They reached his Explorer and Hal walked around to the passenger side to unlock and open Shannon’s door for her. He supposed it was one of those things a goddess expected. She climbed into the truck one long leg at a time, and he tried not to notice the delicate musculature revealed under the leather pants. Tried to ignore the more interesting creases and crevices where the lucky pants rode her hips and thighs. He failed.
He gave himself a stern internal lecture.
This woman is nothing but a torment sent by my sister and a scourge upon my bank account. I am not interested in her pants or anything inside them.
Like most lectures, it went ignored. Not only was he lying to himself, but he was hard again.
6
HAL SWUNG INTO the driver’s seat, started the ignition and checked the rearview mirror before backing out of his parking spot. What the hell? Who the hell? Oh. It was him. His new appearance was going to take some getting used to.
“Okay,” said Shannon, his tormentor and scourge. “You want to head toward Avon, Hal.”
He had a strong suspicion that he didn’t want to do that at all. “Why?”
“We’re going to update your eyewear now.”
“I just got these glasses a year and a half ago. I don’t need new ones.”
She blinked rapidly. “The frames are new, too, or just the lenses?”
“The lenses.”
“That’s what I thought. Those frames date back to about 1989, don’t they?”
“Uh…”
“Never mind.” Shannon reached over and cupped his jaw, tilted his chin toward her.
Hey, I’m trying to drive, here, woman! But he didn’t say it. The touch of her fingertips awakened exhilaration in him, plucked at some hidden longing that he didn’t want to acknowledge. A sweet lemon scent tickled his nostrils—her hand lotion?
“We need something smaller, lighter, with a more rectangular shape,” she said, after moistening her lips.
Was it his imagination or had her eyes gone smoky for an instant? No, what we need is to get naked right here on Route 4. Hal jerked his gaze back to the road.
“And I’d like you to try a set of contact lenses.”
“No. They irritate my eyes and drive me crazy.”
“When was the last time you tried them?”
“College.”
“They’ve made some improvements since then. Some of the new extended-wear lenses are so thin and flexible that you can’t even feel them.”
Hal sighed and kept driving. He had a feeling it was going to be a long day, and every moment spent with Shannon Shane was time he wasn’t tracking the source of his information leak. If he didn’t find it before the IPO… Such a possibility didn’t bear thinking about.
He put a hand up to tug on the whiskers normally abundant on his chin. Damn it! Nothing but skin. How far would this transformation go? The back of his neck was cold, too, and his head felt lighter. Hal wondered if this was how a sheep felt after its wool got harvested.
He looked over at the source of his torment, but Shannon now seemed lost in a world of her own. The fingers of her left hand drummed restlessly on the leather seat between them, every now and then gripping the edge and then losing purchase, falling back to the cushion. The drumming began again seconds later. Her smooth olive skin stretched taut across the fine bones, seeming to barely contain her energy.
She seemed disturbed, deep in thought, trying to come to terms with something.
What went on in the brain of a goddess? Hal found himself vaguely surprised that he wondered. For surely goddesses didn’t ponder much—they just accepted the worship of others as their due and basked in the glory.
Shannon was obviously not in the least dim, but he doubted that she was contemplating the philosophy of Nietzsche or Kant.
She roused herself out of her reverie long enough to give him adequate directions, and soon they were turning into the strip mall that housed Fashionocular, scene of his next trial by fire.
The vague sense of doom hanging over Hal morphed immediately into dismay as he followed Shannon through the door. Hundreds—thousands?—of blank spectacles met his gaze, rows upon rows of them, running from floor to forehead level. He’d never seen so many at once. He’d always bought his glasses at one of the lower-end department stores, and had never chosen from more than perhaps fifty styles.
He looked around. Horn-rims, wire-rims, plastic-rims of every possible width. Round lenses, cat’s-eye lenses, elliptical lenses, rectangular ones. And you could see the world in any hue: blue, green, yellow, tan, pink or even purple. The frames all stared at him, mocked him, disembodied though they were.
“I can’t possibly try all these on,” he said to Shannon. “I’d need hours…even days.”
“Of course not,” she said. “You’re going to work with Marta, trying on different contacts, while I select between five and ten pairs. Okay?”
“But I don’t want to stick little bits of plastic onto my eyeballs. I told you that….”
She nodded until he wound down a bit, feeling that she’d actually listened to him this time. Then she stuck a finger in his back and propelled him toward a plump, pleasant-looking woman.
“Marta? This is Hal Underwood. He’s a little squeamish about contact lenses, but I think he’s only tried the hard ones, years ago. I’m putting him into your care.”
“Hi, Mr. Underwood. We’ve got all kinds of soft lenses now that you can’t even feel, I promise. And look how handsome you are! Why would you hide that face behind glasses?” She smiled flirtatiously at him.
Handsome? The woman was hallucinating. Or more likely, Shannon paid her to butter up the clients she brought in.
Muttering to himself, and wondering when he could get back to his office and pursue more worthwhile things than his appearance, Hal sat in a squat rolling chair in front of a counter that held a circular, magnified mirror. Marta asked what his vision was—20/600 in the left eye and 20/740 in the right—and then brought out several little boxes and sanitized her hands.
Then she reached with her forefinger and thumb into the tiny well of a contact case, and came up with something that looked exactly like a round piece of plastic wrap.
Hal stared at it.
“It’s painless, really,” Marta promised. “You put it on your index finger, like this, and add a drop of solution. Then guide it into your eye and blink.”
He grimaced. “And then how in the hell do I get it out?”
She dimpled and demonstrated. “You’ll grasp it just like this and pluck, presto.”
Yeah. Pluck, presto. Hal had a feeling he would die with the little pieces of Glad wrap still on his corneas. He hoped they were sticky so they’d hold the coins over his eyes when he got buried.
But aside from some blinking to get rid of excess solution, he had to admit the lenses were comfortable—and he even saw more clearly. His old glasses had obviously not been strong enough. He felt absolutely nothing in his eyes, and accepted Marta’s recommendation of two-week extended-wear contacts.
Hal peered at himself in the mirror, still shocked at his changed appearance. He’d noticed before that the little Latin bandit Enrique had left his hair in uneven but somehow choreographed chops and wisps. He touched