~ Mr. Midnight ~

by

B. G. McCarthy

"I’m singing in the school Remembrance Day assembly tomorrow. You want to come?"

Michael set down the post digger he was using and frowned. "Is Ginny going?"

"Of course she’s going. You should have seen her get all weepy because I was picked to do it. It was brutal. I wanted to get down on my knees and beg her to stop praising me."

He laughed. "I can see the scene quite clearly."

"What are you doing lately? Avoiding her? You didn’t even get out of the car when you dropped me off yesterday."

Michael lifted his hat and wiped the sweat from his face. Jake was right. He hadn’t seen Ginny closer than ten feet away for weeks. They had a routine going now. He’d drop off Jake on Tuesday and Thursday nights after his band practice, would give her a smile and a wave out the truck window if she came out on the porch and that was about it.

Every encounter was capped by the same gnawing hunger in the pit of his gut. Every time he saw her it was hours until he could wipe the picture of her out of his head. Last time she’d looked so irresistible he’d wanted to flop her over his shoulder and carry her away. She’d gone back to her editing job and was doing some freelance writing. She had come to the door with hair that looked like it hadn’t been combed in days, tortoiseshell glasses, skin-tight flared black track pants and his tee shirt.

His shirt: the faded one with Pepe Le Pew that he’d loaned her the day of the famous pie incident. She’d never returned it to him and he’d often wondered why. Maybe she didn’t have any that were large and comfortable like that. But maybe she just kept it because it belonged to him. The thought of her curled up in it with her laptop, sleeping in it, naked beneath it, and maybe thinking of him as she stripped it over her head to take a shower, made him nuts.

Ginny Harper seemed to be his first thought when he woke and his last thought at night. And that was bad.

So why didn’t he do something about it?

If she didn’t come to him soon...

It had to be her call. That was the way it had to be.

At least the visits from the ‘old-fashioned girl’ had stopped. She’d just taken to writing occasional letters to his post office box telling him what a dirty bad boy he’d become and how the love of a God-fearing woman could straighten him out. He just turned the crap over to Maggie, who said they were computer printed letters, mailed from different places, some as far as Canada. Maggie said that was nothing. People could get friends from the Internet to do that stuff. There was not a lot to go on.

Kerry had called him just this morning, but he hadn’t mentioned anything to her about it. For now Maggie was just telling him to hold on, that it might peter out if the person got a new obsession. He wasn’t in the magazines this month and that was a good thing. The public was only interested when your face was out there.

"I’m taking the driver’s test tomorrow to get my learner’s certificate," Jake said. "Scored perfect when I took the sample test on the Internet."

"It’s still a year before you can drive legally. What you do on paper’s a lot different."

"But you said you’d let me drive on this property all I wanted."

Michael squinted at the sun. "Supervised. Yeah, Jake, I said that I’d teach you to drive."

"I swear I’ll be responsible, dude. You can take that to the bank."

Michael laughed. "You know who you look like when you put on that upright, serious face?"

"No."

"Me when I was sixteen telling the headmaster that I wasn’t going to sneak out of the dorm ever again. I was one hell of a great actor. A credit to the family legacy."

"What did you do? Visit chicks?"

"Yeah, sometimes I did that."

"Do you even have sex nowadays?"

"Jesus, Jake."

"Well, I don’t ever see any women over here. You’d better do something before it petrifies."

"Thanks. I’ll take that under advisement."

Jake laughed at that, then he got serious. "I think I might ask out this girl I like. She’s older than me, but only a year or so. She drives. I don’t want her to think I’m some kind of tool because I can’t pick her up and take her somewhere yet, but I really like her."

"Kirsten?"

"No, man. She’s way in the past."

"That’ll make Ginny happy."

Jake shrugged. "Don’t know what’ll make Ginny happy these days. She just shuffles around in her slippers and housecoat half the time. She doesn’t even shave her legs or pluck her eyebrows. She’s starting to look like Saddam Hussein."

"Ginny?"

"Yeah. It’s bad. She’s turning into a shlep."

"Maybe she’s just comfortable that way."

"Are you for real? Ginny’s a neat freak. Her personal hygiene is legendary. Iris told her she ought to go on Zoloft. You know that commercial with the depressed little comma thing dragging around."

"I thought that was a balloon."

"Whatever. She’s dragging."

Relentlessly determined and cheerful, people-pleaser Ginny? Depressed? "Did she make up with her sister?"

"She talked to her last week. Apparently Frankie’s having a great time with the boy toy. Gin should find herself one of those. That feedlot guy got any feebleminded brothers we can hook her up with?"

"Not that I know of." He already had a boy toy in mind for Virginia Mary Harper. "Is she working? I thought you said that she was."

"She says she is. Glamour Magazine bought one of her freelance articles and she didn’t seem all that happy about it. She said it was a waste of energy. She said she doesn’t even care about shopping these days."

"Wal-Mart will do that to you." Michael picked up the posthole digger. "Let’s get back to work on this fence. I have to get this done before it rains tomorrow."

"She probably needs to go home," Jake said, studying Michael for a reaction. He wasn’t giving Jake one if he could help it. "Back to New York, I guess."

Michael gritted his teeth as he attacked a new hole. The ground here was harder to break up. Maybe a large stone was in his way. There were always stones in his way. His life was one big field of stones. "Maybe she does need to go there. She needs to be with her friends."

"I don’t know if that’ll make her happy, though."

"Is she seeing Call-me-Bob?"

"No. They still talk on the phone."

He growled at the stone that stood in his way. "Maybe this little experiment of Angela’s isn’t working out for her. It was destined to backfire. She should go back. You too, Jake. You should encourage her to do that."

Jake’s answer came fast and furious. "Then I’m going to live here with you, dude, because I’m not going back to L.A. I’m not going to New York either. I like it here. It’ll be easier to learn to drive here. I have my band. Mom was right. I want to live here. At least until I go to college, if I go to college."

"Ginny will kill you if you don’t go to college."

"If you want to take Ginny out, I have nothing against it. It might have really bugged me once upon a time, dude--"

Michael stopped fighting the rock and shot his half brother a glare. "What the hell are you talking about? Take Ginny out?"

"If you two are staying apart to save my feelings, man, it’s bogus. I don’t care about it that much. I’ll still have you two in my life if I want you to be in it, even if your relationship goes totally into the crapper. My tender teenaged sensibilities will not suffer that much."

Michael gaped at him. The kid was absolutely right. It didn’t feel good, but he was right. Not that Jake knew everything, like what his sister might think of the biggest damned secret Michael was keeping from her.

Ah, hell. He was quitting Midnight anyway. He’d as much as told Kerry. She’d have to void his contract tomorrow with what he had on her.

"She thinks that she’ll screw up everything by screwing you. She suffers from a lack of confidence. So do you, dude. It’s pretty sad."

"Who are you? The bastard child of Dr. Phil and Dr. Ruth?"

Jake pushed the dog off and scratched his head so that his bi-colored hair stuck up everywhere. Then he leaned back on his hands looking as smug as a fifteen-year-old brainiac could manage to look. "Listen, I have my own problems. I’d rather you two just did it. Just don’t talk about it or neck in front of me, okay. And do it when I don’t have to hear the bedsprings creaking."

Michael raised a brow. "Your smart-ass mouth is pissing me off, kid. And I’m not trying to save your tender sensibilities by not seeing your sister. There are good reasons why we’re not together."

"But you want to be."

"Together? I’m the proverbial island, Jacko. I never know what I want. I just know that you don’t know the half of it. I’m not the right guy for Ginny. I’m not right for anyone."

"Do you like her?"

"Of course I like her."

"Would you marry someone like her?"

He sighed. "Jake..."

"What do you think of her?"

"I think she’s too damn good for me."

Jake nodded and grinned. "You might hate it, getting married, but you’d have to at least pretend that you were serious about her. That would be the only way. She’s a prude."

Michael laughed. "That’s a matter of opinion. Just forget about this, okay?"

"I know you’re not gay. Are you a freaking wimp then?"

"Could be."

"Well, whatever you do, stop avoiding her because you’ve got her tied up in knots and it’s not fair. Even I can see that. She’s been a pain to live with."

"There’s been some stuff going on here, and in my life--"

"You mean the reason for this barbed wire fence? You’re keeping something out, dude, that’s pretty obvious, and she thinks it’s us. Avoidance is easier than facing things that you’d rather not face."

Michael shook his head. "How old are you anyway?"

"They say that my intelligence is off the scale."

"I say that about Spike and he still licks his ass."

Jake laughed at that. "All I see now is her moping around and you moping around and I figured what the hell, I’ll ask you. You’re usually straight with me. You don’t tell me lies if you can help it, do you?"

"Not if I can help it."

"Then be straight with her. She deserves that much."

"I hear you." Michael tossed him a pair of wire cutters. "Can we get back to work?"