Sometimes the Best Presents Can't Be Wrapped E-Book

B.G. Thomas

• Herausgeber: Dreamspinner Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 225

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Ned Balding used to be a decent man—until the stress of seemingly countless responsibilities changes him, and he becomes cold and driven—the kind of man who considers firing an employee days before Christmas. The kind of man who kicks a dog…. But Ned's transgressions haven't gone unseen. A Salvation Army Santa witnesses his misdeeds and decides Ned needs to be taught a lesson. When Ned wakes up the next morning, he's stunned to discover he's been transformed into a dog. In the past year, Jake Carrara has lost his mother, a lover… even his dog. His boss came close to firing him just before the holidays. He isn't sure he's ready for another pet when he's asked to foster a dog, but Jake's good heart won't let him refuse. Little does he know, this isn't just any dog. Through a twist of fate, two people with little reason to be friends might teach each other to rediscover the good—and the love—in life.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Ned Balding was dragged out of his home crying...

BEFORE….

DURING

AFTER

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Copyright

Sometimes the Best Presents Can’t Be Wrapped

By B.G. Thomas

Ned Balding used to be a decent man—until the stress of seemingly countless responsibilities changes him, and he becomes cold and driven—the kind of man who considers firing an employee days before Christmas. The kind of man who kicks a dog…. But Ned’s transgressions haven’t gone unseen. A Salvation Army Santa witnesses his misdeeds and decides Ned needs to be taught a lesson.

When Ned wakes up the next morning, he’s stunned to discover he’s been transformed into a dog.

In the past year, Jake Carrara has lost his mother, a lover… even his dog. His boss came close to firing him just before the holidays. He isn’t sure he’s ready for another pet when he’s asked to foster a dog, but Jake’s good heart won’t let him refuse. Little does he know, this isn’t just any dog.

Through a twist of fate, two people with little reason to be friends might teach each other to rediscover the good—and the love—in life.

To Caryl Hull, who has supported me from the beginning and before, and even been overjoyed.

You planted a seed, my friend. This one had to be yours!

NED BALDING was dragged out of his home crying and howling, toward a van. Terrified, he fought to get away—to run—with every ounce of energy he had. But there was a leather loop around his neck attached to a long pole, and a strong burly man was pushing and shoving him toward the van’s open doors.

Ned snarled. Fought. Tried to bite, even.

He was being taken away!

Ned howled all the more and dug his bare feet into the grass of his front yard. He was naked, and anyone could see. Horrifying! Humiliating! The two of them reached the vinca-vine-covered greenway between the sidewalk and the curb, and he tried to dig his feet in there as well, driving his toes into the dirt and thick ground cover, thrashing to either side, but the man was too strong! Now he was on the hot blacktop, and it burned the soles of his feet. God, had it snowed only yesterday? And now his feet were burning?

Got to get away! Run! Run run run! Get someplace where someone can help me.

But the man next to him had grabbed hold of that choking leather band looped around his neck and, with muscles far stronger than Ned’s, was fighting, shoving, manhandling him up into the van—

Stop! No! Don’t do this!

—and he was absolutely terrified.

“Don’t hurt him” came the voice of Lillian, one of his oldest friends, from behind. Why was she letting this happen?

And no! What was inside the van was enough to make him redouble his efforts not to be shoved inside. Cages! He was going to be put in a cage. Oh, and the smells. God no. Shit and piss and something underneath it all. Something truly awful. He just wasn’t sure what.

He was up and into the van now, and when that man tried to climb in after him, Ned turned and tried to bite him. Yes! To bite him!

“Oh no!” the man cried and twisted Ned’s neck painfully. “Fuck you, you mongrel. In! Get in there.”

Ned was forced back into a kennel—a plastic kennel!—and his terror intensified. He panicked, but the man was so incredibly strong, and before he could absorb that it had really happened, he was inside. His captor loosened the leather loop and slipped it right off his neck, and before Ned could react, the door slammed with a loud click! and he was locked in.

Ned howled! He spun around inside the kennel and tried to bite the man’s hand, but the bastard was wearing heavy gloves that stopped Ned from doing any kind of damage.

No! He thrust his head high so he could howl again but hit it hard on the top of the kennel, and he cried out and then just… threw himself down in defeat.

He cried. He cried and cried and cried.

And the man? Who had been so angry and cruel and vicious?

His expression slowly changed from one of pure outrage—

The man? Outraged? I’m the one in the kennel!

—to one of… sympathy.

“Jesus Patootie, doggie…,” he said. He shook his head slowly and sighed. Ned could smell the sweat that ran down the man’s face. That and something else he’d never smelled before. And then it hit him. He was smelling the man’s fear. How? How could he smell fear?

“What happened to you, doggie?” the man asked.

Ned cried. He couldn’t stop.

Look what life had brought him.

Only yesterday he’d sat at his desk and looked at the divorce papers that had been handed to him. He’d thought life had dealt him a really bad blow. But that? That was nothing.

Because now, believe it or not, folks—and he was finally seeing that it was true—he, Ned Balding, was a dog.

BEFORE….

1

NED BALDING stared at the divorce papers. Again. He’d been doing that more or less all morning. They’d been handed to him personally by some zit-faced kid who didn’t look old enough to have graduated high school, let alone be handing over such important legal documents. The little snot had been waiting in the parking lot, hadn’t even let Ned go into the office and take his coat off, and he’d used his tablet to take a picture of Ned holding those papers. Maybe as proof that he’d done his job and not thrown the papers away?

Ned should have punched the son of a bitch and then taken the tablet and shoved it up the kid’s ass. He’d simply been too surprised.

Stunned, really.

He still was.

Ned hadn’t really thought Cliff would go through with it. Thought that when Cliff had packed a little suitcase and gone to their lake house—if you could call such a small place a “lake house”—he was just sulking. That he was doing it for show. That like he normally did, he’d come back home in a few days, possibly as much as a week, and they’d pretend nothing had happened and move on.

Apparently not this time.

Ned became aware of how incredibly quiet it was. Ordinarily he had the door open to the outer office, but several weeks ago the piped-in music he paid for had begun the annual subversive holiday regime, and he couldn’t stand holiday songs. “Silent Night” and “Silver Bells” and “Do You Hear What I Fucking Hear?” and “The Little Drummer Boy” until you wanted to take the pa-rumping bastard’s drum and sticks away from him and beat him to death with them.

It was one of the many things that Cliff had evidently come to dislike about Ned the last couple of years.

“For goodness sake, Ned,” Cliff had said, hands on hips, two weeks ago. “How can you not like Christmas music? It’s so happy and inspirational, and a lot of it is incredibly beautiful. I mean, you don’t like ‘Ave Maria’?”

“I don’t like ‘The Twelve Goddamned Days of Christmas’! I don’t want to hear about some little brat begging some innocent guy for some money to buy his mother some Christmas shoes because she just croaked and is going to be dancing with Jesus today!”

Cliff shrugged and nodded. “Well, yeah, that one does suck a big one.” He shuddered. It was the only thing that kept things from getting nasty. “But how about ‘Carol of the Bells’?”

“‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer’?” Ned countered.

“O Come, O Come, Emmanuel’?” was Cliff’s rejoinder.

“Any Chipmunks song,” Ned lobbed right back.

“Touché,” Cliff conceded. “But how about ‘O Holy Night’?” He grinned in triumph.

“‘Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas),’” replied Ned with a smile.

“There is no such song!” Cliff cried.

“Yes, there is.” Ned nodded. “It’s by John Denver,” he said and then proceeded to launch into the chorus, complete with a hillbilly twang.

“Stop! Stop!” Cliff shook his head.

“At least when Mame sings about how ‘We Need a Little Christmas,’ she waits until the week after Thanksgiving. That’s when everybody used to start playing Christmas songs. The week after Thanksgiving. Now it seems like they’re starting in July!”

“Ned, it’s November third. That’s hardly July….”

“It’s still not even Thanksgiving!”

Speaking of which, he had an eighteen-pound turkey in the chest freezer on the back porch. What the hell am I supposed to do with it now? He and Cliff certainly wouldn’t be hosting the annual Thanksgiving meal this year, would they?

“You’re Scrooge,” Cliff had told him that day. “You’re the Grinch! You’re that character Orson Welles plays in It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“Lionel Barrymore played Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life. Orson Welles played him in the Marlo Thomas remake.”

They’d survived that night. No, the issue that brought the house of cards that was their marriage down was the subject of a dog. Or more than one. Cliff had decided he wanted to breed Labradors. And Ned put his foot down.

“I don’t like animals,” he’d said. “You know that. Especially the kind that shit and piss and—”

“All animals poop and pee,” Cliff said, using the kinder words for bodily excretions. “You do. You’re an animal.”

“—shed. Especially shed! We’ve got good furniture, Cliff. I don’t want all that fucking hair all over everything. I don’t want it on my suits. And what about their claws? What would happen to our leather couch?”

“I can keep them to a part of the house,” Cliff offered. “There’s a door to the downstairs. That way I can have a dog—”

“Like you’re not going to try and weasel it upstairs once I get used to the idea of it being around! I know you. And then you’ll want her on the bed.” He shuddered.

“—and I can breed her in the utility room and—”

“Dogs drop their litter where they want to! We’ll come home and she will have made a huge bloody disgusting mess on the white carpet in the living room, and—”

“Then we’ll get it cleaned.”

“Which will ruin it. You know that kind of mess would never come out, and—”

“Then we’ll get another carpet! We can afford it!”

“We?” The comment had outraged Ned. “We? I’ll be the one that pays for it. I pay for everything.”

Cliff’s eyes had flashed at those words. If only Ned had paid attention to Cliff’s expression. But he’d been too mad, and words said in anger can’t be taken back.

“Watch what you say next, Ned baby,” Cliff had warned.

Why didn’t I pay attention?

Sadly, Cliff’s warning had only made him angrier. He’d felt so… backed into a corner. Like his husband was daring him.

He took that dare.

“You’re not breeding dogs in this house.” The words came so easily. After all, how many times had his father said the same kind of thing? “As long as you live under my roof, it isn’t happening, and—”

Cliff walked out of the room.

How dare he!

Ned had followed him, expletives falling from his lips, but when Cliff pulled his little weekend bag out from under the bed, Ned had finally stopped his diatribe.

“What are you doing?”

Cliff didn’t answer. He packed. He did it quickly. A pair of jeans, some socks, a nice shirt or two, a few T-shirts, some of the sexy underwear he liked to wear (that Ned liked him wearing—Jack Adams, Garçon Model, and especially Andrew Christian), and a pair of deck shoes.

Then he pulled the handle up out of the little suitcase and trailed it behind him as he strode out of their bedroom and down the hall.

“Cliff! I asked you a question.”

Cliff did not stop until he got to the front door. “And I am not one of your employees, Ned. I’m your husband.”

Ned almost scowled at the word. He hated the term applied to two men. It seemed so… heteronormative. And while he liked blending in with the world, not standing out, he hated imitating traditions of a society that rejected gays. Why would he care for their institutions?

But then why was it such a punch in the gut that Cliff wanted a divorce?

“Geez, Ned. Who are you? What happened to the man I fell in love with?”

“He grew up!” Ned shot back. “He started living in the real world.” What choice did he have when his father died and left him Balding Adhesives? A business he didn’t even want. But his sister, Patricia, wasn’t going to run it, and his younger brother, Perry, would run it into the ground. It had been in the family too long for something like that to happen.

“I’m going to the lake house,” Cliff said—because he could, right? He worked from home. If you could call the articles he wrote working, no matter how decently they paid. “If you decide you want to live in fantasyland again, you let me know. But don’t take too long to make up your mind, baby, because I’ve been getting ready for some time now.”

“Getting ready for what?” Ned said with a sneer.

Cliff seemed to almost shrink from him, and that had been a splash of water in Ned’s face. One that startled him and allowed some inner (saner?) voice to warn, Be careful what you say next….

But it was too late for that.

“For moving on,” Cliff said quietly. “I’m not happy, Ned.”

“Do you think I am?” Ned shouted, despite his saner side’s counsel.

Cliff trembled then, and his eyes got big and… wet? And it was a bigger splash of water but still not a big enough one to get his saner self to prevail. This was his pride after all!

“God, Ned.” Cliff shook his head.

“Go on! Get out!”

And then he did. Cliff turned without a word, opened the door quietly, and shut it even more so.

Ned kicked the door. Hard. More than once. His foot hurt for several days, and he was lucky he hadn’t broken anything. He didn’t hear a word from Cliff in all that time. And Ned hadn’t called him because he was sure Cliff would be back. Sure of it.

But the papers said something different, didn’t they?

2

THERE WAS a slight rap on the door, and in the quiet of the room, it startled Ned. He jerked his head to look through the window that made up the top half of the door and see who it was.

Jake Carrara.

He clenched his jaw and had to will the anger away or at least tame it, or who knew what he might say to the man?

Ned gestured for him to come in and smiled inwardly. Jake did not look comfortable. Good.

The door opened, and Jake stepped in.

“Good morning, Mr. Carrara. Why don’t you sit down?” He said the latter to cut his employee off from wishing him a good morning. Not that it was. Morning. Or a good one. It was a half hour shy of noon, and the day was the worst Ned could remember in years.

Time to take it out on someone. And it might as well be this slacker.

Jake pulled the chair away from Ned’s desk enough to sit down. “G-good morning.”

Damn, he’d said it anyway. Well, at least he’d stuttered. Ned’s inner smile broadened.

“C-can I help you with something?” Jake asked. The young man—he might have been thirty or so—ran his fingers through his thick dark hair, and his eyes, nearly black, revealed worry. Good. He should be worried.

“Well,” Ned said to Jake’s question, “you can start by telling me if you know that last Thursday and Friday account for the fourth time this year you’ve missed days of work.”

Jake closed his dark eyes, sighed deeply, and reopened them. Despite himself and his mood, their intensity almost startled Ned. They were the kind of eyes you could fall into. But Ned wasn’t doing any falling today.

“Yes, sir. I am. And I’m truly sorry. I was afraid that’s what this was about.”

You’re sorry? You knew what this was about? Ned opened his mouth to say something—

“My relationship ended in January,” Jake said. “That’s why I missed time then. I c-couldn’t face the world there for a few days. We were together a long time, sir. We never got married—he didn’t want that.”

He?

“But I don’t think that made it less of a relationship, just because it wasn’t legal.”

—and Ned closed his mouth with a snap.

Being legal certainly didn’t keep Cliff from leaving me.

A heaviness seemed to settle over Ned’s shoulders. He didn’t like the feeling.

“We met in high school.” Jake shook his head. “I thought we were together forever. I mean… we were high school sweethearts. We went to the prom.”

God! Is he really doing this? And his eyes! Is the fucker going to cry?

“Geez!” Jake said and wiped at his face. “I’m still not over him.”

Ned turned to his computer. The subject of a relationship ending wasn’t one he wanted to talk about right now. “And February?” he asked, not even trying to understand why a breakup would mean Jake had been unable to work.

I’m here, aren’t I? Did I stay home and cry?

“My mother died,” Jake said quietly.

Ned stiffened. Shit. He saw that now. Typed right there under Reason for Absence. Death of mother. And under that: 3 Day Grievance approved by N. Balding.

How did I forget that?

Ned closed his eyes. Fuck. Opened them and said, “Ah yes. I’m sorry about that.” He didn’t look at Jake. Pride again. He could almost see Cliff shaking his head. Fuck you. He scrolled down the screen. “And this time off in July?”

“I….”

Yes? Ned wondered without looking. Not looking made them so uncomfortable. It gave him power.

“I got bitten by a copperhead.”

Ned couldn’t help but snap his head in Jake’s direction. “A snake?”

Jake blushed. “Yeah. Thank God he didn’t get me good. I’ve had a couple friends get hit hard, and their foot got huge and the swelling didn’t go down for days. I just got scraped, they think. There weren’t… you know… two holes. But a bad scratch. Bad enough the pain was pretty awful and my foot did swell, and I couldn’t stand on it for several days, and it happened on the last day of the festival I was at, and I had to be at work the next day and I couldn’t do it. Luckily the festival ended on Thursday and it happened on Wednesday. I was out of the hospital the same day, but I still couldn’t work. I was back on Monday, though, peg-legging like a pirate, but here….”

A memory hit Ned then, of the pretty man—

He’s not pretty!

—limping around and him asking Lillian, his production floor supervisor, what was going on and… did she say he’d been bitten by a snake?

Or had she simply told him, in her motherly way, not to worry about it; she had it covered.

Probably the latter.

Why hadn’t he looked all this up before hauling Mr. Carrara in here?

He was almost afraid to ask about last week. He did anyway. “And last Thursday and Friday?”

Jake looked down at his lap. Blushed. Then looked up and… those eyes. Wet again. Maybe more so.

“My dog…,” he all but whispered.

Dog? Dog? “What about it?” Ned snapped, suddenly angry again and not even sure why. But then, of course, he was. He glanced down into the open desk drawer, where the divorce papers stared back.

“He died.” And damn if a tear didn’t roll down Jake’s cheek.

Ned’s eyebrows shot up. “Died?” he asked.

Jake nodded. “He was sixteen. I knew him longer than I knew Bruce.”

Bruce. Probably the ex.

“And with everything else… I just sort of—”

Wait a minute. A dog? He didn’t come to work because a dog died? The anger was back. “You didn’t come to work because your dog died?” Ned exclaimed, and Jake jumped. Cringed back in his chair. Somehow that only made Ned angrier. “You called in for a fucking dog?” Ned was actually up out of his seat. He was trembling he was so mad. A dog? A fucking dog? A fucking dirty, nasty, flea-infested, shedding, leather-couch-ruining, shitting, pissing dog? “You did not come to work because your fucking dog fucking died?”

There was a knock on the glass door that made Ned jump. It was a loud knock. He ripped his stare from the wide-eyed Jake to the glass window of the door and saw his floor supervisor standing there. Lillian. She did not look happy. She looked pissed.

Well, what the hell did she have to be pissed about?

“I’m busy,” he yelled. “Come back later!”

But instead of leaving, she opened the door.

“Ned,” she said stiffly. “I need to talk to you.”

“I’m busy,” he said again, and before he could tell her to come back, she shocked him by saying, “Jake. Return to your station. One of the glue guns looks like it’s getting ready to mess up.”

Jake looked back and forth between them like a squirrel on the road trying to decide what to do about an approaching car.

“Now, Jake,” Lillian said in a voice that was not to be ignored.

Jake jumped up from his chair, she moved aside, and he ran past her as if the hounds of hell were after him.

3

“HOW DARE you?” Ned growled.

She stepped in. Closed the door behind her. “How dare you circumvent my authority.” Lillian was a big woman, wide but not tall. Somehow, though, she didn’t look short right now. She could do that. “It is my job to discipline employees.”

“Did you know that little fucker didn’t come in because his fucking dog died?”

“Yes,” she said, voice quieter but no less strong. “I authorized it. He called me last Wednesday night, crying his eyes out. I went to his place and helped him with Coco.”

Ned’s mouth fell open.

“He’s had that dog his entire adult life. Coco was what got him through his breakup. You know something about breakups, don’t you, Ned?”

Ned opened his mouth to respond, but nothing would come out.

“He couldn’t afford to have Coco cremated, and he lives in this shitty apartment building on Main. Bruce wanted the apartment they’d lived in for years. And with his mother passed away and the family house sold, there was no place to bury Coco.”

Now Ned’s mouth was doing the fish-out-of-water thing, and he hated that. He looked past her into the outer office, and a couple of people who were watching slack-jawed from their desks quickly looked away. He snapped his mouth shut.

“We buried him in the woods behind the dog park where Jake always took him to run. Or Jake did. I kept watch. You’re not supposed to bury dogs. I don’t know what the city expects you to do when you don’t have the money to cremate them or take them to a pet cemetery. Do they expect you to—”

Throw them away? Ned almost said but….

“—throw them away?” She said it instead. “Throw a family member in the garbage?”

“It was a dog!” Ned finally found the voice to say. “A dog isn’t a member of the family.”

“He was a dog,” Lillian said, her round cheeks flushed, her dark bangs in disarray. “And dogs are most assuredly members of the family.”

Of course she would say that. She had two of those goddamned yappy Pekingese. Treated them like they were children. She and her husband had pictures taken at frigging JCPenney holding the nasty little things.

A new rage started to form. He could feel it. It was rising like lava up the conduit of a volcano, and it was about to explode.

She held up a hand. Halt! “Ned.”

He froze and—

Her expression softened. “Ned,” she said so quietly he almost missed it. “I’m sorry.”

Ned almost started doing the fish-out-of-water thing again. Sorry?

The ramrod of her spine relaxed. She seemed almost to melt. Her hand fell slowly to her side. “About Cliff….”

Cliff? Cliff? What did Cliff have anything to do with any—

And his eyes filled with tears. “Some bastard served me with divorce papers this morning.”

She closed hers and sighed. Opened them again, and they were wet as well. I guess it’s a morning when everyone is supposed to cry. I must have missed the goddamned memo.

“I know,” she said.

Ned gawked at her. “You know? How would you…?” But then of course she would know. Cliff had told her, hadn’t he?

She stepped to the desk and took the back of the chair where Jake had so recently been sitting in her hand as if to steady herself. Then he realized that was just what she was doing.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Lil?” he asked, using his secret friend name for her. He hardly ever used it. “I was so blindsided. Why didn’t you warn me?”

“I didn’t know until a half hour ago,” she said. “It was why I was coming to see you. That’s when I saw you talking to Jake.”

“And you yelled at me? In front of an employee?”

“I didn’t yell at you. But I was already pissed at you and—”

“Pissed at me? Why the hell would you be—”

“For driving him away!” she cried and then… then she cried. Tears ran down her cheeks. Not in rivers, but God, they were running, weren’t they? And he could feel a storm of his own brewing on the horizon.

No! He would not cry. Would not. Cliff was the motherfucker! Why should he…?

Lillian went to shut the blinds over the big office window.

“Don’t bother,” he said. It almost sounded like a hiss. “Thank you for your concern.” The hiss was gone, and he was proud of the note of neutrality that had replaced it.

She sighed.

“You can go now.”

He sat down—hadn’t even realized until now that he was still standing—and turned to his computer.

“And Jake?” she asked. “What about Jake?”

“It’s up to you. You’re right. Production floor employees are your responsibility. I won’t do anything like that again unless we’ve talked.”

Silence was the answer.

Finally, when there was still no answer, he turned from the screen. She was still standing there.

“He’s an amazing young man, Ned. Not only is he a good person, but he’s a fantastic employee. When everyone else is running around in a panic like Chicken Little shouting ‘the sky is falling!’ when the glue guns start firing glue in every direction, he takes hold of the situation. When employees are quarreling, he steps in and calms them down. The thing he says when things get dramatic has become a catchphrase around here. Everyone loves him. I need him, Ned.”

“Catchphrase?” he asked.

She held up both hands, palms out, and while she slowly lowered them, she said, “Take it easy,” just as slowly. “Everything’s gonna be fine.”