As Dennis started talking, Susan knew she should call a halt to all of this, but she’d dealt with enough crap that day already and the last thing she wanted was to deal with any more. So once again she tried to tune him out, turning her attention instead to the piece of gravy-covered cardboard on her plate. But as she was choking down the last bite, as impossible as it seemed, his loony rhetoric took a quantum leap.
“So I was thinking that maybe on Saturday night you could come over to Mom’s house for dinner. How does that sound? She’s a pretty good cook, you know.”
Susan stopped short. “What did you say?”
“Mom told me to invite you to dinner.”
She looked at him incredulously. “I don’t even know your mother.”
“That’s the point. She always wants to meet the girls I date.”
Susan gripped her fork until her fingers turned white. “Dennis. We’re not dating.”
“Sure we are. We have lunch together all the time. Evie says a relationship is all about togetherness.”
Evie. Change one letter and she became Evil. Why had Susan never noticed that before?
“I’m busy on Saturday,” she said.
“Then Friday.”
“I’m busy then, too.”
“Then pick a day. As long as it’s not Sunday. That’s Mom’s bingo night.”
Susan couldn’t take this anymore. “I have to go.”
She rose and headed for the conveyor belt to dump her tray. Sure enough, Dennis got up to follow her, still yammering away, and all she could think about was how her ex-husband was getting married to a decent woman when the best Susan could do was the quintessential geek with bad hair, bad posture and bad breath, a man she was going to have to break up with even though they’d never dated in the first place.
Suddenly, all kinds of emotions swirled around inside her. Irritation. Apprehension. Resentment. Desperation. Regret over the past. Hopelessness for the future. A plan was forming in her mind to break into a Hershey’s chocolate factory at two in the morning and eat herself senseless, after which she would crawl into a corner, curl up in a fetal position and cry. At that moment, she was a psychologist’s Rolodex all crammed into one person, and that one person was ready to blow.
“So how about seven o’clock on Thursday?” Dennis said. “Any later and Mom’s arthritis starts to—”
“Don’t talk to me anymore.”
“But—”
“I said shut up.”
“But I need to be able to tell her—”
Susan slammed her tray down on the conveyor belt and spun around, skewering him with a furious glare. “Listen to me! I don’t want to go anywhere with you!”
When his eyes got all wide with surprise, Susan was sure she’d scored a direct hit. Then his face morphed into a goofy grin. “Yeah, Evie told me you always play hard to get. She said you like men who won’t take no for an answer.”
Evie was a dead woman.
He inched closer. “She also said you like a man who talks dirty.”
Susan had barely registered shock over that statement when Dennis, in the most graphic language imaginable, proceeded to tell her his fantasy about the nurse in the black hip boots and the naughty barista.
In a flurry of astonishment and disgust, Susan shoved him against a nearby wall, her hand at his throat. His eyes bugged open with surprise.
“Listen to me,” she growled. “I’m not your girlfriend. I don’t even like you. I’ve had it with you calling me at four in the morning. And the last thing I want to hear about are your sick fantasies!”
He tried to say something, but she tightened her hand on his throat, and he gagged and gasped instead.
“How would you like me to tell Mom what a deviant her son is? Huh? How would that be? Maybe I’ll call her at 4:00 a.m. and let her know all about it!”
“No! You can’t—”
“The hell I can’t. And if you so much as breathe another word like that to me again, I’m ripping off your balls and tossing them into that big old vat of soup in the kitchen, and I don’t give a damn what the health department says about it. Got that?”
Dennis’s eyes grew wide and horrified. “Are you crazy?”
“Yeah, Dennis. I’m crazy.”
“This is assault!”
“Assault? Assault? What you’ve been doing to me is assault! I never asked you to hang around, to call me at four in the morning, to be there every time I turn around!”
“I’m calling the cops!”
“Oh, bite me, you little twit!”
Ah, the words felt good, as if they’d been bottled up inside her for years, rattling the cage door, screaming to get out. When she finally let Dennis go, he stumbled out of the cafeteria with his forehead crinkled in Wookiee-like rage, and she couldn’t have cared less. She felt as if she’d just conquered the world. No other jerk would ever pull this crap on her again. She’d scored one for geek-oppressed women everywhere. Until Mr. Right came along, she was through dealing with Mr. Wrong. And she felt that way right up to the time the cops showed up in the E.R. and arrested her for assault.
If only she’d pulled Dennis into a supply closet before going postal on him, there wouldn’t have been any witnesses. He said/she said testimony never got a person convicted. But at noon in that cafeteria sat approximately fifty witnesses who didn’t know the whole story, but they were quite willing to spill the part they did.
But no matter what all those witnesses said, Susan hadn’t actually threatened to kill Dennis. She’d merely threatened to emasculate him and toss his balls into Baptist Memorial Hospital cafeteria’s soup of the day. Unfortunately, Judge Henry Till of the fourth district court of Dallas County hadn’t seen it her way. Leave it to a male judge to associate the loss of a guy’s manhood with death.
Of course, her handprint on Dennis’s throat hadn’t helped matters, either.
After a plea bargain—plea bargain, as if she were a real criminal—she emerged from the experience with an attorney bill that was going to keep her in the red for the next year, along with a request for her presence at an eight-week, court-ordered anger management class. All because a certain banana-nosed freak couldn’t keep his sick fantasies to himself.
Her coworkers were astonished. Lani was horrified. And Don was flabbergasted that his meek little ex-wife would go off on anyone. Apparently he had no idea what a time bomb he’d been dealing with for sixteen years.
So now, in the midst of having to deal with a demanding job, a nonexistent social life, an ex-husband tying the knot and a daughter crying over it, she was stuck in a class designed to teach her how to control her anger just when she was getting the hang of expressing it.
Yeah, life was definitely looking up.
CHAPTER 2
It was five after seven when Susan trotted up the front steps of Andrews Hall, one of the stark concrete buildings that comprised the campus of Henderson Community College. She guessed the court had struck a deal with the college to use its classrooms, which made her wonder if the other students in the building knew they were sharing facilities with hardened criminals who could go nuts and take hostages at any moment.
Once inside, she hurried down the hall to room 124, rounding