Tempter Read Online Free PDF Page B

best aftershave he could find in his medicine cabinet. Now that the brawny, ill-tempered Ken was out of the picture, he was finally free to make his move.
    However, Charlie kept him waiting for almost an hour, and when she finally showed up, it was in the company of a boisterous, bold-talking young man named Jason who hogged the conversation and drank too much. Charlie hardly said a word. When Jason staggered off to the john, Charlie leaned forward, her cheeks flushed like those of an excited teenager, and asked; “What do you think? Isn’t he wonderful? ”
    Any self-respecting man would have walked out right then and never looked back, but Jerry had never truly recovered from his years spent as a high school geek. That a woman of such beauty showed any interest in him at all was enough to sublimate his hurt and outrage, simply in order to remain in her company. So he smiled and told her he was happy for her, all the while hoping that someday Charlie would come to her senses and see him as more than a friend. Since then, he had held her hand through three disastrous relationships, each new romance bearing the same M.O. as the last.
    Maybe if Charlie had been the stereotypical ditzy blonde, he could understand her taste in men a little better. But Charlie wasn’t a checkout girl at the Winn-Dixie; she was a successful junior executive with a local accounting firm. She had three people under her at work. She made more money that Jerry ever would teaching art to hausfraus . With her looks, drive and income, she could have any man she wanted. But instead she invariably picked weak, cheap losers with a mean streak.
    Jerry had tried time and again to put Charlie out of his mind and develop a real relationship with women who didn’t confuse brutality with masculinity and sensitivity with weakness. But every time Charlie called him on the phone, he inevitably found himself drying her tears as she poured out the latest crisis in the unending apocalypse that was her love life.
    “Thanks, Jerry,” Charlie sniffled as he handed her a fresh drink. “Next round’s on me.”
    “Don’t sweat it.”
    “I feel like a real skank, running to you every time I have boyfriend trouble. You must
    think I'm brain-dead.”
    Jerry recognized this as her ritual self-deprecating remark and countered it with his own ritual response. “You know better than to say that.”
    “Everybody’s worries about dying,” she sighed. “Hell, dying’s easy. You only do it once. There’s no end to suffering when it comes to love, though. God, Jerry, what am gonna do now 2 ”
    “The same thing you did after you got rid of Steve. And Jason. You deserved better than Tony. All he was interested in was your money, anyway.”
    “I realize that now. I guess I always knew that was the case, but I didn’t want to admit it to myself. The only time he was ever really nice to me was whenever he wanted me to make car payments for him.” She shook her head in disgust. “You know, Tony only wanted to eat at places like TGIFridays and Chili’s. I kept trying to get him to go to Galatoire’s or Commanders Palace, but he refused. He didn’t like going to places he hadn’t been to before. Lord, can’t believe I was in love with an utter Yat!”
    “I never did like him,” Jerry admitted.
    Their conversation halted as the cocktail waitress approached the table. “Can I get y'all anything else?” she asked.
    “Another round, please. Put it on my tab,” Charlie said.
    “It’s okay,” Jerry said quickly. “I’ll get it”
    “No, I insist. You got the last one.”
    The waitress removed the empty glasses and placed a flyer on the table. “We just got next month’s schedule printed. Thought y'all might like one hot off the Xerox.”
    At the top of the page was the bar’s logo, draped in Spanish moss with shrunken heads dotting the ‘I's in ‘Gris-Gris’. The rest of the page was a calendar with the names of the various bands typeset into the