Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 116362 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 582(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116362 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 582(@200wpm)___ 465(@250wpm)___ 388(@300wpm)
I grab her hand and pull her up to her feet.
She’s immediately bashful, standing there completely naked and awkward, trying to hide her body from me.
I walk over to my dresser and toss her a shirt.
“Here, put that on,” I tell her. “Unless you want to be naked. No complaints from me.”
She slips the shirt over her head. “This is good, thanks. What’s for dinner?”
“Cold pizza,” I tell her as we walk to the kitchen.
“Cold pizza? That is so college student circa nineteen eighty-nine,” she tells me, leaning against the island counter, as if we were alive then. “Do you have Pepsi too?”
“Well, tonight it’s college student two thousand sixteen,” I tell her, opening the fridge. “And Pepsi? What’s wrong with you?” I pause and peer around the fridge door at her. “You might want to avert your eyes. I have to bend over.”
She averts them by way of rolling them up to the ceiling. Good enough.
I get the pizza out and start divvying up slices onto plates. “Ever see that Seinfeld episode where Jerry has that girlfriend that’s always naked?”
“Yes,” she says. “Please don’t open any pickle jars around me.”
“No promises.” We sit down on the stools at the kitchen island and nibble on our slices. Amanda keeps blushing, and I can’t tell if it’s because of the good sex, the fact that we’re having sex at all, or the fact that I’m naked. I have a feeling her prat of an ex-boyfriend never walked around naked in front of her. She probably only saw his penis in the dark. Might have been a good thing.
I’m staring at her like a total dork, probably with a goofy look on my face, when she stops chewing, her mouth open, the pizza hanging limply from her hand. Her eyes widen, focused on a spot beyond me.
Then her hand starts shaking and the pizza is shaking, and it’s like I’m watching that scene with the Jell-O in Jurassic Park.
I stiffen. “What is it?” I’m already whispering, preparing for a raptor behind me.
Her eyes dart to mine. “Um,” she says, voice squeaking. “Just how dangerous is a tarantula?”
Oh no. Oh no.
No.
My head whips around to see Fluffy on the counter behind me.
I swear he lifts one of his hairy legs and waves it at me, giving me a wink with one of his many dark shining eyes.
There’s a split second where everything freezes. Fluffy in mid-wave. My heart. My lungs.
And then Fluffy suddenly moves.
And I don’t know if he’s flinging himself at me or just running away or what’s going on, but I scream bloody murder and I jump to my feet, running clear to the other side of the room. Somewhere in this display of utter cowardice I remember I’m with Amanda. And I’m naked. And still I’m hoping she’s a bigger man than me.
But she’s also screaming, running down the hall.
“Are you okay?” I yell at her, shudders running through me.
“Yeah!” she cries out from around the corner. “Ahh, I feel like he’s crawling on me!”
“Me too!” I slap my hands all over my body. My eyes dart all over the living room, the kitchen, expecting to see that fuzzy rose gold body anywhere.
“What are you going to do?” Amanda yells.
“I don’t know. Kill him?”
“You can’t do that, it’s Kevin’s!”
“Fucking Kevin,” I mutter. “Fine. I guess. We’ll. Capture. Him.”
I let out an embarrassing cry.
Amanda cries out too. “Okay. Okay. We’ll do it together.”
“We better or I’m calling the fire department.”
“I can’t believe you have a fear of spiders!”
“Why? So do you! And it’s a bloody tarantula! It’s as big as my hand!!”
“Yeah, but you’re a man.”
“Well, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize you needed tarantula-wrangling skills on top of a massive cock and orgasms to go. Want me to go into the jungle and wrestle an alligator, too?”
“Let’s just…get it.”
I sigh, trying to gather the courage. “Okay. You come from that direction and I’ll come from this one and maybe we can corner him.”
I take a few steps, taking stealthy glances around the room. At the moment, everything from the remote to a coaster to a shoe looks like Fluffy.
“Is he actually dangerous?” Amanda yells.
“I did a bunch of research,” I yell back. “Once I got him, I wanted to make sure he wasn’t a stowaway from Arachnophobia. I didn’t want to end up like Bill Pullman.”
“That was Jeff Daniels.”
“Or was it Bill Paxton? Anyway. He’s a Chilean Rose tarantula and they’re supposed to be docile. But I’ve seen him eat those crickets, I mean snap their bloody heads off. And I know he looks at me like he’s going to do the same.”
I creep forward until I’m just past the couch and I see her head peek around the corner of the hallway.
“Are you carrying a weapon?” I ask.
She has a toilet plunger in her hands, holding it like a baseball bat. “I had to grab something.”