Part One

Terri was having a shit day.

She overslept, and she NEVER overslept. A freak storm overnight knocked out power killing her Sanyo, and her internal alarm clock failed her. The last time that happened, she was pregnant. She knew that wasn’t the case today – knew it for a goddamned fact. Her last “date” went south almost from the minute she opened the door to him, and that was near on a month ago now. Now she had dramatically raised her standards. She joked to her best friend Lori that the next man she would allow to get in her pants was going to look, sound, and act like Jon Bon Jovi. If she was going to have a suck-ass date, it was going to be with someone beautiful, and that man, in her mind, was the absolute epitome of exquisite perfection.

So, rushing around the house trying to get ready for work, she tripped on a shoe in the middle of the floor and twisted her ankle. That wouldn’t have pissed her off so much except it was one of her brand new deep blue Prada sling-backs, and it was chewed all to hell.

“JOVI!” she yelled, swearing as she hopped to the kitchen to get some ice for her ankle. “If I didn’t love that fucking little dog so much, I’d…” she stopped her rant as an adorable puppy trotted into the kitchen, cocked her head, and pissed on the tiles.

“God DAMN it, Jovi, I haven’t even worn these yet, and fuck baby, you know not to piss on the floor,” she admonished.

Jovi trotted over, took the shoe out of Terri’s hand, and promptly dropped it in the puddle of pee before sashaying out of the kitchen. Terri sat down at the table and laughed. That was all she could do. Laugh or cry, and she had just finished her makeup, and was not about to have to re-do it.

Shaking her head, she grabbed her messenger bag, slung it across her body, and headed out to the carport. She fired up her pickup, and the throaty purr of the engine made her smile. Four miles later, the purr turned into a choke-on-a-furball cough, and Terri sighed. She got the truck because her car had finally decided to give up the ghost. She had babied her car until there was nothing else she could do but let it die a dignified death. She fell in love with this truck right away, and bought it without even taking it for a test drive. She just had to hear the growl of the motor, and she was lost. She absolutely… loved… this… truck. The fact that the pickup was sputtering when the engine downshifted meant Terri’d have to pay some grease monkey a boatload of money she had earmarked for something else.

Like new Prada sling-backs.

Terri hit every blasted red light on the way to the radio station where she worked. At the light she was stopped at now, she mused that she couldn’t write a more shit-filled morning if she tried, and she could write damned near anything – writing was one of her passions. For as long as she could remember, Terri had been writing. Different types of things: poetry, plays, stories. Her recent subject, the last few years or so, was Bon Jovi – Jon in particular.

There was just so much material there. Aside from the stunning sex appeal and philanthropy, not to mention the music and the tours, his life was different and interesting. When she heard interviews, his speaking voice washed over her like a gentle waterfall. When he sang, well there was really nothing quite like it. When she heard about the separation from his wife, she indulged in a little ‘what if’. That game was a favorite pastime, and it was natural to play that game with celebrities in the spotlight. That the current celeb-du-jour was Jon made it all the more fun to play. These musings often turned themselves around and around in her head until they became stories.

Terri had had one of her stories published – she had taken one of her Jon Bon Jovi fan fictions, retooled it a bit, and submitted it to a publisher. They bit, and her book was out there for the whole world to see. Many of her friends had bought copies, and laughed with her over the editing miss on page 153, where the hero, “Sin”, is still called “Jon”. Most of them hadn’t even noticed, because they were substituting “Jon and Richie” for “Sin and Robbie” anyway.

When the light turned green, an overzealous driver crossed in front of her, missing the bumper by less than an inch. “Three fucking blocks to go,” she whispered under her breath. When she got to work, she was in a pisser of a mood.

She hit the studio with three minutes to spare. Barely enough time to get her weather and traffic reports compiled before she recorded them. There were all manner of accidents and other traffic snafus today, so Terri was hopping. Her phone line was ringing, with “helpful” and less-than-helpful listeners calling in with the latest information. Terri dutifully took it all down, and asked one caller how the hell telling people that there was “an accident at the Shop-Rite” would be helpful. “A street, a town, SOMETHING,” she bellowed before disconnecting the call. Terri took a deep breath and assumed her professional voice, and wrapped all the information she had into the recordings she needed to make.

When she sat back to take a breather, the back of her chair let go, and she had to grab onto the console to keep from going ass over elbow onto the floor. She knocked her bottle of water off the console and it crashed to the floor, where the plastic cracked and dribbled water all over the place.

Yeah, for sure, Terri was having a shit day.