All right, technically, just one track on that CD: "If Looks Could Kill."

"She's been playing it since I got here," the group secretary reported wearily, "and I was early today. Who'd she go out with last night?"

Finally, I did in the last place what I should've done in the first place: went across the street to the phone booth on the corner. Outside calls rang in differently; I knew she'd pick up.

"This is Cassandra Wolfe of J/J/G Advertising. I'm away from my office. But if you'll leave a brief mes..."

"Drop the game, Cass," I told her. "I can hear that CD playing. Can we talk?"

"...short message after the beep, I'll return your call as soon as..."

"We can yell, if you'd rather. You can do all the yelling. But we really need to..."

"Beep," Cassie said, and hung up.

Momentarily bewildered, I hung up--and then grabbed the receiver and hung up again so hard that the whole phone booth shuddered. A passing yup in a Volvo slowed to give me a disapproving once-over. For his benefit, I did it again.

Then I stormed back across the street and up the stairs two at a time, dead-heating with Cassie at my office door.

"I take it back, Cass. Now I want to do all the yelling."

"We'll take turns. I'll go first."

"I go first. It's my office."

"True," she said, holding up a bakery bag, "but these are my chocolate-chip muffins."

I glared at her, at the bag, at her, and then threw open the office door.

Cassie poured herself a mug of my private coffee while I helped myself to one of her muffins. Chocolate-chip, all right, with chocolate icing, too. Maybe she wasn't so mad after all.

"I could cheerfully kill you," she said.

All right, so maybe she was. "And God forbid you be uncheerful about it. That could get you talked about. The rude murderess. The uncivil..."

"I could cheerfully kill you, and no jury in the world would give me more than community service. But any judge who'd ever met you would just pardon me anyway, on the grounds that killing you was community service. Do you have any idea what you put me through last night?"

"Cass, you're going to tell me whether I ask or not, so..."

"You could have told me, you know. Should have told me. I shouldn't have had to find out like that. I'm a grown woman, and I've had cable TV for ages. You should've told me. I would've been very mature about it."

I snorted and tossed the rest of my muffin into the wastebasket.

"I beg your pardon?" she asked frostily.

"Quit telling lies. You'd have done just what you did last night, only sooner. You always said you'd hate to see what would go out with me, and now I see that you meant every word of it."

"Don't change the subject. I'm not done with you about the surprise aspect of all this. But now that we're speaking of the witch..."

"Just because you don't like her is no reason to call her names. I don't like most of the birth-control accidents you go out with, either, but at least I don't say so."

Coolly, Cassie emptied her coffee into my wastebasket and then threw the mug in, too, for good measure.

"That's your mug, Cass."

"Fine. Let me see yours just a minute."

I snatched it out of her reach just in time. "You're overreacting."

"And you're not?"

"It's not like I thought this up, you know. Sex has been around for years. Besides, she came after me."

"She should've used a bigger gun. Then maybe she'd have blown you into a million pieces of hypocrite, and I could've worn a great black dress to the funeral."

I was already starting to lose my temper, and that didn't help. "I'm dead, and all you care about is what you're wearing?"

"Your funeral," she informed me, "will be a black-tie social occasion. People are going to come from across the continent, just to make sure you're really extinct. I'll want to look my best."

"Thank God I'll be dead," I grumbled.

"Oh, you'll be dead, all right. A dead hypocrite. Not even just a hypocrite--a fool on top of it. Do you think she loves you?"

It had never occurred to me to wonder. But I really didn't care. "Does it matter?"

"You're such an idiot. Yes, it matters. First time in years--you probably think she invented sex--and you think it means she loves you, even though normal people don't bite, even though normal people don't..."

"Coming from you, Cass," I said, with edge, "this is flat-out jabberwocky. Tell me what love has to do with your love life. You go through men like they're Pez. No, don't tell me; that's different. They're men. But let me happen to hook up with a woman--one woman--and you act like..."

"She owes her womanhood to cosmetic surgery, if you ask me. Get your eyes checked. You know what else you're too stupid to see? She doesn't love you."

Furious, I swept the whole bag of muffins off the desk into the wastebasket. Then I shouldered her aside, none too gently, en route to the door.

Cassie jumped back in front of me. "Don't you dare walk. I'm not through. And you know I'm right."

"Move," I told her dangerously, "or be moved."

"By you and what Girl Scout?"

Fine. All right. She'd asked for it. I backtracked to the wastebasket, picked it up, and swirled the contents around to get a better mix. Coffee, muffins, wadded-up paper, some dead gum, Cassie's fancy china mug. Good.

"What are you doing?"

"Think fast," I advised her, and turned the wastebasket upside down on her head.

She shrieked something about hairdressers and dry cleaning and death, but I couldn't make it all out, what with that wastebasket on her head. Game, set, and match to Kerry. I made a point of slamming the office door behind me.

Halfway down the hall, I heard the door slam open again, followed by the loud clear information that Cassie hated me and wanted something big and heavy to run over me a couple hundred times. I kept walking.

"What is it this time?" Heather asked in passing.

"She doesn't like the woman I'm sleeping with."

"Oh, stop it, Dev. What is it really?"

I kept walking.

(c) 1999, ROCFanKat

Continued - Part 11