My Nora Read Free Page A

resented the idea of spending a good part of his youth coddling a depressed preadolescent. In the end, Matt’s sense of fairness won out. Their parents hadn’t updated their will after Karen’s surprise birth and had left everything to their only child at the time. Matt knew that if they had anticipated an untimely departure that they would divided their assets fairly between the two. So, Matt moved back into his childhood home with his sister and thanked God regularly that she could get herself onto the school bus in the mornings without his assistance.
    Living with his sister (he avoided saying that he “raised” her) had been a fairly easy chore until she turned sixteen and wanted to date. For the first five years of their living arrangement Matt didn’t date at all, which had been like going from a pack-a-day smoking habit to quitting cold turkey. Then he started to get, well, creative. A man had needs, so he had mastered the art of standing coitus in short order. During one particular camping trip with his girlfriend of the moment, who was sharing a tent with Karen and one of her friends, he and his lover took a nice half-mile hike into the woods in order to better “commune” with nature. Karen suspected nothing.
    A few weeks after turning sixteen, Karen had asked her big brother to take her to the gynecologist so that she could be put on birth control. Matt had nearly choked on his beer at the out-of-the-blue request. All that time he had no idea his dorky kid sister had any interest whatsoever in the opposite sex. She still had teddy bears on her bed, for Christ sake. The look on her face when he’d said as much quickly pacified him, and as he had no interest in being an uncle in addition to a stand-in dad at the moment, he made an appointment for the very next week.
    As adults, they studiously avoided any discussion whatsoever about their sex lives and neither ever brought an overnight date home. Karen had tried once and Matt successfully scared the fear of God into the guy over the breakfast table the next morning. He didn’t even have to say a word: he just kept staring at the little twerp over the top of his coffee mug, having been annoyed at the giggling from his sister’s room that had kept him awake for much of the previous night.
    Matt stripped out of his smelly clothes and piled it all in the washer with a scoop of triple-action detergent. While the geriatric machine filled, he locked himself in the master bathroom with a wide-toothed comb and mound of Karen’s gel to tame his hair, thinking he should just cut the shit off.
    His first impression with his new neighbor hadn’t gone according to plan, but perhaps the second one would. And screw the bears. Nora was the game he wanted to bag.

Chapter Two
    Nora tightened the nozzle joining a bit more and tried the tap again, hoping she didn’t get another blast of cold water in her face for all the trouble. Hot damn, it worked. There was a small trickle coming from some invisible crack in the spray gun’s plastic, but it was actually now capable of shooting a stream of water in a specified direction. She gave a silent cheer and aimed the nozzle at her collection of soiled plastic paint pallets and went to town on them. The force from the hose was violent enough that the stuck-on acrylic melted right off without the aid of her tired fingers. Nora had grown sloppy since her move and had let the mess in her sunroom studio pile up. She normally cleaned her brushes and paint trays after each use, but so much had been going on that it was just easier to handle it all in batches. Fortunately she wasn’t working with oils at the moment or she would have probably lost a few of her favorite sable brushes as a result of her negligence.
    When Nora’s phone bleated from the pocket of her plaid overshirt, she shut off the tap and abandoned her mess for the moment, walking toward the road as she answered. The cellular connectivity in Eastern North Carolina was