If there were a ShapeShifter fan magazine, this might be printed in it:

Daniel’s top three obsessions (in order):
1. Music
2. Val
3. CNN

Headed to a party tonight where you think you might get picked on?

Keep this Trevorism in mind:

“I’d sooner stick my head in the john and flush it myself, thankyouverymuch.”

A one-liner that Trevor professes to live by:

Thinking too much is bad for your health.

It’s been awhile since we had an outtake!

In the end, Trevor couldn’t complain. He was riding shotgun as usual in Mitchell’s truck and Rusty fit between them with just enough room for Trev to move aside to show his dislike of her — but she was still close enough that Trev could smell her. Strawberries. Very faint, as if that, like her, was nothing more than a tease.

“Can someone please explain to me just why it is that we’ve got to stop and pick up food if we’re on our way to dinner?” Trevor half-whined as Mitchell pulled the Bronco into the parking lot behind the grocery where the lovebirds had met.

“Ma needs us to pick up extra chicken,” Mitchell said. “Sounds like the guest list grew by my sister and her dork husband.” He grimaced as he parked and turned off the ignition. “Man, that’s a way to ruin a night. Making the three of us be nice to him.”

Trev glanced out the corner of his eye, half-expecting Rusty to tell Mitchell that it wouldn’t be so bad. “Amy’s at least fun to be with,” she said.

“For you two,” Mitchell grumped as he opened the door to the truck. “I’m the one who always gets the short end of whatever you guys cook up.”

“Us?” Rusty asked, fluttering her eyes in an innocent act that Trev didn’t buy but probably left Mitchell drooling.

“Are you two gonna do some sick sappy shit in front of the tomatoes?” Trev asked as he hopped out and looked to make sure Rusty had gotten out of Mitchell’s side. He gave the door a satisfied slam, half wishing she’d stuck something in his way. A hand, a foot; didn’t really matter. Just something so Mitchell would get all pissed and work him over good for being so fucking careless with the princess.

Like Rusty was some prize or something.

Like Trevor would have hurt her on purpose.

“We could get sappy,” Mitchell said. He winked at Rusty as he slipped an arm around her shoulders. “We could buy us some tomatoes, grill ’em up…”

She shook her head at him, all business now. “Your mother was quite specific that we not show up with anything but the chicken.”

Mitchell waved her off. “Yeah, like washing the dishes before we split won’t shut her up. Remember that, Ker. If you do the dishes, she forgives all.”

Even Trevor had to agree with that. Mama V was as devoted to mothering as a woman could get, but there was nothing she despised more than cleaning up after dinner. It had probably been the only chore Trevor had done on a regular basis, plastering a smile on his face and telling himself repeatedly that if he did a good job, she’d forgive whatever he’d done that day to piss her off.

Inside the grocery, he beelined for the tomatoes as the other two trailed behind, probably absorbed in some lovers’ babytalk that needed to be stopped. Two of the biggest and freshest tomatoes got stuffed up his charcoal grey t-shirt. “So this is what was really going on when you invaded my life, huh? Tomatoes are round like tits — especially yours, Rusty. You thought M here was all about the fruit, but really, he was thinking how much it looked like your nice round boobies.” He leaned toward her, leering.

Before she could do anything but look a bit shocked, Mitchell cuffed the back of his head, making him bobble one of the tomatoes. He breathed out hard as he settled it.

Rusty just laughed, the way you do when you’re looking at something pathetic.

Trevor looked down and then gave her a death glare, wishing it really worked. One hand was still at tit-height, the other down by the waist of his jeans. He wasn’t coming off as a clown, just a fool. A pathetic fool. No wonder she looked like that.

He put the tomatoes back, trusting that if Rusty wouldn’t conveniently forget he’d done this, Mitchell would shut her up. M was good like that, always looking out for Trev’s pride. As if it was too precious to be abused.

Trevor wished it was that simple. It was more that his pride had been the first to get beaten away but like a loyal, stupid puppy, it kept coming back. And back. And back.

Maybe it was a good thing it had, Trev thought as they tromped through the rest of the grocery, toward the meat case in back. If it hadn’t been for pride — okay, and fear for Eliza, too — he never would have gotten the balls to get his hands on that gun. He’d probably be dead now instead of being the most constant viewer of the Mitchell and Rusty show.

“Hey,” he said, “why don’t we go out and hear some bands after dinner’s over?”

“If anyone good’s playing, sure,” Mitchell said. “Ker?”

“You guys can go,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Remember I told you I wanted to swing by that opening tonight?”

“We can do both,” Mitchell said.

Trevor wanted to smack him for sounding so fucking desperate.

“We need some chicken,” Rusty told the guy behind the meat case. “How much again, M?”

“Whaddya need?” the guy asked.

“Umm… five double breasts,” Mitchell said. “Wait. No. Make it four. Four singles, so I guess that’s two doubles…”

“Breasts?” the meat guy asked.

Trevor leaned close. “No,” he drawled. “Tits. We need chicken tits; that’s what’s on the menu tonight.”

Rusty covered her face with her hands.

“Aww, come on, Rusty,” he laughed. “Like that’s not what you fancy artists call ’em.”

“No, Trev, we don’t. We call them chicken breasts. Save the tits for the women, okay?”

He gave her a wolfish grin. “You know that’s the best part of you girls.”

Mitchell leaned over and whispered to him, “Only because you haven’t met a woman like Kerri.”

Trevor fought the impulse to spit, puke, and shudder. “Who the fuck wants a woman like her? Oh, yeah. You/, you big loser.”

Mitchell rewarded him with another cuff to the back of his head, hard enough to make his ears ring.

“Just take the bird tits and let’s get out of here,” he said, licking his lips and savoring the hit Mitchell had given him. On days like these, when Mitchell handed it out just right, life was good.

Patterson had called to say he was due home sooner than originally expected, so Sonya was absorbed in getting dinner together when it all began. She felt rushed; she’d spent the day helping a friend try to make sense of a temporary bookkeeper’s disaster, and Sonya and her friend had quit for the day still wondering if they were seeing the numbers correctly. She had brought some of the paperwork home for Patterson to look over; while he wasn’t a figures sort of man, he was sure to know some at the office who were.

With all of that on her mind, it wasn’t surprising that she barely paid attention when Mitchell and Trevor slunk through the kitchen, an unfamiliar girl between them. And she was too focused on defrosting the ground beef to dwell on the fact that Trevor was alone when he returned to the kitchen and asked, with his fake innocent air, if he could help.

Sonya handed Trevor a knife and the onion she’d been trying to chop while she rummaged in the vegetable bin for the broccoli. The boy went to work without complaining, but again, she was too wrapped up in the idea of dinner to think much about that anomaly, either. It was just a relief to have the extra set of willing hands.

When Amy screeched, she jumped three feet, taking the skillet with her. Mostly defrosted ground beef and unevenly chopped onion splattered her arms; Sonya banged the pan back on its burner. “Amy Christina, this had better be life-or-death!”

“Mom! You have got to see what Mitchell’s doing now!” Amy rushed into the kitchen, her face as pale as her hair. She chewed worriedly on her lower lip and gestured over her shoulder with an unusual urgency.

Trevor’s snicker stuck in Sonya’s brain and she turned to him, considering.

“Let me go see,” she said calmly, reaching for a kitchen towel to wipe her hands and arms off with. “You tend the meat,” she told Amy and crossed the family room and up the three stairs to the sleeping wing of the house, her daughter’s protests about cooking falling on uncaring ears.

Carefully, quietly, she opened the door to the boys’ room, and peeked inside. Mitchell and the girl were wrapped around each other, mostly covered by the bedsheets, his hair hiding both their faces.

She cleared her throat.

Mitchell’s head jerked around, his eyes wide and scared, his mouth open in surprise. The girl bit back a guilty and panicked sound as Mitchell said, “Ma!” He started to scrabble at the sheets, pulling them up closer around himself and his girl, trying to soothe her at the same time.

Sonya couldn’t stop the smile at the sight of her son’s swollen lips — and devotion to someone he’d probably never met before, knowing Trevor. “If your friend would like to stay for dinner, just let me know and I’ll set an extra place,” she said and closed the door again.

She didn’t need to press her ear to the door to hear their sighs of relief. But she did need a minute to lean against the wall and laugh. That little scene was something she knew Trevor had been working on for a few weeks now and while she supposed that as a mother, she ought to be yelling at her youngest for having sex under her roof, she and Patterson were liberal enough to know their home was the best choice. Lord only knew the sort of places Trevor would drag Mitchell to next time if she made a fuss now.

Trevor, on the other hand… Amy, too.

Sonya pushed herself away from the wall beside Mitchell’s door, gritting her teeth. Trevor had set Amy up for that intrusion; of that, she had no doubt. It was probably the only reason why Trevor had brought Mitchell and his friend back to the house.

Regardless of whether or not she’d been set up, Amy knew better than to go into the boys’ room without knocking first. A closed door meant something in the Voss household, regardless of what lies Trevor had told her. Just as other families had inviolable rules about who did what chore on what day, the Voss family had rules about what a closed door meant.

Amy and Trevor were arguing in the kitchen, probably about what had just transpired. And something was starting to smell overcooked.

That needed to be dealt with before Patterson got home. Time was running short and now Sonya wasn’t exactly certain how many she’d be cooking for. While she doubted the girl would stay, Mitchell could very well want some time to himself. A boy didn’t lose his virginity every day, and a boy as sensitive as Mitchell was bound to need the time to make sense of what he’d just done.

Amy and Trevor, on the other hand… Yes, Sonya told herself as she straightened the hem of her shirt. Something was starting to smell overcooked in that kitchen of hers, all right.

Only because it’s my birthday and the best gift my husband could give me was to take the kids and give me the day to write, I now present…

The Strand (a fiction Outtake)

“Trev, what do we do? We can’t take ’em back to the house; Ma’s got that party tonight, remember? And neither of them have a place… what do we do?

“Chill,” Trevor told Mitchell, hating the way the guy was getting all twitchy like some Tourette’s patient, except without the interesting vocabulary.

“The Bronco’s out after last time…”

“I know, I know,” Trevor said, trying to think fast. The girls would be back from the john in a minute or two, and they’d want a plan if they were going to head home satisfied. As if Mitchell knew how to satisfy a girl, but he was learning.

Dragging them to All Access just to use the back room wasn’t a particularly good idea, either. Spending time there before heading back was fine, but showing up just for a quick fuck apparently wasn’t.

They were at Decade, in fact, which was in one of the seedier parts of town, which meant that… “There’s always The Strand,” he offered.

Mitchell shuddered.

“Oh, like you’ve been there,” Trev sniffed. “Fuck, even I haven’t. Yet. Let’s take the girls, make it a joke and see if we can get them to cough up something better.”

Mitchell’s eyes got so big, Trevor was afraid they’d fall out of the idiot’s head. “We can’t go there! We’ll catch something for sure!”

Trevor lit a cigarette and blew smoke in Mitchell’s face. “How can you stand being such a dork?”

Mitchell stuttered and stammered something clear up until the girls came back.

“Look, we don’t have anywhere better to go, ourselves, so how about we do a double over at The Strand? Have some fun, destroy a room and run like hell?”

Trev’s girl, a brunette who, he swore, had been a prostitute only a week before, shrugged. Mitchell’s girl, who had boring brown hair but tits to make up for it, nodded eagerly. “I’ve always wanted to know what it’s really like in there,” she half-squealed. “Even if we don’t get naked, it’ll be worth the money, just to see the place.”

“And then we can get naked another time!” Trevor told her with false enthusiasm. He and Mitchell hadn’t done a particularly good job picking girls; they weren’t worth much more than The Strand, he decided.

Figured it was all working out; it always did now that he was away from Hank. That guy poisoned everything around him, even before he’d touched Trevor.

Yeah, Trev thought as he slung his arm around his girl and steered her out of Decade and down the street to The Strand, life was much better away from Hank.

They paused on the street outside the front door. “We’re doing this for real, right?” he asked everyone.

Mitchell looked about as white as his hair, but he nodded and tightened his grip on his chick. Taking it as foreplay, she snuggled against him and licked his neck.

The idiot blushed.

The lobby wasn’t much more than an office. Not even that; just a space to stand while you signed in and paid, which Trevor took charge of. M was scared enough that he’d probably forgotten how to write, let alone tell believable lies on the register, and it was just classless to let the girls take charge. Let the feminists burn their fucking bras in his face for all he cared; with Trevor Wolff, chivalry was not dead.

Through the probably-bullet-proof plexiglass, the guy slid him a room key and buzzed them through a dirty white security door. He and Mitchell exchanged looks as they passed; maybe this hadn’t been such a good idea. But a room for seventy-five cents? How could they argue?

They should have, they decided as they got into the hallway. It reeked — of bodies, of sex, of piss, of puke. It smelled worse than All Access, and that was not an easy smell to top. It was bright enough, though, which sorta surprised Trevor. “Aren’t these places supposed to be dark?” he asked Mitchell, who bobbed his head like he was too stupid to do anything but agree.

Mitchell found Room 32 first. Around the second corner; the place made a cube. What was in the middle, Trevor didn’t know. Probably a holding place for prostitutes or else a triple-x-rated peep show that was miraculously free for any vice cop who happened inside.

The room was about the same as the hall, only it smelled like bleach. Trev’s girl covered her nose with her hand. “Okay, I’ve seen enough,” she said with a shudder. “They only do this when someone dies in here.”

“Maybe they just bled a lot,” Mitchell laughed, peeking into the bathroom. Trevor stared at him; the guy seemed comfortable and at home. Had an alien been waiting inside the room and taken M over when he’d walked in?

“What do we do now?” his girl asked, touching the bedspread with her long, lacquered nail. Trevor noticed it was orange, and it would have matched the orange bedspread maybe back when the spread had been new — which had probably been thirty years ago, back when orange was in and avocado was a great color for a kitchen appliance.

“We should leave,” Trevor’s girl said.

“Wait, I want to look around,” Trevor said, following Mitchell — who still hadn’t come out of the bathroom. Either the killer was still there, or the guy was taking a whiz.

Neither; he was inspecting the bathtub. “Can you imagine?”

Trevor didn’t want to tell him it had fewer cracks than the one in Hank’s house. It was cleaner, too.

But, of course, Hank had liked sticking them in the bathtub before he’d reached his ugliest point. Less to clean up, he’d laughed. Trevor also thought the guy had gotten a hard-on, watching them try new ways to escape.

He shuddered; that shit was best left where it belonged. “C’mon,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this joint.”

Mitchell looked at him funny. “You okay?”

“Sure. Nothing that won’t get cured by leaving this shit-hole. We came, we saw, we left. Wasn’t that what we wanted?”

The kid squirmed. “I thought we wanted the girls to cough up a place. You know…”

“Yeah,” Trevor sighed, “I know.”