Free Unzipped? by Karen Kendall

didn’t,” he insisted. “I’m wary, that’s all. Your looks are…intimidating. You seem like a being from some Planet of Perfection, where there are no flaws.”
    “Planet of…?” Speechless, she let her hands drop to her sides. “That’s nuts. Look, I have huge feet, and a big ugly mottled birthmark on my thigh, and flabby upper arms. I go to the bathroom, same as everybody else. I’m not manufactured by Mattel!”
    “Hey,” said Hal. “Calm down.” He put a soothing hand between her shoulder blades and rubbed. Normally she hated being touched, but he did it to comfort, to relax, and not to grab or own. She didn’t move away.
    “Sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to take out my issues on you, of all people. You’re my client.”
    “It’s been a long afternoon. Would you like a beer? I wish I had wine to offer, but…”
    “I’d love a beer, thanks.”
    Hal went to the stainless steel refrigerator in the kitchen and she followed. It was the cleanest kitchen she’d ever seen: obviously unused.
    “You don’t cook much, do you?”
    “Nope.” He handed her a cold green bottle after twisting the cap off.
    “Thank you. Did you just move into this place?” She took a sip and felt the pleasantly bitter bubbles spread over her tongue before heading down her throat.
    He nodded. “About a month ago. My accountant kept nagging me about how I was pouring money down the drain by renting, and how I needed the tax write-off from a house.” He put his own bottle to his lips and she noticed again how beautifully shaped they were. They formed an ironic quirk in his face, saved his blue eyes from being angelic. Hal might not be a sophisticated man-about-town, but she knew that he was no angel. Angels didn’t make love the way he did. Have sex. Whatever.
    She took a swig of beer to distract herself from that train of thought, because she was starting to want to jump him again.
    “So I obviously struck a nerve,” Hal ventured.
    She began to peel the label off her beer bottle. “Yeah.”
    “Sorry. I guess we all carry around our pasts and the ideas we form from them. Most of the really pretty girls in my past were stuck-up. They knew they were beautiful and they used it. Unfortunately you remind me of one of them.”
    “And she wasn’t nice?”
    He raised his own beer bottle to his lips and drank from it. “Definitely not.”
    “To you in particular?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What did she do?”
    “You really want to know?”
    Shannon nodded.
    “Samantha Stanton. That was her name. Gorgeous. She used to wheedle my trig homework out of me and copy it before class. Stupid me, I let her. Then she wanted me to pass her test answers and I wouldn’t play ball. So Sam got even.
    “Around prom time she lied and said she’d broken up with her boyfriend—would I take her? Part of me was suspicious. I mean, why would a varsity cheerleader want the chess club nerd to take her to prom? But another part of me, probably my dick, believed her.
    “So I rented a cheesy tux and shiny plastic shoes, slicked my hair back and bought a corsage. Showed up on her doorstep.”
    He stopped and shook his head. Took another swig of beer.
    Shannon waited.
    “The front door of her palatial home opens, and it’s a whole preparty. Half the football team, her boyfriend, all of her snotty girlfriends and cheerleader buddies. And they all fall down laughing at me, the dork on the doorstep who thought he had a chance in hell of taking Samantha to the prom.”
    Shannon sucked in her breath in horror.
    “I was so humiliated I could barely breathe.”
    “What did you do?”
    Hal shrugged. “I left. I thought about putting sugar in her gas tank. I thought about a lot of things. Used to dream about revenge…especially when the crank calls came late at night. She and her friends used to think it was funny to talk dirty to me. Get the nerd all hot and bothered and hang up on him. I guess the idea was to leave me with a big boner for their