Promise Rock 03 - Living Promises (MM) Read Online Free PDF Page B

fun stories to tell.
Marjorie Bell was one of those. She was a big woman, far bigger than was healthy, with a face that refused to line, even in middle age. She had short, blonde-gray hair and a wide freckled face, and a neck that hadn't recovered from a car accident about five years before.
She taught high school, now that her husband had retired from the Navy, and her stories about her students made Jeff laugh until he needed to pee. He always scheduled an extra fifteen minutes to her sessions just to talk with her, and she always used it. Today was no different.
“Okay,” she was saying this day, as Jeff applied his magic heated sonic wand of love to the tissue at the base of her skull, “so we've just covered Lord Byron, and how the guy slept with anyone and everyone, male and female, and was driven out of England for totally boinking his half-sister, Augusta. That's out of the way, we've got fifteen minutes to go, so I decide to launch into my „Don't get knocked up during Winter Ball' spiel, right? I mean, it happens every year. You see these kids with the six-month baby-bump walking the stage at graduation, and you're like, „Really? Winter Ball? You couldn't have fit a couple of rubbers in your teeny-tiny little handbag with your cell phone or something?'. So in the middle of this, a girl comes in from the office—she just got to school and doesn't know what we're talking about—and she says, „Okay, so what're we doing?'.”
Margie let out a low moan of relief at that moment, because Jeff took the heat massager to just—that—spot on her neck, and Jeff kept it there for a minute until her whole body shuddered with tension relief and she could continue her story.
“So what did you say?” Jeff prompted, and she laughed a little and arched into the sonic vibrator for another knot in her painfully twisted neck.
“I told her we were talking about how not to get knocked up during Winter Ball, and she says, „Don't worry about me! I'm going with my cousin!'.”
Jeff couldn't help it. He had to pull the sonic wand away so he could laugh. “Ohmigod! That's hilarious! What happened?”
Margie stretched, the motions graceful and svelte, almost like Constantine's stretching, and at odds a little with her size. “Well, the whole class totally broke up, and then this one guy, who was lost on the whole Byron thing anyway, suddenly breaks out with, „Man, and make sure your condom's fresh! Those things go bad after a year!', and there was only five minutes of class after that—like I was going to get that class back!”
Jeff snorted softly, still laughing. “Oh, honey, that's priceless!”
Margie laughed with him and then swiveled around on her little “victim's stool,” as she called it, and rolled her eyes. “Yeah—let's see if I can keep my job after that gets to the parents, though!”
Jeff frowned and took the little K-Y covered baggie off the end of the wand, then wiped the rest of the glide gel off of Margie's neck. “How do you mean?”
Margie's shrug was resigned. “People get awfully het up when you talk about sex, you know?”
Jeff rolled his eyes back. “Well, they get pretty homoed up about it when you talk about gay sex, so I guess that's about right!”
It was Margie's turn to laugh, and she did so with gratifying heartiness. God, he loved to make someone bust up. He collected stories in his head all day, witticisms, catty remarks, anything he could think about. It was like his drug, the one thing he could do that would make himself feel better, and he indulged in his emotional crack as much as possible. He thanked the gods for folks like Margie, who just handed it out for free by the truckload. They pretty much kept him sane.
Margie grabbed her 4X T-shirt and threw it over her head, over her lunchroom-lady bra, and turned comfortably around to Jeff, who was making notations on her chart.
“You're doing about the same, Margie,” he said, trying not to nag, “but you know what would really