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      Don't Forget the Pepper Spray

      by

      Kristen Marie

      Copyright 2013 Kristen Marie,

      All rights reserved.

      Published in eBook format by eBookIt.com

       http://www.eBookIt.com

      ISBN-13: 978-1-4566-1493-5

      No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

      STORY CONTRIBUTORS

      Michael Allen

      Kristin Cassidy

      Shelley Christopher

      Kiki Collins

      Verily Grace

      Kaycee Green

      Victoria Hatch

      Joy Jansen

      Vanessa Jordan

      Stephanie Kirk

      Melody Klein

      James Lewis

      Jesse Lyn

      Kristen Marie

      Melissa McGibbon

      Erica Matsumori

      Erin McBride

      Reni McBride

      Jannette Newton

      Teresa Niumatalolo

      Tunde Opra

      Kelsey Parrish

      Alexandra Pavlenko

      Prana

      Tami Raban

      Bryan Samuels

      Anna Turnover

      This book is dedicated to those who believe small things can become BIG, fear is just a limit we put on ourselves, and the power of one is great, but the power of a unified many is greater.

      LOCK-UP

      Do you know what a night in lock-up does to a $500 Betsy Johnson dress?

      I sigh to myself. There were signs. There were definitely signs. “A plus b plus c” equals no go but, let’s be honest, I hadn’t had a date in a while and my math skills were more like, ”A plus b plus…”, oooh he smells good, equals, what where we talking about?

      So I put on my favorite, “maybe-just-maybe, designer, of-course-I-didn’t-pay-retail dress” and slid my flattering heels into the passenger seat of his cherry classic car. The interior of which was a soft, dreamy white and the leather seats were supple and warm behind my knees. I liked that the car had one of those big steering wheels with the ridges for better grip and a radio face that made you go fishing for the right station in a sea of static.

      I glanced over and caught his profile illuminated by the light pouring out of a store window across the street and yes he was somewhat chinless. Umm. Actually he looked like someone had unfastened the skin from his jaw and now it just sort of hung there, loosely connected between his lower lip and his neck. But he’d been funny on the phone and was taller than me in my heels, and I was over my dinner-out budget this week so if I wanted something other than veggies and rice and dying alone, this was my shot. The door was closed, the music was mellow, the light was green and we were off.

      “So Alice,” he says to me. He asks me about my work and my hobbies and I’m mildly engaged but I can hear him humming under his breath as he listens to me and he’s always switching topics which isn’t exactly making me feel listened to. But we’re in my favorite part of town and there are fancy cheese shops and snazzy wine bars and I’m a 9 riding with a 6 so I figure everyone will just think he’s loaded, and I’m kind of okay with that.

      We stop for a minute to glance at a line to get into one of the restaurants and I don’t really notice that a police car has pulled up behind us until he activates his horn telling us to move on and not block traffic, but Frank suddenly seizes up. I swear I saw his neck flap move two inches as his chest tightened. Before I can even ask him what’s wrong he cranks the wheel and punches the gas and shoots into traffic. We barely miss knocking down several fancy pedestrians, and I’m thinking if we didn’t have a reason to get pulled over before we sure do now.

      “Whoa Frank” I said, trying to laugh it off. "Is there a body in the trunk?" Oh crap Alice there probably is a body in the trunk and now he knows that you know and now you're going to end up in a plastic bag under the freeway and he's going to be wearing what's left of your scalp all the way across the state line. We stop suddenly, he turns towards me and says, in a high-pitched, sing-song voice: "Ha ha ha ha, body...trunk...that's funny." Then he parallel parks.

      We're in the bar and he's ordered one, two, three drinks and I've had one...one drink, because any more is completely a no-no on a first date. But we're laughing, having a good time. He's a funny accountant if you can believe that. And yes food gathers in the corners of his mouth and yes one of his shoes is untied, but he has a nice smile and a 401K so I'm going with it.

      We leave the bar and it’s cold, so we decide not to walk to the restaurant. He's had a few so he asks me if I can drive the car the 7 blocks. While my instinct is screaming about insurance, I say okay and get behind the wheel. The car purrs to life and I think good date or bad, at least I got to drive this car. We pull up right in front of the restaurant and just as I'm about to back into a spot I hear the sirens again.

      The cop gets out and walks over to the car and I’m ready to be nice and sweet but I’m getting hungry so this better be quick. “Step out of the car ma’am” he says. “What?” I ask trying to hand him my license. “Out of the car ma’am, did you know this vehicle is stolen?”

      Stolen? I look over at Frank and he looks like he’s about to wet his pants. Frank trips all over himself trying to explain that it’s his grandmother’s car and that he borrowed it but when he pulls out the registration it has her name on it and their last names aren’t the same. To top it off, his grandmother lives in a senior citizens’ home and had Alzheimer’s. Frank can’t call the home and verify that she’s his grandma because the office doesn’t have him listed as a next of kin and she probably won’t remember him. At this point the look on my face is as the same as the look on the cop’s. Is this guy for real? To top it all off, since I’m driving the car, I’m a suspect too and this bozo can’t seem to utter the simple phrase, “I’d had too much to drink and my date offered to drive.” No he just sits there whining about why the officer won’t believe him and how grandma was old and probably didn’t remember that she had let him borrow the car. It turns out that the grandmother had had a lucid moment and wanted to go for a drive. She had called her friend who had been keeping the car for her and when the friend had noticed the car was missing, he had called the police and declared it stolen.

      So there I am in my expensive dress sharing a holding cell with a woman who looks like she could bench press me, eating a very dry and salty meal provided by the officer. This was not the dinner I had in mind. Finally, a few hours later, Frank was able to contact his parents who were able to verify that he was indeed related to the owner of the vehicle. Whether he ever had permission to take the car will never be known all I cared about was that the charges were dropped.

      Frank had the guts to call me the next day and try to laugh it off, saying that we had gotten dinner one way or another. I explained to him that it isn’t dinner when the state pays and I promptly hung up.

      TERRITORY MARKERS

      I have discovered that men are territorial.

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