Member-only story
A Surprise Guest
A novel excerpt
Camden is not a morning person. In spite of this, she wakes at 5:00 a.m. every day, weekends and holidays included, and has done so since she was 15 years old; it’s a self-discipline thing. One of the effects of this early rising is that though, as a proper English woman she prefers tea, mornings are started with coffee, the stronger the better.
This morning she can smell the coffee already brewing in the kitchen, which means that Sal must already be awake. The timer on the coffee pot broke a few weeks ago, and she hasn’t gotten around to buying a new one yet. This strikes her as odd, though, because Sal is never up this early, unless he’s just getting in from the night before.
Camden throws a thick bathrobe over the XL-sized Arsenal T-shirt she uses as a nightshirt, walks out to the kitchen, and screams. A man who is most definitely not Sal is standing there, and her scream causes him to jump; he drops his coffee mug in the process. The sound it makes as it crashes to the hardwood floor is as loud as her scream.
At that moment Sal appears from his bedroom wearing only a pair of old gym shorts bearing the logo of the New York Jets. He is holding a Glock 9mm pistol.
“What the hell?” he yells, clearly still groggy.
Camden backs toward her bedroom door and simply points at the stranger in the kitchen. He has not moved, likely frozen in place by the menacing sight of her cousin and his large gun. The man slowly raises his hands and gives Sal a questioning look. Not frightened, she realizes, but questioning. As if they know each other.
“Who is this man?” she demands, pointing at the stranger, but looking at Sal. “And why is he in my kitchen at five in the morning?”
Sal lowers the gun, and the main hesitantly lowers his hands.
“Our kitchen,” he replies, then walks to the cupboard and pulls down three mugs. “He’s a friend of mine. Actually, I’m more of a fan than a friend. He’s going to crash here for a few days while he gets some things sorted out.”
Her expression would show less amazement if he told her he was training monkeys to ride unicycles while juggling chainsaws.
