Black Flame Read Online Free PDF Page A

understood, and strangely satisfying.
    After recruiting him to play football, his high school coach—who had a much higher tolerance for Jimmy—gave him an old weight bench and some free weights in exchange for Jimmy rigging the school’s scoreboard with a projector system the A/V department no longer needed so it would light up for night games. By then, Jimmy’s career as an inventor seemed inevitable—at least to him. Between school, sports, and tinkering, there was little time for anything else, especially after his mom got sick, so his experience with girls was limited to the occasional make-out session or exploratory grope. Since then, he’d graduated to longer and more satisfying sessions with willing adult women, but he was careful to choose only the most predictable, the ones who could be counted on not to form bizarre attachments. Female scientists were good. He’d also had relatively successful, if brief, relationships with an international economist, a philosophy grad student, and a visually impaired attorney.
    Deneen was definitely not potential sexual partner material, even if she hadn’t been Jayne’s sister and, therefore, off limits due to the current living situation. She was, in fact, the sort of woman Jimmy tried to stay away from: a heavy user of cosmetics and grooming products, she dressed for visual impact rather than practical considerations, which indicated an undesirable set of priorities. Not to mention the fact that she was far too attractive. Jimmy didn’t discriminate against attractive women, but in his experience, physical beauty was highly correlated to impetuous, unpredictable, and dangerous behavior.
    Also, her motives and opinions were confounding. While Jimmy had taken care to prepare for tomorrow’s brunch, she found his preparations lacking for reasons that he didn’t understand. The kids at the Family Circle Intervention Center had never seemed to care what sort of plate their food arrived on, and he doubted the packages would stay wrapped long enough for the paper to make much of an impression. Jimmy was actually good with the kids—all of the other volunteers said so—especially the boys, who liked to challenge him to wrestling matches and ride around on his shoulders. And this scheme of hers to become a wedding planner—was that even a real job? If Jayne and Matthew were for some reason unable to plan their own wedding, Jimmy figured he could take care of it in an afternoon. How hard could it be, once you secured a venue, an officiant, a DJ and someone to bring food?
    She’d been vague about her plans, too, declining to say how long she intended to stay. Well, with her sister out of town, that probably had added a day or two. She hadn’t made arrangements for lodging elsewhere, so Jimmy was going to have to put up with her for at least a few more days. And presumably she’d return when the wedding actually occurred, but maybe she’d get a hotel room then. He wouldn’t worry about that now, at any rate; he just had to put up with her until Jayne returned home and took her off his hands.
    A vein pulsing in his neck alerted Jimmy that he had probably lifted enough for now, especially since he wasn’t wearing athletic garments and still had domestic chores to complete. He set down the weights, wiped off his face with a clean hand towel from the stack he kept in the larder, and ventured cautiously back into the kitchen.
    For the next three hours, Jimmy doggedly continued his cooking adventure, the first time he had ever attempted anything more ambitious than a turkey sandwich or a pot of spaghetti. Cooking, he reasoned, was merely following instructions in a manual, and as someone who mastered the Consumer Electronics Troubleshooting and Maintenance Handbook at the age of eight, and built a real-time communication server at seventeen, he figured he had every reason to expect success. However, the results of his efforts proved disappointing. As the afternoon wore on, he