Over the Wall Read online

  OVER THE WALL

  Theolyn Boese

  www.loose-id.com

  Warning

  This e-book contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language and may be considered offensive to some readers. Loose Id® e-books are for sale to adults ONLY, as defined by the laws of the country in which you made your purchase. Please store your files wisely, where they cannot be accessed by under-aged readers.

  Over the Wall

  Theolyn Boese

  This e-book is a work of fiction. While reference might be made to actual historical events or existing locations, the names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Published by

  Loose Id LLC

  1802 N Carson Street, Suite 212-2924

  Carson City NV 89701-1215

  www.loose-id.com

  Copyright © May 2008 by Theolyn Boese

  All rights reserved. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this e-book ONLY. No part of this e-book may be reproduced or shared in any form, including, but not limited to printing, photocopying, faxing, or emailing without prior written permission from Loose Id LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-59632-693-4

  Available in Adobe PDF, HTML, MobiPocket, and MS Reader

  Printed in the United States of America

  Editor: Crystal Esau

  Cover Artist: April Martinez

  Dedication

  For Christina, Jessica, and Jodi. Thanks for listening, proofreading, and telling me when I’m being a dork. At one point or another, all of these women have had to work with me. So, thanks to Chris for dealing with me after snarky customers and actually taking my advice sometimes. Thanks to Jess for listening to my barely coherent rants after boyfriend breakups and for watching The Bicycle Man with me. And last, but far from least, thanks to Jodi for not talking to me until the second cup of coffee and keeping me from killing the coworkers when they acted like true cubicle dwellers.

  Prologue

  Seven-year-old Cassia Anne Kinsley stared at the snake held in her father’s hands with delight. Her eyes inspected the way each scale fit perfectly into the others. She stretched out a finger to stroke the reptile gently. “It’s not slimy, Daddy.” She looked up at him with perplexed curiosity. “Tania said snakes are slimy. And mean.”

  James watched his daughter pet the reptile curled through his fingers. “Well, Cass, most girls are scared of snakes. They think snakes are slimy because their scales shine and they are cold blooded.”

  Cass absorbed this. She leaned forward and sniffed it lightly. “It smells good, like cotton candy.”

  Her father released the snake and they both watched it slither into the tall grass. He didn’t react to the candy comment, well used to hearing things like that out of his daughter’s mouth.

  After a moment, she flopped onto her back in the grass and stared up at the sky. “Girls are weird,” she announced.

  James lay down beside her and stared upward as well. “Why do you say that?” His daughter always had an interesting way of looking at things and he never knew what was going to pop out of her mouth. Like the time she asked her doctor how old women were when they went into heat. Before the doctor had time to reply, she followed up with another question: Why do girls only have two breasts when most animals have more?

  “Well, Kevin threw a ball at Stacey and hit her in the arm and she started yelling at him ’cuz he got her shirt dirty.” She chewed on her lip, “Kevin likes her. I bet he was just trying to get her to play with him. She told the teacher, and he had to do lines after school, so now he’s telling the other boys she’s a cootie factory.”

  James bit back a laugh. He rolled onto his side and propped his head on his hand. “If he hit her with a ball and calls her a cootie factory, why do you think he likes her? Sounds like he thinks girls are gross.”

  Cass turned her head and looked at her daddy solemnly. “I saw stuff like that on Critter Kingdom,” she said, referring to her favorite television program. “The boy cats are always biting the girl cats they like.”

  He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Hmmm, so you think Kevin is throwing balls because he can’t bite her?”

  Cass nodded. “He’d have to do a lot of lines if he bit her,” she informed her daddy sagely. “But, if he uses a ball, she has to look at him, his parents don’t get called, and he doesn’t have to do as many lines. And he doesn’t want the other boys talking to her, so he said mean stuff. Besides, girls don’t like getting bit.”

  James goggled at this train of logic. It was especially shocking how well she understood the logic of Kevin’s thinking. He stared at the brown eyes watching him expectantly. “I think you’re right. Girls don’t like to be bitten.”

  She went back to watching the clouds, obviously content her father understood. After a moment, she sighed woefully. “I don’t think I’m very good at being a girl, Daddy,” she whispered mournfully. “I don’t like pink.”

  He laughed softly. “That’s okay, Cass. It’s not a requirement.”

  Chapter One

  Twenty years later…

  Cass lounged back in her easy chair and took a quick slurp of her hot cocoa. Her laptop was busy logging her into her favorite chat room. She aimed the remote at the television and flipped channels until she came to a feature on sharks. Tossing the remote aside, she absently listened to the program while gnawing on a carrot. The chat room came online and she saw that she was the only one in it.

  “Blah. Looks like the gang is still at work.” She finished her carrot and moved the laptop aside. She stood and stretched before going to the large cage along one wall. It looked like something out of a mad scientist’s laboratory.

  Brightly colored tubes wound in and out of each other, through the cage, and up and down the wall. Three apricot-orange and white hamsters with long, fluffy fur stared at her blearily from various rooms built into the huge cage. She shook some pellets into their bowl and checked the water. Finding the bottle full, she added a few carrots and closed the cage door securely. Her pets ignored her and continued the important task of sleeping.

  After reheating her cocoa and finding something a bit more substantial in the freezer for her own dinner, she flopped back down into her chair. She flipped open the footrest, pulled her laptop back onto her lap, and watched the shark program intently while she waited for someone to show up in the chat room.

  Several minutes passed while she finished her microwave dinner. She tossed the empty container into the trashcan beside her chair and checked the room again. Still empty. Her hamsters had awakened and were beginning to move through the maze to the food dish. After a few nibbles El Fuzz, the largest and only male, came to the door and stared at her expectantly.

  She eyed him, “I suppose you think I should let you out.”

  The hamster’s nose twitched.

  “Bet you think I should dig out your ball, huh?”

  He wiggled.

  “Okay, but you have to stay away from the stairs this time. No more of that hop the broom handle stuff,” she told him sternly, referring to the time he had managed to roll his ball over the broom handle she had used to block the basement stairs. The poor animal had bumped and thumped his way down every step and knocked himself stupid before she could rescue him. She rose and took down a clear acrylic ball with slits cut into it. Cass twisted the top off the ball and opened the cage door. She held the open ball to the door and El Fuzz eagerly clambered inside. She closed the cage again and put the top on the ball and twisted it shut before setting it on the floor.

  Her pet took a moment to inspect his surround
ings before pushing the ball off and zooming into the kitchen. A few minutes later an outraged squall sounded and her cat, Tantrum, darted out.

  Fuzz was hot on his heels. His little legs were a blur as he franticly ran inside his ball while he chased the cat around the room.

  Tantrum charged up the stairs and stopped at the top and began cussing El Fuzz out the way only a Siamese can. Loudly. With great passion. Punctuated with hisses, snarls, and spitting.

  Cass ignored all this with the ease of long practice.

  El Fuzz came to a stop at the base of the stairs and stared up at Tantrum with a gleam of maniacal glee in his beady little eyes. He lurked there for several minutes. Pacing his acrylic ball back and forth across the base of the stairs. Waiting. Hoping. Knowing that sooner or later, the cat had to come back down.

  Looking down at her screen Cass noticed a message was waiting for her. One of her friends had logged in while she was trying to ignore her hamster as he plotted the cat’s doom. It read:

  Grimalkin: Ho, Wench! How’s your night?

  She grinned. Grim was her favorite person in the room and the person she was closest to in there. His sense of humor matched hers, and he had never pressured her about meeting in real life or sending pictures, even though they both lived in the same city. She quickly replied.

  RikkiTikkiTavi: Not much, watching sharks on TV and an insane hamster in my living room. How about you?

  Grimalkin: *shrugs* not much. I just got home from work and grabbed a burger on the way. Need to finish going through stuff and see what else The Bitch took when she left. When do you start the new job?

  RikkiTikkiTavi: On Monday. One can only hope it’s better than the last one. Ya know… I bet your DVD collection would quit shrinking if you knew your girlfriends better before they moved in. Just a thought.

  Grimalkin: Smart-ass.

  She grinned. It was so fun to needle him. This was the third girlfriend to move out this year, and the eighth since she had known him. Several other members of their little group popped in and started chatting with them. Cass backed off the subject of his last live-in since the rest of the crew ragged him unmercifully about her.

  About an hour later, he sent her a private message before he logged off for the evening.

  Grimalkin: I can’t wait to hear about your new co-workers. You have a great talent for meeting crazy people. Night, babe. BTW, that documentary you told me about was great. You need to get out more.

  He logged off before she could reply.

  She snorted and said her own goodbyes to everyone else before logging off as well.

  Setting aside her computer, she stood and looked for her hamster. Finding him curled up and asleep in his ball, she took him back to his cage and transferred him back inside with gentle hands. His cage-mates ignored her. She still wasn’t sure about those two. She had found them in a small box of trash outside her last job and took them home with her, hoping they would get along with El Fuzz. It had been a risky venture since hamsters were territorial and sometimes killed interlopers. Luckily, both of the foundlings had been female and El Fuzz had adjusted just fine. They, on the other hand, had stuck their furry noses in the air and proceeded to pretend El Fuzz, and Cass for that matter, didn’t exist. So, she named them Cheerleader and Debutante.

  Cass turned off the TV and looked around her small living room. The house seemed especially empty tonight. Her father had sold it to her before moving to Florida when he retired. He was kicking back on the beach and schmoozing the retired ladies who lived in the complex. Since he was fairly young to retire and had a full head of glossy hair and all of his own teeth he was very popular amongst the ladies. Cass sighed to herself. My dad is an aging letch. Just admit it and deal with the shame. Not that she wasn’t happy he was having fun. He had given up a lot of his freedom after her mother had died and left him a single dad.

  She turned off the lights and made her way upstairs to her bedroom.

  Tantrum lay curled up in the center of her bed. He looked up when she came in and snorted with regal disdain. He was always in a snit for a couple of hours after El Fuzz had been loose to terrorize the household. He stalked over to a corner of the bed and pointedly turned his back on her before curling up to go to sleep again. She often thought that Tantrum must have been a Regency England maiden in a past life because he was so good at snubbing people he felt had wounded his dignity.

  She stripped off her clothes and shimmied into an over sized T-shirt. Her bed seemed huge and cold tonight. Loneliness slid through her. Usually she enjoyed being alone, but lately it had been bothering her. She suspected she would be coming into heat soon. Unlike most of her cousins, she hadn’t yet.

  Cass believed it was because she was rarely around men, except for her best friend, Jonathon, and the instinctive drive to mate hadn’t been stimulated. Once she came into heat, she wouldn’t be very picky about her partner. Or partners, if things got really bad. She hoped Jonathon was single if she did come into heat, since they occasionally slept together when he was between girlfriends and he knew about her family’s legacy.

  Her mother’s family shape-shifted. Oh, nothing cool like wolves, tigers, or bears. Oh no. Whoever had pissed off the gods enough to get the whole family cursed had really gone the extra mile. Every member of her family ended up with some bizarre and not very useful beast living inside them. No one was sure exactly what had happened, or why the animals they turned into were chosen, but legends had been passed down in the family for generations. Some were so corny Cass didn’t believe a word of them, but the one about an ancestor raping a priestess of some obscure religion when he was traveling seemed the most likely to her.

  Cass was a mongoose. Her mother had been a squirrel. From what she had been told by her father, her deceased grandfather had been a horny old goat. She tried not to think of that too much. Ew.

  She had a multitude of cousins that had got the short end of the shifter stick as well. Although her closest cousin was a fox. That didn’t seem so bad. Except that her mother had left her a chicken farm. Oh, delicious irony.

  And then there was Aunt Sophie…

  She quashed that thought quickly. Best not to go there.

  She sighed and slid between the sheets, turning onto her side to pick up the paperback she was reading. Just like she did every night. Grim was right; she did need to get out more.

  Chapter Two

  Cass stared at the computer screen blankly as the woman training her droned on in an endless monotone of systems and policies. It was her first day at her new job. Said job was nothing more than another cubicle slave rut, but Cass liked them. It gave her a bit of social contact and a steady paycheck. Besides, the people she met in those types of jobs were always interesting. The drama and angst of cube slaves was wonderful fodder for the poetry she liked to write as a hobby. It was like being in high school all over again, only with more baby daddy drama and less alcohol. Well, at least there was less alcohol after you got out of the Customer Service departments. Not that she blamed the customer service representatives. Hell, I’d drink too much too, she thought meditatively. People don’t call customer service because they’re having a good day.

  In her opinion, cubicle dwellers tended to be quite colorful. There seemed to be something about carpet covered Styrofoam walls that brought out the strange in people. She firmly believed it was fumes given off from the wall contents seeping into their afflicted brains over a slow period of time.

  She was abruptly brought back to reality when Mabel-Ann, her trainer, suddenly stopped typing and stared at the screen for a minute.

  She turned and smiled at Cass strangely. She leaned close and whispered, “My doctor gave me a prescription for those brain pills, but I don’t think I need them, so I didn’t fill the prescription.” Having said that, she turned back to the screen and began talking and typing as if nothing had been said.

  Cass blinked. She edged her chair back a bit and eyed the smaller woman warily. Alrighty then, she thou
ght to herself. That was random.

  Half an hour passed and Cass’s eyes glazed over again. Her thoughts wandered.

  Mabel-Ann paused in her monologue again.

  Cass eyed her curiously.

  She turned and smiled at Cass before leaning close to whisper another tidbit. “I haven’t had sex with my husband in thirteen years.” Revelation given, it was back to work.

  Cass looked around nervously. She was starting to wonder if this was a joke on the new girl. No one seemed to be paying any attention to her though. Oooookay…

  By the time lunch rolled around, she was feeling a little desperate to get away from her new coworker. Unfortunately, Mabel-Ann decided to give her a tour of the cafeteria. She also decided that Cass wouldn’t want to sit alone.

  Great. Cass stared glumly down at her hamburger and listened to the other woman drone on about her personal life. This is what I get for thinking I’m lonely. A new friend. Yay. Too bad she’s fucking crazy!

  After lunch, she trudged back to Mabel-Ann’s desk for more fun and frolic. The rest of the day continued much at the morning had. Hours of excruciating boredom broken by way too much information about a person she really didn’t want to get to know better.

  She quickly learned to fear Mabel-Ann pausing mid keystroke. It always precluded a very personal remark.

  As if her thoughts had summoned the unimaginable, Mabel-Ann paused in her typing once again. Almost a full minute passed.

  Cass cringed, her trepidation building.

  Mabel-Ann turned and smiled queerly.

  Cass shuddered inwardly as the other woman’s mouth opened.

  “My husband likes to walk around the house naked. One night he went outside for something and I locked him out. It was snowing. He was very angry when I let him back in.”