The Boarding House -Miss Olivia

 Miss Oliva awoke with a feeling of falling, or was she just having a heart attack? She jerked herself up quickly. Damn, if she didn't have to have a stupid dream about that hedgehog. It attacked her.

Of course, it wasn't long until someone knew she was awake. She could feel it move across the bed. It made her shiver to the point she felt poison in her mouth. She squinted hard in the dark, awaiting her punishment.

Bean purred up against her as if she needed to relax. She rubbed her fingers between his ears.

"How can I relax," she whispered in a fret. She looked at her cell on the nightstand. It was only four in the morning. She held the cat and flung herself back on her pillow. No way could she sleep now.

Yes, she knew exactly who Fitz was and it only speeded up her heartbeat to the point she couldn't even hear Bean pur against her chest.

She nursed her bottom lip, hoping she wouldn't cry, but she did.

Damn, if he didn't look just like his father, a real dweeb. What in the world did she ever see in that truck driver?

Granted she was only fifteen back then and hitchhiking on the toll road somewhere in Oklahoma. That was back in the day when she could sleep under the stars on top of the teepee roof-covered picnic areas. Back when she had no fears. Back when she was going to be a songwriter. But she met Cappie and he was going her way. However, she couldn't remember which way now. Oh, hell, it didn't even matter.

She'd stayed the rest of the summer with a cousin who evidently couldn't conceive. Jeanie was college-educated and worked at the Modern Language Department back then. She'd promised to teach Fitzgerald so many languages, some Olivia had never heard of.

Oh, there was no turning back, and she hadn't turned back. She was so young then. Young enough, it didn't even hurt her body having a nine-pounder like Fitz. She couldn't say she could even remember the labor pains.  But to look at him now. That was Cappie's baby. That look in his eyes. He might as well have been a sick clown.

Cappie didn't even have any business driving a truck. She bet he was dead, as much as he smoked and drank back then.

She sniffed back tears now, remembering how that little fart Fitz came on to her in the kitchen when he first got here. Well, of course, she laid down the law. When he gave her that rhetoric, "What do you say? How about it? Come on? I bet you could teach me some things in that basement of yours."

What she would have done to stomp that mess of a boy. "I only date black men!" She snapped, clenching her jaw.

"But you know that Kirby's gay," Fitz scowled back after scavenging in her fridge. He acted like he already knew about her and he was just testing her.

"So," she'd hugged herself at that moment, but she felt her body shaking. How dare that boy come so close to letting it all slip into place. "He might change his mind if he ever gives me a chance."

There, she'd cooled his heels. But he was still here. She was thankful to see him, but she had no intentions of telling him who she really was.