Aefle & Giesla Read online

  Istoria Books

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  Presents

  Aefle and Gisela

  A romantic comedy

  by Libby Malin

  Copyright 2011 Libby Malin Sternberg

  Cover photograph copyright Dmitriy Shironosov/Dreamstime.com

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  PRAISE FOR LIBBY MALIN’S ROMANTIC COMEDIES:

  My Own Personal Soap Opera:

  -- Malin creates a world of wit and chaos that is …smart and insightfully written. - Booklist

  -- Malin's latest is heavy on humor… (she) coaxes plenty of laughs…Publishers Weekly

  -- I wholly recommend this romance... You’ll not be disappointed. Trust me! Rating: 5 Stars.

  Love Romance Passion

  Fire Me:

  -- This fast-paced, humorous book kept me giggling throughout the night. A Novel Menagerie

  -- Fire Me ...had this reader chuckling out loud. Jo-Anne Greene Lancaster Sunday News

  -- Libby Malin pens a tale that is hilarious while still being poignant and introspective. The Romance Studio

  Loves Me, Loves Me Not:

  -- The love story is charming and will be appreciated by any woman with bad taste in men who somehow inexplicably ends up with Mr. Right. Washington Post

  -- A whimsical look at the vagaries of dating... an intriguing side plot adds punch and pathos to the story... Publishers Weekly

  -- Malin's clever debut toys with chick-lit stereotypes and offers quite a few surprises along the way. Booklist

  -- Loves Me, Loves Me Not will leave the reader feeling refreshed and hopeful…a simply terrific book. A "Top Pick" at Romance Reader at Heart

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  About Istoria Books

  CHAPTER ONE

  “DARE, DARE, DARE!”

  Thomas Charlemagne peered at the crowd over his glasses through alcohol-besotted eyes. A scantily clad woman edged provocatively closer, her hips in remarkable synchronization with the downbeat of a fast-moving pop song that seemed to occupy virtually all the space in Thomas’s brain. My, but it was hard to think in this claustrophobic room, a pine-paneled, low-ceilinged enclosure in the back of Wiley Willy’s, an Oyster Point sports bar, the spot chosen by Corey Bainbridge, the soon-to-be groom of Thomas’s cousin Wendy, for his bachelor party.

  “Come on, Timid Tommy!” an unidentified voice cajoled. “She's not going to bite!”

  So this was the latest dare of the night. Stick a few dollars in this modern-day Salome’s belly-dancing waistband. Would that slay the “Timid Tommy” beast that had haunted him through grade school, middle school and high school?

  “I'm not afraid of her,” Thomas Charlemagne replied with as much dignity as he could muster while nearly falling off his chair. Perhaps taking the dare to race Corey through several shots hadn’t been such a fine idea. “I jus…just… think it's dishrespectful.” He smiled.

  The gyrating woman inched nearer.

  “You sayin' I ain't got class?” the dancer asked.

  Thomas waved the air in front of him. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no,” he said. “I just mean…” He took a deep breath to try to clear his head. With great effort, he sat up straight and managed to find the words, which he let out in a rapid-fire torrent before Jim Beam once again reclaimed his tongue: “This is a different cultural trope from what I'm acclimated to. I mean, you should be free to express your sexuality, yes, go ahead, right ahead, let a thousand sexual flowers bloom… but taking money from more privileged males is simply a re-enforcement of existing norms of cultural hegemony, not a liberation.”

  He burped. Had he pronounced “hegemony” right? It had sounded something like “hedgehog.” And “acclimated” -- well, that had sounded similar to “ashpirated.” He’d have to look that up. Why didn't he have one of those phones with a dictionary in it?

  Thomas tended to discourse when he was in his cups. He’d already enjoyed explaining his research at the university on Aefle the Minuscule, an academically neglected twelfth-century poet monk.

  “Just gimme some sugar, honey,” the dancer said, her butt now practically in Thomas’s face. He noticed numerous bills poking from her sequined costume, some of them in her bosoms. With a good-natured sigh-- or what he hoped looked like one-- he pulled out his wallet and dragged out the only remaining bill, one dollar, which he attempted to place, with great ceremony, in her pulsating waistband.

  “Uh… hold on, now… can’t seem to…” With too much effort, he pulled the elastic outward, which had the unfortunate effect of freeing all the money she’d collected already. It scattered to the floor like confetti.

  She stopped dancing.

  “Jerk!” she jeered, as she bent to retrieve her cash. “For one lousy buck?” She walked off in a huff.

  “Come on, Timid Tommy!” Corey shouted in irritation. He had bullied Thomas in high school. Now he was marrying Thomas's cousin, which was why Thomas had come back to his hometown for the weekend. He’d not wanted to come, but his sister had bullied him in a different way, by laying on him filial guilt. Their dad was in an assisted living facility. He couldn't attend, and it was the least his children could do to keep up with the rest of the family for him. Thomas was diligent about visits to his father but didn’t like spending one more second than necessary in his hometown on those dutiful jaunts. Megan, a Baltimore lawyer, had driven them both to Oyster Point -- a sleepy Maryland village on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, as southern and slow as Baltimore tried to be northern and hip -- the night before.

  And after they’d visited their dad, Tom had decided to take a trip down memory lane, walking the streets of his old town, grateful with every step that he’d left it.

  The wedding party boys had passed him in the neighborhood that evening and invited him along in drunken over-friendliness. Thomas, who had been happily sober at the time, had accepted because even more than a decade after high school, he couldn't help feeling a little surge of hope when the jocks included him.

  “I'm not Timid Tommy!” Thomas now said, raising his empty tequila shooter to his lips. When no liquor was forthcoming, he looked at it as if it were a friend who had betrayed him. “Have I not proved that many times over already this evening?”

  He’d acquitted himself with great courage, he thought, as dare after escalating dare had been thrown at him. He’d downed the shots, he’d danced on a table, he’d done that thing with the scooter... and he’d even placed a call to an old Oyster Point flame, DeeDee McGowan, on a dare from some fellow who worked in her car dealership. Thank goodness she’d not been there.

  Ouch. Thinking of DeeDee pinched. He’d heard she, too, was…

  “Not yet,” Corey said, leering over him. “You're not done yet.”

  People
started shouting out different dare possibilities. He thought he heard someone suggest climbing a flag pole. Another might have yelled something about wrestling a man named Killer Bubba. Finally, a voice in the back cut through with “Stand up and stop the wedding.”

  Corey laughed hard at that one, doubling over with amusement. “He won’t do that. He'll be out of Cuervo courage by then.”

  Thomas felt his face flame. So, these peasants thought he was incapable of courage without the Three Wise Men -- Misters Bean, Cuervo and Coors? How wrong they were. How blasted wrong they were!

  He stood, throwing his shoulders back, annoyed when that motion triggered the room’s spin cycle.

  “My extinguished-- er,esteemed-- companions,” he began, scratching his nose. “I’m sorry to inform you that you are wrong. Dead wrong. I shall-- with no hesitation-- be quite willing to stand and object to Mr...”

  “Bainbridge,” someone hollered.

  “Yes. That one's wedding.” Tom pointed to Corey. “But only if said gentleman agrees, as I do not want to disrupt the sacred nuptials of… Mr. Bain… him… and his inamorata without, of course, his expressly granted…”

  “You got it,” Corey said, grinning. “You got my permission, Tommy. It's a dare.”

  “Dare, dare, dare!” the chant went up again.

  Corey joined in and, in a gesture of great collegiality, Tom thought, pulled out his wallet to place a bet on the dare.

  “A hunert bucks,” Corey said, smacking two fifties on the bar behind him. “A hunert bucks says you won’t.”

  The crowd silenced. The music stopped. Tom stared at the money. He narrowed his eyes.

  “As Plato, in his ever invigorating Dialogues wrote, through the interlocutor role of Phaedrus, of course…”

  Did someone just snore?

  “A learned man has always riches in himself.”

  “Huh?” somebody asked.

  “That is to say,” Thomas went on. “I need not your lucre.”

  “Name your price,” Corey taunted, and the “dare” chant began anew.

  When it quieted, Thomas looked round the crowd-- or rather, as much of it as he could see when the room stopped swaying enough for him to focus. What did he want from this fractious crew?

  “Timid Tommy stops tomorrow,” he announced at last. “I accept the dare. I shall complete my mission with alacritude and pulchrity. But…” He took a breath, and when he next spoke, it was with the resounding stentorian tones of a Shakespearean actor. “But forthwith and henceforth from that day forward, Timid Tommy shall cease to exist. His name shall not be found upon the tongues of the good folk of Oyster Point nor in the annals of the town’s… annals. No one shall utter it nor refer to its history! Timid Tommy will be slain forever, and his memory buried with him!”

  He’d hoped to hear a rousing “hear, hear,” but instead all he got was baffled silence.

  Corey, however, sealed the dare with a handshake. “You got it, Thomas.”

  What sweet balm to hear that name, instead of the diminutive and its wretched adjective.

  ***

  Across town, the entertainment for DeeDee McGowan's bachelorette shindig was a bust. Her friends had told her they were securing a “sexy mechanic” -- a nod to the car dealership that DeeDee had worked in her whole life and had inherited from her dad -- to do a Chippendales routine. But, as it turned out, none of the girls knew where to ask for male entertainers in tiny, gossip-laden Oyster Point, so they'd hired an unemployed construction worker, who had promised to make up for in muscle what he lacked in experience.

  As it turned out, a striptease with a one-piece jumpsuit was neither lengthy nor suspenseful. And his muscles, while steroid-pumped, didn’t quite make up for the jelly-roll around his middle. The girls had politely clapped and thrown a few bills at him.

  “I guess you get what you pay for,” DeeDee said to her maid of honor, Kelly, as she dutifully slipped a George Washington into the guy's off-brand “Jake” Boxers as a show of good will. She turned her cherubic face up toward him and said, “Keep working on the dancing.” She stood. “Gotta pee,” she informed Kelly and headed out of the back room of Barnacle Bailey's and toward the restrooms.

  God, it felt good to get away from the crowd. Her face felt stiff from so much pretend smiling. All those congratulations and best wishes-- she felt like such a phony thanking everybody. If they only knew -- she’d thought of canceling the wedding a hundred times. Whether she’d go through with it remained an open question.

  She just wasn’t sure she loved Buck or that he loved her. She’d convinced herself, for a very brief period after his proposal, that she did, at least enough to make for a contented marriage. They’d dated off and on over the years. They were both in the same field-- he owned a used car dealership, and her lot sold new. They both valued family and hard work and wanted to settle down.

  Settle. That was the problem. She felt as if she were settling. Settling because she just hadn’t found anything better. After a while, she’d come to the conclusion there simply wasn’t anything better to be found, at least not in Oyster Point.

  As she entered the restroom, DeeDee saw that two of the three stalls were occupied, from the sounds of it, by ladies who were experiencing difficulty with the opposing forces of their tiny skirts and slightly-larger derrières. With a loud thump, one of them toppled onto the divider between the stall DeeDee chose and her own. DeeDee rolled her eyes. She enjoyed a drink or two but had little patience for the girls who couldn't hold it down.

  “Ohmygawsh,” one of the women said as she exited. “You know what I can't stand?” She sounded like a young twenty-something, enjoying her first blush with being legal. Yeah, Dee remembered that feeling and was glad she was past it.

  “What?” her friend asked, starting to run the water at the sink.

  “I hate it when bachelorette bitches swarm a bar.”

  “Ohmygawsh I know.”

  DeeDee smiled sardonically and waited inside her stall. After a moment of thought, she reached up and turned off the flashing LED light in her plastic tiara.

  “I mean,” the first woman continued, “I'm gonna do it, when, you know, it's my turn... and you'll totally be there and everything...”

  “I know! I'm totally there!” the second woman replied.

  “...but I just can't stand it when other bitches do it all in front of me, like na-ha, you're not getting married.”

  DeeDee nodded. She’d felt that way, too, as a witness to other bachlorette parties here. Had that driven her to say yes to Buck-- her growing bride envy?

  “Oh, honey,” her friend said, “It's, like, karma. It'll come around. And anyway, you know who it is?”

  “Who?”

  “That cat lady Buck Bewley is marrying. Ohmygawsh, he’s totally boinking Gretchen Waters at the Snip n’ Style on the side. I swear I saw her drive away from his house the other night.”

  “I’d do him,” the other said, laughing. “I like me a hot older gentleman.”

  A few seconds later, they left the restroom. DeeDee exited her stall and washed her hands, then dabbed cool water at her now-red eyes. I like dogs, not cats, she thought, anger rising, and thirty… something… was not “older”… and Buck is going to pay.

  CHAPTER TWO

  SUNSHINE SCREAMED in Thomas Charlemagne’s face the next morning, triggering a headache. The warmth closed in on his nose and eyes so fast he had to wave the light away or risk being blinded.

  He stumbled over the threshold of the Eastern Winds Motel and Car Wash, onto the main street.

  “Get me to the church on time,” he sang to himself, looking at his watch. A blur. He felt his face. Where were his glasses?

  Memories cascaded over him as he licked his lips, trying to rid himself of the sour taste of too much bad beer and worse whiskey.

  Glasses, glasses. Oh yes, Corey Bainbridge had taken them at some point during the party.

  Hadn’t he?

  God almighty, why’d he agree
d to come to this thing? Thank you, sis, he thought, remembering Megan’s scolding. It would make Dad happy. He has so few things in his life that do that. He isn’t getting any younger. We're all he has...

  So he’d packed a bag after spending all day in the university library with the Aefle collection they’d recently acquired under his direction, ridden the three hours over the Bay Bridge from Charm City during which he’d listened to Megan talk about their father’s care, and checked into the town’s main fleabag hotel before going off to visit Dad at Gentle Seas.

  Not exactly a fun-filled evening, especially after his father had filled him in on Oyster Point gossip, rubbing salt in a wound Thomas had thought was closed. He’d taken a walk to clear his head and soothe his restless soul when the bachelor party had found him.

  Good thing they had. At last, he could put his childhood reputation as Timid Tommy to rest. That, and little else, he remembered from the bachelor party. He squared his shoulders and squinted up the street. Well, he’d show them.

  He burped. “Sorry,” he said to the air.

  He stepped off the curb, just as a big Chevy Four Wheel came around the corner, letting out a blast on the horn that would have awakened the dead.

  “Timid Tommy no longer!” he shouted, holding up his hand as the driver screeched on the brakes. “Timid Tommy my ass!”

  He strode across the street with purpose, wishing he could clear his mind. Must be the sunshine. Forgot how sunny it is here in April. Knocks thoughts right out of the ole head.

  “Timid Tommy my ass,” he repeated, chuckling to himself. “You dared me, Corey Brainbradge. Bainbadge. Brainbridge.” He waved the air again as he peered up at a large stone building he was sure was the church. “And I shall, at long last, show you, just as Aefle the Miniscule showed his nemesis, Aefle the Greater, when he hid in the turnip cellar until compline without sanding the floor.”