Asking for Trouble by Rosalind James

with the truck, get them out of here. And I’ll
bet Joe can hang those for you, too,” she added as he came in with an armload
of framed pictures, the only ones Alyssa had kept, wrapped in a moving blanket,
and set them on the bare mattress.
    “Joe doesn’t have to hang my pictures,” Alyssa tried to
protest, but it was like arguing with the tide.
    “Sure I do,” Joe said. “If Rae says I have to.” He bowed his
head in mock servitude. “Just have to go home and grab my tools.”
    “Need any help?” Alyssa’s new roommate Sherry had come to
lean against the doorway, which made the room seriously crowded. A curly-haired,
petite brunette, Sherry had a personality that belied her small stature, and Alyssa
had known almost as soon as Sherry had opened the door to her on the fourth day
of her so-far-disastrous housing hunt that they were Meant to Be. Although the
way Sherry was looking at Joe right now was giving her some second thoughts.
    “Want a ride?” Sherry asked Joe. “I’m free.”
    “Sure,” he said, and Alyssa scowled. “Soon as we finish
unloading.”
    “What’s this?” Rae asked, holding up a threadbare item from
the box she was emptying into Alyssa’s second dresser drawer. “You can’t mean
to keep it. It’s a rag.”
    Alyssa whipped it out of her hand, stuffed it in the drawer.
“Just something I like.”
    She dared a quick look at Joe’s face, saw him looking back.
If Joe ever looked startled, he was looking startled now, and she knew he’d
recognized it, even with the white lettering peeled away in spots. Eielson AFB. The shirt she’d worn until
she’d worn holes in it. The shirt she had never been able to throw away,
because it would have felt like throwing away Joe.
    “Maybe you wouldn’t mind looking at the dripping faucet in my
bathtub, too,” Sherry suggested to Joe, oblivious to the moment. “If you’re
handy, and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I’d really appreciate it. I’ve
told the management company twice, but they don’t seem too eager to hop on it.
And it’s so annoying when you’re lying there in the tub, you know?” She gave
him a smile that had Alyssa seriously reconsidering her housing decision.
“Listening to that drip-drip-drip, just when you’re getting all warm and
relaxed.”
    “I should be able to fix that for you,” Joe said, and he
looked, Alyssa thought irritably, like he was all set to help Sherry relax,
too. He wasn’t offering to help her relax.
He was just nagging her about her car, exactly like Alec.

 
    “Next weekend, Liss,” Alec had said when they’d gone out for
well-deserved pizza and beer after the move, including Sherry, because Alyssa
hadn’t exactly been able to get out of inviting her, “I’m taking you to buy a
new car. I’d do it this week, but I’ve got too much going on. And if you can’t
afford it,” he went on over her protest, “I’ll buy it. You heard what the man
said. A new transmission, or a new car. And that car isn’t worth putting a new
transmission into, would you say, Joe?”
    “No,” Joe said. “You need a new car.”
    “All right,” Alyssa agreed, her heart sinking at the thought
of the hit to her already-stretched budget. “But I’ll buy my own car, thank you
very much.”
    “Call it a Christmas present,” Alec coaxed. “From Desiree
and me.”
    “Wow,” Sherry said. “Want to buy me a new car too?”
    Alyssa ignored her. “No. Thank you, I guess, but no. You’re
bad enough now, Alec. If you buy my new car, you’ll think you can tell me how
to drive it. You’ll be asking me if I got the oil changed. You already ask me if I’ve had the oil
changed. But if you buy my car, you’ll think you have the right to ask, and what’s worse, I’ll feel like you have the right to ask. Forget that. If I wanted a guy to boss
me around, I’d get married.”
    “Ha,” Alec said. “Trust me, that’s not what happens when you
get married.”
    “She’s right,” Rae said.