Love, Greater Than Infinity (Book 1: New Adult Romance) Read online

  Teddy + Gracie Series

  Book One: Love, Greater Than Infinity

  By Cora Avondale

  Copyright © 2013 by Cora Avondale

  ISBN 978-0-9890858-8-5

  Kindle edition

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Dedicated to my mother, with love, C

  BOOK ONE:

  LOVE, GREATER THAN INFINITY

  Chapter One

  A keeper may not fall in love with his assignment

  The universe is both an organized and chaotic place. There’s the spatial world—a three-dimensional fun house of length, width, and height—guided by the empirical five senses, and undisputed theories of general physics and mathematics. Then there’s the rest of the universe—the halls of mirrors, trap doors, shrinking rooms, and other warped realities like parallel higher dimensions, worm holes, cosmic folds, and mortal portals. Keepers in the higher dimensions guard over mortals in the lower dimensions in an effort to maintain the theory of determinism within the universe.

  For this reason, Teddy Mulligan never intended to fall in love with a girl in a lower dimension.

  Falling in love with his assignment—much less altering her Destiny—was a clear violation of the Dimension Canon, an oath that he swore to uphold for eternity. And as a general rule, it’s always best not to mess with things promised for eternity.

  The Dimension Council could have easily made Teddy’s assignment a sumo wrestler in Japan, a farm boy in Iowa, or even an Eskimo hunter in the Arctic, and he would have never breached the laws of the universe for the sake of his one true love. But instead, the Dimension Council assigned Teddy to be Gracie Harris’ keeper as a test of his loyalty to his oath—a test he was destined to fail—not because Gracie was the assignment who made Teddy believe in the absolute power of love, but because she was the girl who ultimately made him want to prove it. Love, greater than infinity—the most omnipotent force within the Universe.

  Chapter Two

  A keeper may not interfere with predetermined events

  At first, it seemed like the typical end of the school day. The bus lurched forward, starting its routine disposal of kiddie cargo, and as usual, Bryan prowled his way towards Gracie, intent on starting up his familiar routine of harassment.

  “Hey, Tiny, you’re sitting in my seat again—” Bryan Black bellowed, demonstrating how deep his voice had changed since the summer. Since the beginning of the new school year, Bryan Black bullied thirteen-year-old Gracie every morning on the #47 yellow bus with the same obnoxious accusation. No matter where Gracie sat that morning in the bus, she was always sitting in his seat.

  “Hey, everyone… Wanna know why I call her, ‘Tiny?’” Bryan sneered at the other kids as he got imaginative with his abuse. “Because her titties are so tiny I need a magnifying glass just to see them.” With an imaginary magnifying glass in his hand, he would lean forward, inspect Gracie’s chest, then double over with cackling laughter.

  On her way to school and on her way home, Gracie Harris silently endured the torture. She never told her parents or any of her teachers, and all the other kids on the school bus stared, wide-eyed and mute with fear, at the spectacle. They had learned early on that the bus driver—a silver-haired absentminded Vietnam Vet, who never acknowledged the children’s routine hellos and good-byes—was useless to protect them. No one moved. No one breathed. No one said a word in Gracie’s defense. They were too afraid to attract Bryan’s attention. He might pounce on them and devour their eyeballs. Not even Gracie acknowledged him. She remained as stoic as a china doll; she simply kept her eyes focused outside the window, pretending not to hear him. It was a cold act of stoic defiance. But on the inside, she was cracking.

  “Aren’t you interested in doing something?” Teddy complained to Devlin, Bryan’s keeper, whose annoying blend of brazen confidence and surfer nonchalance meant he was a fresh recruit from Keeper boot camp.

  “Just chill, dude. That’s just what they do at this age.”

  Like a veteran juvie patrol officer instead of a rookie keeper, Devlin threw up an indifferent shrug and reclined deeper into his school bus seat. “He just digs her, man, that’s all. Just give it four or five years.”

  “I don’t think four or five years is going to cure your assignment’s chromosomal defect,” Teddy zinged back.

  “Dude, you know the rule against interference better than me.”

  Devlin’s sly smile made it clear he was referring to Teddy’s previous rebellious run-in with the Dimension Council. And although Devlin’s nonchalance was as irritating to Teddy as his puss-faced, lower dimension delinquent, it was also clear that he was right.

  It was Martha Tannenbaum—all over again.

  Before there was Gracie Harris, there was Martha Tannenbaum, a nervous fragile temp worker who didn’t deserve to be harassed by the firm’s rising star lawyer, Seth Patterson. This was back in the late 60’s when a woman was expected to wear skirts in the work place and brew her boss’ coffee every morning. Seth Patterson got-off on humiliating the new secretaries by “accidentally” slipping his porno centerfolds inside his legal briefings. Humiliated by Patterson’s hyena laughter and hollow apologies after the fifth “accident,” Martha finally broke down and spent her entire lunch break in the bathroom stall, weeping silently because she didn’t have enough money saved up to simply quit.

  During that time, Martha was Teddy’s assignment, which was why it seemed like a good idea to Teddy to steer Seth Patterson’s limited edition 1968 mustang convertible into a tree to teach him a lesson about the proper way to treat a lady. With a broken jaw, fractured left arm, and crushed fibula, he spent six weeks in the hospital, half-naked in a body cast, with nurses shoving indelicate tubes up delicate parts. And you can bet that at the end of the day, Seth Patterson finally learned some bedside manners.

  Unfortunately for Teddy, the members of the Dimension Council were not exactly impressed. Instead, they considered it a felonious charge of misconduct because Seth Patterson almost died before his time. Teddy was cited with “destroying physical property with malicious intent to cause bodily harm within the lower dimension,” and was removed from his post as Martha’s keeper. The Council assigned her a new one, Mrs. Johnson—a no-nonsense mid-life replacement who motivated Martha to quit her job and start her own real estate company. Meanwhile, Teddy was sentenced to four weeks of probation and two months of lower dimension community service—which included the menial task of protecting urban pigeons from getting flattened by the barreling wheels of impatient motorists.

  After serving his time as catcher-in-the-rye with broods of oblivious pigeons, Teddy was eventually granted a second chance with a new assignment—Gracie Harris. But it was no coincidence that Gracie’s early childhood involved a pre-pubescent version of Seth Patterson. Only this time, the harassing bully—Bryan Black—was thirteen instead of thirty, so steering his mustang into a tree wasn’t an option.

  Fortunately for Teddy, interference soon became unnecessary because Teddy’s sassy pre-teen assignment found a way of handling it herself.

  “Hey, Bullet-tits, you’re sitting in my seat again. Why don’t you get up from my seat and go shave your legs, Sasquatch.”

  Bryan loomed over Gracie as the bus bumped along its route. His breath reeked of burnt baked beans. Gracie barely flinched.

  “No, not gonna move, huh
?” Bryan continued, “Guess we’ll just have to share the seat and maybe if you’re nice to me, I’ll pay you five dollars to suck my fat—”

  Suddenly, for the first time during his reign of terror, Bryan became speechless. He cringed with a sour expression of fear and paralyzing pain, and choked on his own saliva. His eyes gasped open like a suffocating fish, fighting for oxygen.

  “Yes, why don’t we share this seat,” Gracie said, jolting the school’s lunchroom fork up Bryan’s shorts and jamming it deep into his fleshy testicle, “so I can fork your fat prick off for free.”

  Bryan Black bowed forward like a submissive puppet. His gaze spiraled down towards his crotch, trying to comprehend why his left testicle was being skewered like a pork shish kebab. He would later insist that Gracie had assaulted him with a six-inch switchblade rather than a dull three-pronged plastic fork. Gracie thrust her elbow up straighter and Bryan exhaled with a wheezing cough, his eyes crying out, Mercy, mercy, for the love of God, mercy! But it was in a language only other males could understand. Bryan’s crater face ripened from petrified gray into blazing pink. All the other children watched, waiting for his head to shoot off his shoulders and rocket through the bus’s ceiling. But there was only his muted scream, accompanied by ghastly facial reflexes of revulsion.

  “Whose seat is this?” Gracie demanded.

  Bryan shifted his weight left, then right, and mouthed inaudible curses like he was performing bad ’80s karaoke.

  “I can’t hear you?”

  “Yours,” he gasped.

  “And from now on, your seat is the first one in the front—with the first graders. Got it?” Gracie jabbed the fork deeper into his testicle.

  Bryan nodded. Gracie eased up on her fork, but only to give Bryan the chance to turn and begin his demoralized gimp up to the front of the bus. With his left side hunched over, he limped up the congested aisle and slid into the empty front seat amidst the company of barely potty-trained kindergartners.

  Of course, it didn’t end there. Gracie got in trouble because Bryan Black went crying home to his mother. Mrs. Black, frantic and irate, called Gracie’s father along with Mrs. Fairbanks, the school’s principal, and demanded a full investigation into the sexual harassment of her son by the vicious hands of an armed and dangerous “man-hating pre-menstrual tween.” The next day, Bryan was escorted into school by both his parents and treated by the school nurse for a bruised left testicle. A strict regiment of ice packs and ibuprofen was prescribed, and Bryan’s homework was sent home for a week with his younger brother, Timothy.

  When Bryan Black returned to school, the fallout was brutal. No kid survives the humiliation of one of his parent’s showing up to school on his behalf, much less both parents, and Bryan Black became the butt of all genital jokes for the rest of seventh grade. The snickering jokes in the boy’s bathroom became an everyday salutation. “Hey, Black? Heard you gotta pee backwards since they sewed it on wrong,” or “Heard you gotta thaw out your left testicle every time you want to masturbate.” Bryan Black was officially and irrevocably ostracized. Years later, the girls still whispered about whether or not Bryan could “perform” on Prom Night, and for the rest of his high school career, Bryan Black was rumored to walk slightly bowlegged because Gracie Harris had tried to fork off his left nut.

  Gracie, on the other hand, got two weeks of after-school detention. She was also forced to eat her lunch in the school office for a month, spending her recess licking school fundraising envelopes. It was a small price to pay for learning a few invaluable life lessons. First, the most interesting kids in the school were the ones hanging out in detention. Second, standing up for herself far outweighed any punishment. And third, breaking the rules once in a while was kind of fun. And so, it was that day on the school bus that Teddy realized the woman who Gracie Harris would soon grow up to be.

  * * * *

  Gracie was prohibited from riding the school bus for the rest of the year, and although Gracie never said a word to her parents about Bryan’s verbal abuse, Mr. Harris knew his daughter was no “man-hating pre-menstrual tween.” On her first day back to school, Mr. Harris accepted the responsibility of dropping off his daughter on his way to work, attempting to pry out the truth about what really happened on the bus.

  “Say, Gracie,” Mr. Harris said as he drove up to the curb of the school and slowed the car. “Did that bratty boy say something to you…?” Mr. Harris threw his car into park.

  Gracie sat in silence and glanced at her father with a stern calmness that prevented him from delving further. There was a gleam of independence in her eye. Her father knew Gracie had a propensity for taking care of herself, exhibited early on when she rode away from her father’s guiding hand that first day on training wheels, or when she insisted on making her own peanut butter sandwiches before morning kindergarten. Gracie would never betray a desire for her father’s help if it meant giving up on her own confidence to handle it without him. So Mr. Harris knew better than to push the issue.

  “You know, with everything that’s happened…your mother and I wonder if maybe a college prep high school out in Northbrook might be better than Evanston High School. With your math grades and all, we think maybe you’d be better off in a smaller school.”

  “I do all my math homework,” Gracie replied quietly. “I just never get the right answers.”

  “Well, your mother and I are afraid that you got my genes in that department.”

  “Yeah, Mom told me you failed Algebra in high school.”

  “Yeah. Failed Algebra II—twice.”

  “Dad, you’re an accountant.”

  “Scary, isn’t it? Can you imagine a doctor practicing medicine after failing medical school—twice?”

  “Maybe you should’ve picked a different profession.”

  “Yeah, so don’t go telling the whole world that your father is really a poser, okay?”

  Mr. Harris eked out a reluctant smile from his daughter. It always made Gracie both amused and embarrassed when her dad tried to use teenage lingo. She exited the car and slammed the door.

  “So… that prep school in Northbrook has an open house this weekend,” Mr. Harris called through the open window.

  Gracie peered into the car. She understood. “Listen, I’ve gotta go or I’ll be late.”

  “You realize that it would mean enduring a thirty minute car ride with your coolio dad every morning?”

  “Cool-io?” Gracie screwed up her eyes.

  “Yeah, Cool-io, G. High-five.”

  Mr. Harris stretched out his palm, and Gracie slapped it without conviction.

  “Dad, you’re so embarrassing.”

  “Yeah, that’s what your mother says, too. I’ll tell her to get some more information about that prep school.”

  Gracie’s mom and dad kept their promise and enrolled their daughter in Ursula Academy after her eighth grade graduation. Also as promised, Gracie’s coolio dad drove her every morning before work, and forced her to dish out the “4-1-1” about all the girls in her freshman class. Years later, they were precious memories that Gracie would cherish, because in less than two years, Mr. Harris would be dead and Gracie’s Destiny would be unalterably set in motion.

  Chapter Three

  A keeper must honor the mandates of the Dimension Council

  It happened when Gracie was a sophomore in high school. Mr. Harris was dead before the ambulance arrived to the crash site. Teddy knew something was going to happen to Mr. Harris; he just didn’t know exactly what. But when the word came down from the Dimension Council that morning, their mandate was clear: keep Gracie out of the car as long as possible. Bruno, Mr. Harris’s keeper, knew about the mandate as well. Bruno was a silent hulking type. With stoic eyes and a clenched jaw of a hit man, he nodded to Teddy with acknowledgement of their mutual mission before entering Mr. Harris’s car, idling in the driveway.

  “Gracie, come on,” Mr. Harris hollered from his car window. “We’re already fifteen minutes late…”


  “Dad, you said I could drive this morning!” Gracie called back, running out the front door and down the porch stairs. Gracie, who was now almost sixteen, was itching to practice her temporary license.

  “And you said it’d take you five minutes to do your hair.”

  “Ha, ha,” Gracie approached the car. “C’mon on, you promised,” Gracie swung open his driver’s side door and encouraged her father to give up the steering wheel.

  “No, slow poke,” her father tugged the door closed. “You’ll be lucky if you don’t miss your first class. And we still need to get gas. Now, get in.”

  With his stern glare, Bruno peered out from the car’s rear window and communicated the urgency of the situation. Teddy responded by unzipping Gracie’s backpack, which scattered her books onto the asphalt driveway.

  “Ugh—“ Gracie dropped to her knees to reclaim her books, and immediately noted her missing lunch sack. “My lunch? Where’s my lunch?” It was the same one Teddy had removed, just moments earlier. It was the best stall tactic he could come up with on emergency notice. “Dad, I forgot my lunch.”

  Mrs. Harris stepped through the screen door and onto the porch. “You must have it, Gracie. I saw you take it off the counter.”

  “I know, I know. But it’s not here…”

  “She’s faking it,” Mr. Harris moaned with sarcasm. “Nice way to get out of Algebra.”

  “Daaaaad! I swear. It just disappeared.”

  “I’ll have to make her another lunch sack, Tom,” Mrs. Harris called out to her husband.

  “I’m going to fill the tank, ladies.” Mr. Harris saluted the two women, flipped the car gear into reverse, and slowly backed down the driveway. “You’ve got exactly five minutes, Miss Molasses.”

  Mrs. Harris and Gracie waved in agreement, and Teddy watched as the pine trees in the front yard obscured the car and Bruno’s mournful stare.