized graduate of the Ricardo Montalban School of Over-Dramatization.

"Save your pity for your scrawny little butt after I kick it down the stairwell for ya," Tony counter-sneered, giving Basilio a farewell shove through the door, simultaneously smiling and waving a pleasant good-bye to Mrs. Sanchez.

"Little punk," he groused to himself under his breath as he shut the door. He crossed over to the flower box on the table and slid the card from its tiny envelope, smiling to himself as he read the inscription:

Forgive me for last night, baby. All my love — Tony

His Dad had sent them on his behalf, he knew, convinced that he himself would forget — as he did — despite it having been drilled into his head over the years, time and again, that flowers and a proper apology were mandatories after having successfully angered, disappointed, or otherwise oafishly screwed things up with a woman. Neglecting to send them was not only uncivilized and disrespectful, but tantamount to committing romantic suicide.

Tony returned the card to the envelope and tucked it back between the folds of the blue satin ribbon around the box — his Mom's contribution to the effort — deciding to leave the flowers where they were for now, just in case he needed something to cheer Michelle up with a little later on. Amid her many mixed emotions, he couldn't help but detect some annoyance, and even disappointment in him, both in her voice and her eyes.

Reentering the bedroom, he was surprised to hear the shower cascading into the tub and drifted into the bathroom, feeling a little wounded.

"Hey... you mad at me?" he asked, leaning against the wall and folding his arms across his chest.

"What do you mean?" she called out to him.

"Don't you want me in there with you?" he inquired, a noticeable presence of dejection embedded in his tone.

"You were already dressed. I thought you'd taken a shower earlier."

"I was waiting for you," he brooded.

"Well, come in, then, okay?" she said to the sound of ensuing silence. "Okay?" she repeated upon receiving no response.

"Not if you don't want me to," he mumbled.

"I want you to, dear," she assured him.

Silence hung in the air for a moment.

"If you wanted me to, ya would've called me..."

"Just — Honey? Just get in the shower, all right? For goodness sake. I'm ordering you into the shower as part of your penalty for jeopardizing my life, okay?"

"Your life was never in jeopardy, Michelle," he muttered defensively, hurriedly yanking his shirt over his head, not wanting to waste time opening buttons.

"Oh? Read up on 'TSS.' Consider that another part of your penalty."

"What the hell is that?" he queried, yanking open the button and zipper on his jeans, his mood becoming a little brighter with every article of clothing that hit the floor.

"'Toxic shock syndrome.' It's when you leave a tampon in for too long and you end up dead from a bacterial infection," she informed him.

"Geeziz, Michelle," he winced. "Do ya have to... say that?"

"What?"

"That word," he whined.

"Tampon?"

"Don't — Geeziz, ya didn't have to say it again. Can't we just develop, y'know... like, a code word, or something? Geez..."

"Will you just get in here, please?" she snapped at him, her nerves already sufficiently frazzled as it was from the emotional roller coaster ride she'd been on from the second she'd opened her eyes and emitted her first blood-curdling scream of the morning. "You can't even say the word, so I'll assume you neglected to mention it to that doctor of yours..."

"I didn't think it was important," he sheepishly conceded.

"And the doctor didn't even think to ask, did he? With hundreds of women dying every year simply because they'd neglected to change their... code word. This is why I have a female gynecologist," she advocated.

"Geeziz, Michelle," he flinched, like someone had just accidentally staple-gunned him in the head. "Can't ya just say 'doctor'? Female 'doctor'?... I hate that word."

"Utterly, utterly hopeless," she sighed deeply, shaking her head and giving up as he stepped in and came up behind her, wrapping an arm around her waist and kissing her cheek before leaning past her to wet his face and hair. He noticed that his kiss hadn't been received with the usual level of fanfare; nor would he likely be finding himself pinned to the wall and at her mercy any time soon, he had the funniest feeling.

"I'll make this all up to you somehow, honey. Believe me," he swore on his scout's honor. "I'll let you read the Sunday fashion section first. How's that," he offered, trying to lighten her mood.

"The sacrifices you're willing to make for me... I'm touched," she grumbled. "Who was at the door?"

"No one. Just the kids messing around," he semi-truthfully replied, trading places with her long enough to quickly rub some shampoo in and out of his hair.

"So?" she asked a little self-consciously after he'd transferred her back under the warm stream of water.

"Hmm?"

"Are ya gonna tell me what I did, or are ya just gonna let me sweat it out?" she timidly inquired.

"Did when?" he played stupid, still striving to remain as deep within the vague zone as possible.

Michelle slowly turned and doe-eyed him, sending an instant pang of guilt hurtling against his conscience.

"Was I talking about anything? Did I drift off to sleep? Pass out on the floor? What?" she bravely prodded, not at all sure she was even prepared to hear the answers.

"Nah," he casually shrugged the night away, seeking to portray it, overall, as nothing particularly worthy of writing home about: hopefully even eventually boring her off the subject entirely, if there really was a God. "You were woozy. I put you to bed," he reported with technical accuracy, artfully omitting his parents' presence along with the rest of the events. "Turn around, baby," he gently coaxed her, taking the soap from her hand and rotating her by the shoulders. "Hungry?" he abruptly changed the subject with all the smoothness and suavity of a man whose hair was on fire.

"How woozy was I?" she persisted, crossing her arms and patiently allowing him the few moments of uninterrupted contemplation he pretended to need as he worked the soap around her shoulders.

"I don't know, honey," he finally said. "Woozy... Y'know, woozy like anybody else would be if they'd guzzled down a load of sedatives. That's what the stuff is designed to do, after all, isn't it?"

That was pretty vague, he had to hand to himself, skimming his soapy palms around her shoulder blades and watching the suds drizzle down and over her smooth, inviting hips, lusting for the moment when his hands would finally work their way down that far.

"On a wooze scale of one to ten..." she persevered, seriously beginning to worry why he was being so conspicuously careful with the way he crafted his answers.

"Uhh... I don't know. I'd say... well, I guess I'd say that ya started out pretty woozy at, like, maybe a six when the stuff first hit ya... probably 'cause ya hadn't eaten anything... Remember? I was just about to make ya that vegetable omelet..."

"I never got that far, I guess," she safely concluded, given how ravenously hungry she felt.

"I gave ya a couple of cookies before ya went to sleep," he responded as she turned to face him again.

"That would explain the crumbs I found in the cuffs of my nightshirt," she murmured, her brow creased with worry and her disheartened eyes awash with nagging uncertainty. "Was that doctor wearing Old Spice?" she asked. "My nightshirt smelled like Old Spice... That men's cologne from a couple of decades ago, remember?"

He stared blankly at her, not quite knowing how to dance his way around that one. Regardless of what he said or misled her to believe, the minute she met his Dad the jig would be up, no two ways about it.

"It's frightening," she quietly mentioned primarily to herself, nervously chewing on her lower lip.

"What is, baby," he asked, now feeling the guilt pangs starting to pelt his conscience's outer core with considerably greater speed and force.

"Not knowing," she responded despondently. "Missing a whole night from your life... Somebody knowing what you did and said, and you not knowing yourself... I'd prefer to know everything, no matter what, than to have to stumble around in the dark like this," she mumbled with a sigh of defeat and resignation, deciding to abandon her pursuit of answers and simply leave it at that, since questioning him further would only result in getting her nowhere just as fast as she'd gotten thus far.

Tony felt awful. Keeping things vague was a system that worked well for his Mom, perhaps, but it didn't feel right doing it with Michelle. His evasiveness wasn't sparing her feelings; it was causing her even more anguish. She appeared so lost and vulnerable and was obviously looking to him not just for clarity, but relief. Her soft, dewy eyes were asking for help; they were respectfully requesting that he be open and upfront with her and to come through for her, radiating the same level of trust in him that he had seen the other night when she'd shared her most private secrets and thoughts. They even seemed to be looking past him, into the future, searching to see if theirs would be a relationship of honesty, or one of selective, convenient truths. She was depending on him, he knew, to do the right thing by her.

It felt like a make-or-break moment; a decision on his part that would set the tone and tenor of the marriage he was hoping to enjoy for the next few decades of his life, and possibly even a few more lifetimes following.

He rubbed his forehead pensively, then his eyes, mulling the impossible damned-if-he-did, damned-if-he-didn't position he was in. Trying to spare her grief and embarrassment wasn't even an attainable goal, he realized, since Michelle was going to feel terrible no matter which way he played it.

"No, umm... no, Max wasn't wearing it," he answered in a low, somber tone, reaching around her and shutting the shower down.

She watched him step out and mindlessly extend his hand to her, engrossed in thought as he proceeded to dry them both down, switching back and forth between her and himself with mechanical, methodical sweeps of the towel.

"You were wearing it?" she quietly and rhetorically asked, though knowing that it couldn't have been him. Old Spice was too thick a scent. The bedding would have absorbed and emitted it; she would've been able to detect it in his hair earlier, too, since he self-admittedly hadn't showered between last night and up until now.

He didn't answer her right away, like his mind was preoccupied with other things, so she followed his cues in silence. Crawling back into bed minutes later, she deposited herself up against the pillows and under the covers as he slid himself into some silky white boxers he'd pulled from the dresser drawer.

"Stay there," he muttered, massaging his brow with his fingertips on his way out the bedroom door, leaving her to wonder if he planned on telling her who, then, had been sporting the aftershave if not himself or Max. She felt the ponderous grogginess suddenly sweeping over her again and struggled to keep her eyes open.

"Sit up, honey," was the next thing she heard him say, awakening to the sight of him laying glasses of juice on the nightstand alongside two mugs of steaming coffee he'd set down a minute earlier. Before the aroma of food had even registered, he was back with the same large oval platter from yesterday's breakfast. Heaped with scrambled eggs and English muffins, its presentation was more fraternity-style than family-style, with tiny salt and pepper shakers and a butter dish and other assorted items wedged in amid the food itself.

As she sat up against the pillows, he took one of them and placed it on her lap, then laid the platter on top. Stooping in with a kiss to her face, he stretched himself out on the bed, on the opposite side of their makeshift table, and propped his head up against his hand, settling in for the long haul.

"I gave you a couple of Mrs. Sanchez's cookies," he began in a low, easy voice, feeding a forkful of eggs into his mouth and gesturing with a nod of his chin for her to do the same while they were still steaming hot. "They're these giant-sized things she makes," he continued. "Only, umm... most of it ended up on the kitchen floor... in the corner, where I had you sitting against the wall... The wall with the clock..."

By the time he had polished off at least two-thirds of the platter's contents, he had told her everything.

Michelle sat frozen against the pillows, her eyes parched from not having blinked for an inordinately long period of time and feeling as though she might never blink again.

"Eat some more, baby," he encouraged her, picking up the fork she had dropped onto the plate in a moment of horror and motioning for her to take it back in her hand.

"Hugeness?" she repeated in stunned disbelief, temporarily unable to produce the power to speak above more than a whisper. "Are you sure I—?"

"Uh-huh," he gently confirmed, reaching for his coffee mug.

"That—that doesn't seem like a word I would use," she double-checked with eyes bulging and manicured eyebrows arching at an unnaturally sharp and uncomfortable-looking angle. "Are you absolutely sure I—?"

"Uh-huh," he gently repeated, surveying the remaining eggs and wondering how much he should leave for her.

She stared at him blankly, frozen in horror.

"How could you let me meet your father in that condition?" she gasped.

"Your condition was the primary reason he came over, baby. He was worried about you," he delicately explained. "Besides, I wouldn't have been able to keep him away if I tried. He's one of those take-charge kinda guys."

"What... what must he think of me?" she breathlessly fretted. 'I love your—?' Oh, my God," she moaned, covering her hot, flushed face with her hands, nearly stabbing herself in the side of her head with the fork.

"He thinks you have the skin of a china doll," Tony sympathetically assured her, pushing some eggs closer to her side of the platter. "Eat the rest of that, honey. C'mon," he implored her.

She didn't respond. She couldn't move. Her mind was racing.

"You wanted to know everything," he gently and softly reminded her, wondering if he'd made the right decision after all.

"How am I ever going to face him?... And your mother?" she despaired, her hands still covering her beet-red face. "I said 'hugeness' in front of your mother..." her voice trailed off into another mortified gasp.

"She thought you said 'cuteness,'" he soothed her, deciding to allow himself a little white half-lie after being so brutally forthcoming about every other detail. "She said—and this is a verbatim quote—she said, 'Isn't that sweet, darling? She loves his cuteness.'"

"Did she really say that?" Michelle asked hopefully, peeking out from between her fingers.

"Yes, baby," he consoled her.

"But your father. He—oh, my God, your father..." she said in a shallow whisper. "How did he react? What did he say?"

"Nothing. He was fine. He seemed kinda proud, actually," Tony couldn't help but lightly chuckle upon recalling the moment. "Thanks for the compliment, by the way," he politely added, pained to no end to see her face so blushed with embarrassment.

He lazily pushed himself up from his reclining position, took the fork from her hand and removed the pillow-table from her lap, convinced there was no way she was going to consume another bite. Placing it on the floor for the time being, he turned back and shuddered at the mist beginning to blanket her eyes.

"Ah, c'mon, honey. Please don't start that," he lightly whined, repositioning himself beside her. "See?... See, this is why I didn't want to give you all the particulars. I knew it was just gonna upset you."

"No, you made the right decision. I'd rather know than not," she said, trying to convince herself of it. "I always want you to tell me the truth... All of it. Promise me that."

"All right," he reluctantly agreed with a sigh, as if being asked to cut off his own hand. "In exchange, though, I want you to keep this all in perspective," he bargained. "I mean, it's not like my parents were shocked, or anything. It's like... well, think of it in terms of me being the one who'd gotten stoned and said something in front of your aunts, like—like, 'I love your breasts'..."

"My huuuuuuuge breasts," she said, drawing a more accurate comparison.

"Nah, it would have to be something a little more believable," he replied with a straight face and a pinched grin, hoping to get a giggle out of her, or anything even remotely resembling a smile. But she was clearly too absorbed in her thoughts and humiliation to react. "C'mon, baby, don't be upset," he gently pleaded.

"I'm not."

"Yeah, ya are," he said. "Tell me what I can do to make you feel better, huh?"

She frowned dejectedly and looked away for a moment while he patiently waited for the formula that would snap her back into her old self again.

"You can drive me over there," she answered in a small, tentative voice, peering up at him through sorrowful eyes. "I've got to... re-meet him. Now. Today. I don't want time to pass. He'll replay things in his head. People always do... And I've — I've got to apologize, so he'll at least know I'm mature and civilized and—oh, God, I can't believe I said that."

Tony's heart sank. He didn't want to go to his parents'. He wanted to spend the entire day alone with Michelle, preferably right there in bed for hour after naked hour. He wanted to cook for her and dote on her and snuggle in her arms, and her in his. With any luck at all, he'd even get her into a good enough mood to make warm, slow, gentle love to her. He wanted to share one of his forty fantasies; the one he had already gone to the trouble of cleaning up so she wouldn't think he was a sexual psycho-deviant who ought to be exiled to a deserted island for the good and safety of the general public.

"Can't ya call him instead?" he asked hopefully, assuming a wounded puppy expression — the kind he'd received numerous times throughout his life from various stray dogs in parking lots, seeking to con him into taking them home with him.

"No... no, that wouldn't be right. I should meet him face-to-face," she said, adamantly convinced of it. "I should look him in the eye."

"He really liked you, honey," Tony took another gentle stab at it. "I don't think you have to go through all that."

"I have to look him square in the eye now, or I'll never be able to, dear," she explained, knowing herself only too well.

He sighed.

"Okay... but under one condition," he acquiesced, sounding like an eighty-year-old man as he rose to his feet. "That I pick the time and the place. They probably aren't even home."

"Okay," she said with a smile. It was a small smile, but the first he'd seen on her face since she'd awoken at the top of her lungs.

She busied herself contemplating how she might reintroduce herself while Tony went off to place the call.

"Done," he announced a few minutes later, finding her sitting upright against the pillows with her arms and legs folded, chewing her lip and staring off into deep space. "Two hours, which means we have a whole hour and forty-five minutes before we have to start getting dressed," he said, nearly choking on the last few words.

"You're forgetting about the drive time," she mentioned with a stress-filled sigh, wondering if anything she could say would ultimately assure his father that she really wasn't a cheap floozy.

"Nah, they're coming here... to the scene of the crime," he replied, fumbling with the watch's tiny alarm setting.

"Honey! They shouldn't have to haul it over here!" she said in shock. "I didn't mean for them to have to go out of their way to—"

"Nah, nah. They're already out, doing the whole church and brunch thing," he eased her mind. "It's their standing date. My Dad's been taking her out every Sunday since they were married," he said, shaking his head in disbelief at how infinitesimally tiny they had made the timer and wondering what kind of guy was supposed to have hands dainty enough, or nails long enough, to actually grasp the thing.

"That's so romantic," she said, though only halfheartedly, unable to shake the embarrassment and anxiety eating away at her. She watched him growing seriously annoyed with the timepiece. "Give," she directed with her hand out to him.

He gladly relieved himself of the task, dropping the watch into her palm and himself facedown on the bed, making a pillow of her lap.

"Tell me what I can do to cheer you up. C'mon, baby," he pleaded with her, draping his arms across her body.

"Nothing, dear. I'm fine. Really... I'll be fine," she promised, unconvincingly.

"Yeah, only I want you to be fine now," he mildly sulked, holding up his wrist when it came time for her to reattach the band. "How 'bout I let ya go snooping for, say... fifteen minutes. Any room or closets or drawers. You enjoy that, honey," he reminded her.

"Maybe later," she sighed, sharply elevating his concern levels.

"Thirty minutes," he more than generously doubled the deal, shocked that she wasn't already down the hall tearing his office apart. "It's a one-time offer," he added to the temptation. "Now or never. Take it or leave it."

"I think I'll pass, in that case, dear. I'm still a little tired," she moped.

His head lifted from her lap just enough for his jaw to drop like a rock.

"Okay, well... I guess I didn't realize it 'til now, but... I can see I'm gonna have to get serious about this," he mumbled as he pushed himself onto his feet again.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

"Hang on," he murmured in a determined tone, disappearing for a minute and returning with his checkbook and a pen.

"You're gonna pay me to cheer up?" she eyed him with disbelief as he sat himself beside her, spending a moment to settle in comfortably against the pillows. He ignored her question and opened his checkbook, gazing off in deep thought for a few seconds, pondering the numerics and nodding in agreement with himself as he put pen to paper and began to write. She couldn't believe what she was seeing.

"Okay," he said after scribbling his signature and tearing the check free from its binding. "This oughta brighten your day," he confidently added, holding it out to her.

She stared at him as if he were insane.

"Go on. Take it... You're worth it," he enticed, moving the check closer to her hand.

She frowned and took it from him, then rolled onto her back and held it above her head.

"Pay to the order of Michelle Dessler," she cautiously read aloud. "One hundred kisses and... zero-zero cents..."

She turned her head to the side and stared at the smirk on his face for a brief flash before bursting into laughter, much to his delight and relief, compelling him to take a moment to silently commend his ingenious self.

"A hundred kisses don't quite cut it for ya, I take it," he mock-defensively responded to her laughter, feigning mortal insult, like a rejected groom who'd shed his clothes on his honeymoon night only to have his disappointed bride declare that the marriage was over. "Fine, fine. Not a problem," he huffed indignantly beneath his breath, opening the checkbook and busying himself with another.

"What's this here?" Michelle cackled, peering through tears of laughter at the upper-right section of her payoff.

"What..."

"Here... This... Where the dollar amount is supposed to be. It's a drawing of something."

"Where?" he said with miff saturating his tone, faking annoyance at having his thoughts interrupted as he impatiently glanced over to where she was pointing. "That's my lips," he announced, prompting another blast of unbridled laughter from her, half of which came snorting out of her nose this time.

"Have you ever thought about taking that 'Draw Sparky' test ya see on matchbook covers?" she cackled harder.

"I don't smoke, Michelle," he curtly reminded her, feigning irritability over the razzing she was delighting in giving him.

"Yeah? You should see yourself after sex," she quipped, laughing hard at her own joke while Tony struggled to maintain a straight face.

As he scribbled out his next offering, she crawled over and nosily leaned against his arm, hoping to steal a peek, but he elbowed her head away.

"Back off, woman," he warned in a rankled manner, sparking another round of melodious giggles. After a few moments, he tore the check from the book and handed it over. "There... Try resisting that," he confidently challenged, watching as she eagerly sat up to read.

"Pay to the order of Michelle Dessler... one hour and... one... one Tarzan costume..." she blurted out in a gale of laughter as the mental vision of him in a leopard loincloth flashed through her head.

"And?"

"... and... and twenty-five cents," she cried, holding the check to her stomach as she howled. Her contagious laughter forced him to bite the insides of his cheeks in an effort to maintain his straight-laced, mortally insulted persona, waiting until her laughing jag had finally dissolved into tear-wiping and runny nose-sniffling. "What's the quarter for?" she tried to inquire without losing it again, wiping her tear-stained cheeks with the heels of her hands, trying not to get her checks wet in the process.

"Knowing you, you'll insist upon flipping a coin to see which one of us wears it," he clarified cheerlessly, watching her collapse onto her side in a heap.

"No Jane costume?" she cried amid her gut-heaving.

"No way in hell," he firmly stated, drawing the line. "I'll be the one who ends up in it. I can just see it," he brooded, working to hold back laughter at the sight of her clutching her sides in the fetal position, curls splayed and jiggling in rhythm and sync with the rest of her body.

He facetiously sighed, deeply and impatiently, while she labored to compose herself, witlessly feeling around in the crumpled blanket for the checks that had tumbled from her hands at some point during her breakdown.

"What else do I get?" she excitedly begged to know, crawling over to his side and leaning her head in to wipe her eyes on a leg of his boxers.

"More?" he gawked incredulously, shaking his head in fabricated disbelief. "God, you're expensive," he muttered to himself, opening his checkbook again.

"This is the price you pay for not taking better care of me," she was sorry to inform him.

"I'll take care of you, all right," he grumbled under his breath, finding himself breaking character and chuckling a moment later when she returned to his side and wiped her damp nose on his boxers this time.

"Where do I go to cash these, by the way?" she inquired after he had "eeew-ed" and pushed her head away, muttering something about a piglet and ordering her to get away from him.

"The Bank of Almeida will be opening shortly," he testily informed her, resuming the tone of an irritated branch manager in high-priss mode.

"I see," she played along, loving his game, and especially her role as the pesky customer from hell. "Can I mix and match them if I want?" she annoyed him.

"I running a bank here, not a Chinese restaurant," he tartly responded. "You don't get to pick and choose from column-A and column-B with legal tender, Michelle..."

"Why can't I cash this one in for the full Tarzan costume, but only half the kisses with this one for now, and then open up a—?"

"Shhhh," he loudly hissed as though her incessant chattering were completely destroying his concentration.

"You're using up all your checks, y'know," she pragmatically pointed out to him, sprawling out on her side while she impatiently waited for him to finish.

"So what. I have more," he mumbled into space, chewing the cap of his pen while formulating the proper verbiage.

She quietly and excitedly watched as he finally finished his signature, tore the check free, and handed it over to her, sitting back with arms crossed and a proud smirk brandished across his face.

"Pay to the order of Michelle Dessler, one..."

She abruptly halted and inhaled sharply, her mouth dropping open and eyes doubling in size as her head snapped up in his direction.

"You are so fresh!" she squealed, cheeks reddening as she lurched forward to mount a punishing tickle attack upon his ribcage. But before her wriggling fingers could land their first assaultive round, he handily tossed her onto her back in one smooth swoop, applying pressure with his chest to hold her in place.

"Yes, I know," he agreed with a roguish smirk, feeling his own cheeks on the verge of breaking into a blush. "You love it," he seductively reminded her in a gruff whisper, calling her bluff of modesty.

"You are going straight to hell someday, mister," she guaranteed him in the midst of a fresh giggling fit, squirming under the weight of his silky chest. She stealthily moved her fingers in for another surprise assault upon his ultra-ticklish ribs, but he foiled her plans once again, catching and pinning her wrists gently against the mattress.

"Yeah, with you right behind me," he hated to have to tell her, his mouth proceeding to have its way with whatever happened to strike his fancy within nibbling distance. Between the taste of her warm skin and the sensation of her body wriggling and giggling beneath him, he felt his excitement level already straining the limits.

"Don't make me scan that check and send it out inter-agency," she threatened as she struggled, though not very hard at all, to free herself from his immobilizing grip.

"Gee, don't do that," he flippantly pleaded with cocky sarcasm, pausing momentarily from feasting at one of his favorite hotspots. "Every eligible babe in the place will be beatin' my door down. And then what would I do."

"In your dreams," she managed to chuckle her assurances before his mouth had sealed itself over hers, muffling out her words and ensuing series of shallow moans.

She plotted her retaliation strike, launching with a taunting tongue, though not really perpetrating any significant damage until she had succeeded in wrestling her lips free long enough to whisper something into his ear that sent an unanticipated surge roaring through his system at a speed that caused his body to jolt from the zing.

"Geeziz, baby," he moaned in an odd mixture of stunned pleasure, sheer pain, and undying gratitude for the way her wicked mind worked, then conducted a quick assessment of damages sustained from the bunker-bombing she'd so neatly and pin-pointedly blindsided him with. For one thing, his brain was partially paralyzed; for another, he was already strongly considering a short respite, feeling the serious need for time out to recover and regroup from the image her words had branded into his mind "And I'm supposed to be the fresh one, huh?" he euphorically double-checked, his own commentary muffled this time as her lips voluntarily surrendered themselves back into the custody of his warm mouth, leaving her shameless words to clang around inside his ear.

She giggled softly and proudly at the effects of her evil handiwork, seizing the perfect opportunity to slip her wrists from his grip while he languished in a weakened state, his brain reeling and his guard still down.

"You don't know what you do to me, woman," he groaned in pain, laying his head against hers and succumbing to the intoxicating sensation of her busy fingertips now torturously taking their sweet time inching his boxers downward.

When her hands extended their full reach, the satiny bottom of her foot took over, sliding up along his leg, her toes then cleverly catching hold and escorting them to their final destination just slightly north of his shins.

"You're so talented," he lethargically lifted his head and crooned into her eyes with a soft chuckle, amused by her beaming expression of self-pride.

Kicking his boxers off the rest of the way, he collapsed his head against her shoulder, dreamily shuddering from the thrilling sensation of her nails swirling lazily around his lower back. They gently scratched and scraped along, eventually parting company, with one hand heading east and the other west to explore the smooth, firm terrain before meeting up again south of his tan line, drinking in the shape and sinew of each hill, crest, and valley they passed along the way.

He silently lauded her ability to cause his temperature to rise and his skin to glisten with such stunning expediency, efficiency and effectiveness. He marveled in her sensuousness and sexual confidence, too; in how breezily and brazenly she would simply assume ownership of whatever happened to interest, intrigue, or amuse her at any given moment; wantonly using him however she pleased, for whatever she wished, and in whatever function, capacity, or fashion — unabashedly and without compunction, fear, consent, or a second thought — relegating him to spectator status until her curiosity had been satisfied, or her goal achieved, and his parts and services were no longer required.

He equally marveled in her control of his emotions and movements. She had a way of pulling his strings, judiciously and teasingly withholding certain things from him at certain critical points and junctures, then playfully dangling them, like sexual carrots, making him that much more desirous of what he couldn't immediately have. She thrilled his senses and manipulated his mind into wanting to strain his body harder and longer to please her; to sweat for her; to earn her.

Nostrils tingled from the intoxicating aroma of his own thick body scents beginning to blend with hers, creating a whole other separate and unique fragrance that he adored. It was neither his nor hers, but theirs, and hung in the air, permeating the pores of their skin and everything surrounding them.

Sighing deeply and serenely, he propped himself up on his elbows and lifted her head just enough to fill his hands with her curls. Leaning his lips against her ear, he tried to tell her how much he loved her and how exquisite she made him feel, frustrated by the lack of words in the English language sufficient to describe the scope and depth and magnitude of the passion she produced in him. She solicited responses and effectuated results that no other woman had ever even sought out before, much less attained from him. He groped for a way to articulate how her sultry playfulness and creativity could have him chuckling in one breath and leave him trembling in the next, and how mystified he was by the ease and speed with which he'd find himself moaning her name repeatedly and seemingly at her will. But he had no idea how to even begin to transcribe those feelings into words.

Fortunately for him, she seemed to identify with his verbalization frustration only too well, taking little time to propose a perfect alternative to trying to tell her how he felt.

"Show me," she purred with reanimated fingers, and hands slowly descending between their bodies, neatly collapsing his elbows and brain out from under him.