In the House of Spite Ch. 18

"We all missed you, Baby," the man said as he led Gunner out of the truck. The dog was rather graceful, almost like a cat. "Did anything happen while I was gone?"

Pearl used her thumb to point back at a general direction. "Someone was making noise a little while ago."

His brow wrinkled. "You alright? Is anything broken?" He led Baby Blue out and closed the vehicle's door.

"I'm fine." Pearl was approached by Baby Blue, who used his sweet eyes to quietly ask for attention. She crouched down to scratch behind one of his ears. The sweet dog closed his eyes and wagged his tail. "I stayed inside. I think I saw something, but I'm not sure."

"It moved really fast, didn't it?" Darren watched Gunner go into the house.

Nudging Baby Blue a little to get him to go inside, Pearl said, "Yeah."

"Probably Aaron," Darren said. He patted Pearl's shoulder and gave her a very serious look. "Lock yourself back up. I'm going to look around."

Pearl went through the process of locking everything up again and putting the security bar up. Then she went from window to window, trying to track Darren's movements. She eventually saw him in the back. He bent down to pick something up. It was a big, plain, cardboard box. Judging by Darren's flexing muscles and light strain in his face, Pearl assumed the box had some weight to it. She watched him carry the box over to an outdoor seating area.

With the box on a glass table, Darren used a pocket knife to cut the tape off.

In that moment, Pearl's body cooled as she wondered if there was something dangerous inside.

The first thing Darren pulled up was a fresh box of crayons.

Rolling his eyes, he put it aside and picked up the next thing. It was a brand new, possibly designer purse. Pearl put a palm over her heart.

A soft, white Teddy Bear. A separate, beige colored box with a pair of high heeled shoes in them; the bottoms looked to be made of a red leather, and there were some red dust-bags. A few bags of fruity candy. And finally, a jewelry case. Darren opened it and held the jewelry up. It was a pearl necklace similar to what Darren had bought her for Christmas, luster and all.

Darren's face was so twisted that Pearl wanted to smooth it out.

He put all the things back in the box and carried it to the door.

When she let Darren in, he still had the box. She went through the whole locking process again as he took the box off to the kitchen. Then she hurried over there.

The box was on the kitchen table. Darren was fuming as he stared down at it, his hands on his slim hips.

"This is just plain weird, huh," Pearl said as she stood right beside him. She blinked rather quickly, and a shoulder jerked up. "Okay, it's not the weirdest thing I've seen. I take monster cock on a regular basis, for fuck's sake."

Darren didn't say anything. His jaw and cheek muscles moved very harshly. He was definitely clamping and grinding his teeth. His fingertips drummed on his jeans.

"You okay?" Pearl said almost too casually.

A single, tense breath, and Darren spat out, "If you wanted fucking red bottoms I'd get them for you!"

That ruined any tension left in her body. Pearl gripped the edge of the table and laughed. It was almost uncontrollable. That might've been the right thing to do because Darren's angriest wrinkles disappeared and he started laughing too. When they were both done, they took cups of water.

"Well," Pearl said as she tried to cool her pink cheeks, "Crystal's going to be happy."

"Huh?" Darren cocked his head to one side.

"We can just give all this stuff to her," Pearl explained. "Anything she doesn't want she can give to one of her mommy friends." Something about motherhood made some women at least pretend to be friends, or that's what Pearl thought.

Darren swiped some hair out of his vision and said he was going to get some tape to re-seal the box. Pearl followed. She watched him take out all those locks and such to the garage door and remove the security bar. "Does Crystal have any red bottoms?"

"I don't think so," Darren said, "and I don't think she'll care that they came from Shawn. She'd probably think this was a good way to stick it to him."

In the garage, Darren looked through a metal chest of drawers. He found the silvery duct tape with little effort. "You're not really a red bottom heels kind of girl, anyway," he murmured as if he was talking to himself. "You're a footies on the kitchen floor kind of girl."

"I'm your kind of girl," Pearl chirped.

With a smirk, Darren lightly tapped the top of her head with the flat width of the tape roll.

***