Ex-files: Kinky Katy Read online

  The Ex-Files: Kinky Katy

  Dakota Cassidy

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright ©2004 by Dakota Cassidy

  No part of this e-book may be reproduced or shared by any electronic or mechanical means, including but not limited to printing, file sharing, and email, without prior written permission from Changeling Press LLC.

  ISBN 1-59596-055-4

  Formats Available:

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  Publisher:

  Changeling Press LLC

  PO Box 1561

  Shepherdstown, WV 25443-1561

  www.ChangelingPress.com

  Editor: Sheri Ross Carucci

  Cover Artist: Sahara Kelly

  This e-book file contains sexually explicit scenes and adult language which some may find offensive and which is not appropriate for a young audience. Changeling Press 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.

  For KB… An e-mail of sunshine, sharing your love of life in a million different ways. With your heart, your sincerity, though thousands of miles away. For this and more, I am ever grateful, ever humbled to call you friend. You are a treasured gift… this one’s for you, my darling.

  All my love,

  Dakota :)

  Chapter One

  Breathing…

  There now, do you feel the inner peace seeping into your personal space? Go with it. Allow the gentle tide of sanity to wash away your hallucinations.

  Better? her mental counselor asked.

  Shit no, I’m not better! the freaked out irrational half of her screamed. There’s a woman with pink hair in Maddie’s bathroom, telling me she’s my guide to MY LIFE! No amount of breathing in my personal space is going to make that better. What kind of question is that? Are you better? She gave a mental snort. Better…

  I’m only trying to soothe your frazzled nerves. You do, after all, do this counselor stuff for a living, don’t you?

  Well, consider me un-soothed.

  Katy Jennings lay flat on her back with her eyes scrunched tightly shut, taking deep gulps of air as her mind raced frantically to remember what she’d been doing before she got here. She couldn’t get that damn Madonna song out of her head either… ‘Like a Virgin.’ Where had that come from?

  And, where was here anyway? She reached blindly with her hands, making contact with the cool porcelain of the bathtub.

  OH! Yes, she’d been in Maddie’s bathroom -- Maddie was such a good friend. She was wildly in love with Cole, and Katy was at their “moving in together party,” when she had to use the powder room. All of that love emanating from the two of them was killing her and she’d felt guilty. Guilty because her marriage was over and she didn’t want it to be. So guilty she’d excused herself to the bathroom and gone off to mope.

  Moping…

  Yes, she’d been moping and in general feeling like crap over the fact that her ex-husband Garret was getting married again. The sharp pang of regret shot to her gut in full throttle.

  Center yourself, Katy. Think of the road ahead, not the road already traveled.

  Oh, shut the hell up. See where all of that counselor-like crap got me? Flat on my back on a bathroom floor with a friggin’ hallucination singing ‘Like a Virgin.’ I don’t need your help, thank you very much.

  Oh, my…

  That was very non-Katy Jennings like. She never insulted anyone, let alone herself and her way of life. Katy didn’t just counsel others. She believed what she counseled them with. Her tools of the trade, so to speak, the big counselor’s bag of tricks.

  “Kaaaaaattttttyyyyy! Wake up and quit all the sappy-crappy “I love me” shit! That won’t work here.”

  Here… I repeat, where is here? she whispered mentally. Katy groaned and popped one eye open, then just as quickly shut it. Oh, this was whacked. That’s what Maddie would say and by now, Maxine would be spewing a string of expletives in her native Spanish tongue.

  They would help her. She had to get up and go back out to the party to find them. Maddie, Maxie, Victoria… They were her friends from Divorcee’s Anonymous. It wasn’t exactly anonymous. There were only the three of them. Maddie called their group the ex-files…

  “Oh, noooooooo, Katy. Maxine and Maddie can’t help and neither can that loose cannon, Victoria. C’mon, get up, we have shit to do and I have little time to waste while you breathe and center yourself. Sometimes I just can’t believe what big babies you all are. A little travel dust and your world comes to a screeching halt. Now, get up, would ya?”

  Travel dust? Double-U-Tee-Eff! As in WTF is going on?

  Oh, yes, Katy Jennings, she thought, your world has tipped on its axis. You are now one of your patients. This is bad, Katy, very bad indeed, she chided herself. It means you need to seek a new form of counseling all unto itself.

  A small hand tugged at her shirt. “No, Katy, you haven’t lost your mind, but you have entered the world of the twilight zone. My twilight zone and I think you’ll like it, though admittedly it takes some adjusting. So please, let’s put the counselor box away and go with me on this, huh? Let’s ride the train of discovery together and do this thing!”

  This was just about enough!

  Katy sat up and fast -- too fast. The blood rushed to her head and nausea spread throughout her stomach like wildfire. She clung to the edge of the tub, laying her head against the cool porcelain. A nose just barely pressed to hers and insisted, “Open those eyes, Katy, my girl! Look at me…”

  Katy popped her eyes open again and saw two fingers, not her own, pointing directly at a pair of sparkling-gray eyes, also not her own, directing Katy to “Look at me.”

  “Look at me.” The wing-nut’s voice -- whose nose was pressed to hers -- was a combination of gentle but appeasing impatience.

  Katy looked at her.

  “Okay, now focus.”

  Squinting her eyes, she focused in on the total package she saw, but inches from her.

  Oh, Jesus. “Who are you?” Katy whispered.

  She sighed. “I’m sort of your fairy godmother slash wish-meister.”

  “Um, I’m sorry, fairy godmother?” Breathing…

  “Yeah, I know it’s hard to comprehend. It’s semantics. Look, Katy, you made a wish, or someone did. I’d have to look at my notes to be sure who did the wishing. Anyway, somebody wished something and that dragged me here. It’s through a vortex of time or some crap. I don’t know the science of it. I stunk in science. Math was my gig. Anywhooo, this vortex thing drags me here. Well, sucks me here is more like it. Damn hard on the hair. So, I’m here and so are you. This is when it gets good.”

  “Good?” Katy shook her head. She was in Maddie’s bathroom with a… a… a fairy godmother? Oh, damn. None of her training had prepared her for this. She must have missed the hallucinations/cracking up class.

  “You’re not cracking up, Katy. I promise. You’ve been granted the chance of a lifetime.”

  “Okay, so let me get this straight. I’m getting a wish?”

  The pink-haired sprite smiled wistfully. “Yeah, you are.”

  Katy bit her lip as her brow furrowed. “And that wish is?”

  “Here’s where it gets sticky… Like I said, someone wished for you to be able to go back. I’m assuming they wanted you to be able to right a wrong of some kind.”

  Katy sat up straight, ignoring the kink in her back. “Where am I going back to?”

  “Well, look at me, would ya? I’ve got leg warmers and hair the size of Mt. Vesuvius, Madonna is a QUEEN and everyone has ripped sweatshirts. Where do you think you’re
going back to? I mean, does anyone willingly wear this unless fashion dictates it?”

  OMIGOD. Did this mean… OMIGOD…

  The eighties?

  Katy gasped and slapped a hand over her mouth. “The eighties?” she said around her fingers.

  “Cool, huh?”

  She fought to keep the rise of panic from overwhelming her. Breathing…

  The sprite tilted Katy’s chin upward again. “Focus, Katy, don’t fade on me now.”

  Yes, focus… “I can go back to the eighties?” Her question came out rather squeaky.

  The sprite pointed to the closed bathroom door. “Right out that door, sweet-cheeks.”

  I’ll take door number three, please, Monty. “Holy…”

  “Shit, right? Yep, everybody says that. They’re amazed, astonished, astounded. So do me a big favor and get over it and fast, cuz there’s a catch too, Katy. If you go back, you only get five days and then I come get your butt and take you back to the future. You’ll have the chance to see some things that you’ll look at differently now that you’re older, but it still doesn’t mean that whatever happened in the present won’t remain the same. Do you get it?”

  Katy pursed her lips. “No.”

  “It means you’ll still land right where you left in 2004. It means you might not be able to fix anything by coming back to 1983 to find out what went wrong.”

  She mentally prayed that she wasn’t really losing all of her marbles. How could she lose her marbles anyway? She was the marble keeper for Christ sake!

  Okay, let’s look at this rationally.

  She was good at rational.

  If this meant she could start over, if she really was back in the eighties, it meant Garret was here too. Somewhere… and they weren’t divorced and he wasn’t getting married. Her head reeled with the possibilities. Dipping her toe in the pool of the nonsensical she tentatively asked, “What year is it again?”

  “1983.”

  She almost sobbed. The first year of their marriage. Laying her head against the edge of the tub, Katy struggled to remember what that was like. They’d lived in a small studio apartment with nothing but each other and a can of raviolis. Her heart raced, it had been so good then… Before she’d become so gung-ho on getting her degrees and wrapped up in her own “personal space,” centering herself, too focused on fixing other people’s lives, while hers fell apart. Too busy utilizing all of the fancy terms she’d learned and honing her psychology skills.

  These past weeks, since her sons had let it slip that their father was remarrying, she’d fought an uphill battle to remain calm. Find the purpose she thought she’d gained after Garret divorced her. But she could no longer deny her utter despair over him marrying someone else. It was wrong, so desperately, irrevocably wrong.

  And she wasn’t feeling very counselor-like about her resentment either. Thus, she didn’t wish to put it in the resentment box and take it out at a later date to play with. No, what she wanted to do was rip this broad’s hair out one blonde follicle at a time.

  Tonight, at Maddie and Cole’s party, she’d been full up to her eyeballs with fighting it off anymore. Katy couldn’t deny she loved Garret. It was something that just was -- and might always be. Since her divorce she’d taken her own advice and gone out on dates. She’d built a life with her friends from Divorcee’s Anonymous, her therapy practice, but the hollow in her heart, the ache that never went away, was always there. Eating her from the inside out and gutting her emotions until she couldn’t breathe from it. She never failed to end up feeling half of a whole.

  Tonight, she’d finally admitted that she loved Garret… still. That nothing would change that. Not divorce, not time, not distance, not even her thinking spot.

  And certainly not some blonde chippie who thought she could just come in and snatch Garret up like he was hers.

  “So, now here’s your chance to see if you want to change that, Katy…” her fairy god-whatever whispered.

  She startled Katy out of her reverie, bringing doubt with her. “What if I can’t? What if what was supposed to happen did? Just like fate wanted it to?”

  She shrugged her small shoulders as a wisp of a smile flitted over her lips. “I guess fate might have made a mistake the first time, huh? It brought you here again, didn’t it? At least you’ll have tried, right? It’s like I told you, Katy, I’m only here to make the impossible part happen. The rest is up to you. Finding the answers to this included.”

  “What do I have to do? I’ll do anything.” How many times had she wished for something like this? How many times had she wondered what might have happened if she’d just done this, or not done that? Katy went to bed every night alone, asking herself those questions. And now, her chance to change this was staring her in the face -- in the way of a sprite-like fairy godmother, albeit, but staring her smack dab in the face nonetheless.

  “Well, I know it’s going to involve a lot of hair spray and probably a ripped T-shirt or two. But ‘Like a Virgin’ didn’t come out until 1984. I just really think that was Madonna’s best showing.”

  Katy laughed. A genuine, full-fledged giggle, something that had eluded her for many moons now. “I never much liked Madonna and I can’t even remember what I looked like back then.”

  Her fairy godmother snorted, waving her small hands over the length of her very Madonna-like outfit. “Trust me, honey, it can’t get much worse than this.”

  “But, wait… I’m older now. I don’t look the same, my body is…”

  “Nah, don’t break out in hives over it. Everything will be just like it was, difference being, you’ll know what’s going to happen when your time back in 1983 is done. But, remember, when the end of this road less traveled happens, and you go back to the future, you might decide you like this Katy. Because the more mature, weathered Katy is going to take a long hard look at her marriage. If this mature counselor-like Katy is beyond Garret, you’ll find out, because you have the future behind you so to speak.”

  Wait one damn minute! She might go through all of this and still lose Garret? Find out he just wasn’t for the Katy of 2004? She couldn’t go through that again.

  But she’d already been through it. Maybe she was mourning what was, but not what would be?

  “But he’s different in 2004 as well. It isn’t just me.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t drag his butt back too. It would defeat the purpose, ya know? He’s not a willing participant. He was done wishing things would change a long time ago. It’s you who did the wishing, lady. Garret divorced you in 2003.” Her fairy god-whatever shrugged. “I don’t make promises, Katy. This is just a vacay of sorts, a way to determine if saving your marriage really is what you want to do. Maybe your divorce was for the best, ya know? This isn’t a promise that you’ll change everything when you come back to the present. This is a reprieve to see if you really want to save it or your new divorced life is what’s best for you. If you want to save your marriage, you’re going to set aside this order you’re so fond of and get in the pit of mud and fight dirty for your man.”

  Katy couldn’t reconcile all of it in her head at the moment. Her mind raced and her throat closed, but she managed to squeak out one last question. “How long do I get for this vacay again?”

  “Five days, Katy, and no more. You go back to the future at the end of your five day stay. Period.” The fairy-whatever’s face took on a stern, hard look.

  It didn’t matter. Screw everything, screw all of her careful planning and her lucrative practice too, and God forgive her, the patients she might leave behind for now. Her partner Tom would take over or would the world even care that she was missing for five days enough to stop and notice she was gone? Katy shook her head in confusion. She’d wished every night in her prayers for just one more day with Garret. She was going to take it… and figure the rest out later. She was going to skip off to the land of the unplanned and smack into the town square of impulsive.

  The hell with this. She was going back!
<
br />   Her fulfillment account was on empty at the bank and she planned to make a hefty deposit.

  * * *

  Eyeing her reflection in the mirror, Katy scrunched her hair. This was an abomination of the worst order. The ozone would explode from so much product.

  “That’s a boatload of hair spray,” her new friend commented, wrinkling her nose.

  Katy tugged at the sweatshirt, strategically ripped in all the right places. “What’s your name anyway?”

  “Tallulah. And if I hear one wisecrack about my name, I’ll zap your ass back to the new millennium so fast it’ll make your thinking spot look like a grease spot.”

  Katy frowned, aghast at the very thought. “Oh, no, I would never do that. That would be cruel and cruelty is a sign of low self-esteem.”

  “See now, here’s the problem with all that crap you’ve got floatin’ in your gray matter -- did you ever give pause and think about just letting it all hang out? I mean, really, Katy, do you believe some of the nonsense you sell?”

  “You’re hurting my feelings, Tallulah, and that’s also a sign of low self-esteem. The need to feel superior is a complex, you know.”

  Her tinkling laughter drifted through the acoustics of the bathroom. “Yeah? And so friggin’ what? Are you gonna send me to my thinking spot now? Did it ever occur to you that all of the psychobabble you spew just might have been your downfall? Not only did you spend years getting a degree in it, but you used your husband as a subject to practice on.”

  “Oh, that’s just ridiculous. I did not,” she replied indignantly. “I tried to make our relationship better because of what I’d learned. I didn’t use him as my guinea pig.”

  “Listen, Dr. Phil, I don’t know the details of what happened to your marriage, just the general outline, but if this dumb-ass crap is what you did to him -- it’s a wonder he didn’t run out of the house screaming. Did you ever think he might have just wanted to talk? Maybe he didn’t need a solution, just a sympathetic ear and maybe he needed a lover not a Ph.D.?”