To Love Again

By Ian W. Cooper

Sitting there passively, and waiting for some nice lady to come along and discover him, just isn’t working for reclusive John Muggeridge. He’s been alone for far too long. Something needs to be done about it. A quirky lady carpenter and a face from the past are enough to crack that fragile shell wide open. Rebecca has been alone for a while too. While she doesn’t think it bothers her, she has tickets to the big premiere, and no one to go with. A short and romantic story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ian W. Cooper
• Release date: Mar 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781927957240

Ian W. Cooper

Ian Cooper has written fiction, non-fiction and worked for newspapers and magazines. He likes to make people laugh as well as think. His writing has a strong sense of the dramatic. Out of work and recovering from a life-threatening illness, someone suggested writing his sexual memoirs, which he initially rejected for the amount of research involved. He didn’t want to have to make it all up from scratch. A single dad and semi-retired from his most recent experience in the construction industry, Ian squeezes a little writing time in between raising a daughter and building a home-based business.

Book preview

To Love Again

Ian W. Cooper

This Smashwords edition copyright 2014 Ian Cooper and Long Cool One Books

Design: J. Thornton

ISBN 978-1-927957-24-0

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The following is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any person living or deceased, or to any places or events, is purely coincidental. Names, places, settings, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. The author’s moral rights to the proceeds of this work have been asserted.

Table of Contents

Act One

Act Two

Act Three

About the Author

To Love Again

Ian Cooper

Act One

Rebecca was fixing doors in Bellevue Manor, a small, three-floor walkup of thirty units. It was in the Central City location.

She stood at the end of the second floor hallway. Having unhooked the top closer and taken the pins out of the hinges, she removed the heavy door completely and leaned it against the wall. Two and a half inches thick and with three-quarter length frosted glass, it must have weighed a hundred pounds. She was used to handling them.

Forty-one years old, Rebecca had worked for Stigman and Schmegande, the property development firm, for nine years. An irreverent bunch, employees called it Stigma and Smegma, inspired by the thick eastern European accent of a secretary long since retired. The name lived on.

She found that her electric screwdriver was dead. Rebecca would have to remember to put that on the charger when she had a chance.

Shit.

Her wrists ached by the time she had removed the four screws each, twelve in all, from the half-hinges in the door-frame and then set the hinges aside in the corner. They were Phillips screws, slots would have been a perfect bastard. She pulled the hammer out of the ring on her right hip and the half-inch chisel out of her pouch.

The top of the door had been hitting the opposite side of the frame. It made a lot of noise, especially when people came and went at night, when other tenants were trying to sleep. She carefully began taking a little wood out of the top hinge location. You could only go so far before the actual edge of the door began to bind. There had to be a gap to pull the door into. An eighth at the top, maybe a sixteenth on the middle hinge, and then if she just left the bottom one alone, it might do the trick. It would tend to pull the door closer to the frame at the top. She’d already fixed the door to the front lobby, and the one down at the end of the hall and around the corner, using exactly this technique.

The ground floor doors, of which there were actually three, were already done. The bottom floor had a rear exit to the parking lot. The laundry rooms on the first two floors were done. A couple of units needed doing, there was the third floor, and then it would be on to something else.

She set the blade, feeling it cut and bite the wood fibers. She tapped lightly, peeling back a thin scroll of seasoned maple. The surface was always a bit yellowed. Years of smoke and grease and human occupation would always see to that. It was cleaner underneath.

Ten steps down and to her left, as the door was right-handed and swung outwards, the east side door to the building darkened and a tall figure came up the steps outside. He used a key for entrance. The man came up the stairs, with a couple of grocery bags dangling from his right hand and his keys in his left.

He stopped and nodded and she looked at him.

Hello.

Hi. She stepped out of the way so he could go through the opening, which he did.

He stopped and turned, with an odd look. He hesitated for a moment and she kind of ignored him. She thought he lived right there in two-oh-nine or two-ten.

She was just about