Chapter 3

I got off the stationary bike and walked over to the treadmill. Tori was aboard, walking up a steep incline at the moment. From having watched her work out for the past forty-five minutes or so, I was guessing she would soon be moving a lot more quickly. She flashed a small grin at me as she began to speed up.

"I'm headed upstairs," I told her, "I'm sure there'll still be coffee when you're done and I'll leave you a mug on the counter."

"Thanks, I'll be looking for it," she replied, "and thanks again for the workout."

"My pleasure..."

I slowly stumped up the stairs, tired, but satisfied. A long hot shower would was going to be welcome as was the promised coffee. I was certainly feeling the effects of too much alcohol combined with too little working out over the past few weeks. As I reached the kitchen door, I came to a decision, more working out to go with the more drinking part of my diet. Smirking to myself, I entered the kitchen.

Stacy and Renee were sitting at the small kitchen table looking out the sliding glass door at the snow-covered deck. Stacy had her back towards me with Renee seated to her left as they munched on bagels and sipped their coffee in the breakfast nook. I stepped across the kitchen to get a mug and couldn't resist taking a swat at the slightly wet ponytail that Stacy had arranged her hair in. Renee rolled her eyes as she saw what I was going to do, and managed to catch my arm on the follow through. She tugged me down for a quick kiss as Stacy reached out to swat my ass.

"Phew," snickered my wife as she wrinkled her pert nose at me, "you definitely need that shower now."

"Thank you Captain Obvious," I retorted dryly as I reached into the cupboard and pulled out two mugs. I set them down and dumped cream and sugar into mine before filling it with coffee. "So what are you two planning so deviously, today?"

"Well," Stacy spoke up, "I was thinking about taking Tori into the city to do some shopping. Then I thought maybe you two would like to meet us for dinner later."

"Sounds good, what do you think, Renee?"

"I think it sounds fine. I have to finish some laundry and then I have a few other things to do."

"Any particular choice of restaurant or time we're meeting, Stace?" I asked as I turned to head for the shower.

"It's Stacy," she sniped with a mock frown, "and I hadn't really gotten that far yet. I'm more in the planning stage about the actual shopping."

"Ok then, why don't you just give us a call on your cell or from your apartment when you make a decision then."

"I'll do that," she grinned as she rose to refill her mug, "now go take that shower before you smell up the whole house."

I took my time in the shower, letting the hot water sluice away the exertions I'd made earlier. Working out with Tori had pushed me a little more than I had expected, but then I should have expected it from a woman who made a living as a fitness instructor. I took my time getting dressed. Deciding it was a good day to get some work done with our guest entertained and my lover tied up, I headed downstairs to my office to do some writing. As I pushed open the door, I discovered that my chances of getting any work done had just been reduced to almost nil. My lovely wife had bills, bank statements and the like spread out on the desk and was staring at the monitor. Not wanting to disturb her since I know she'll be screaming for me at least three times while she's doing working, I headed into the den and turned on the TV. I flipped randomly for a little while, not finding anything too interesting until I stumbled across "A Christmas Story". I was settling in to watch it as Stacy and Tori headed out. They both waved goodbye at me, not making a lot of noise and disappeared into the garage. A few minutes later I saw Stacy's black Explorer head down the driveway and out onto the street. Not ten minutes later came the first explosion out of the office.

"J, will you get in here please," called my wife.

"Yes dear," I replied as I leaned in the doorway.

"Why won't this fucking machine do what I want!" she snapped.

"What exactly are you trying to do," I asked calmly as I knelt beside her chair.

"Well, I would LIKE to balance the bank statement, but as you can see, nothing happens when I click on the link," she huffed as she demonstrated, obviously frustrated.

I moved the mouse down to the toolbar and nothing happened. On a lark, I used keystrokes to pull of the task manager and discovered the problem. While we did have some five hundred megs of RAM on the machine, the operating system was sufficiently old to get hung up on having too many windows open. Among the open items, my bride had managed to get three websites on two separate browsers, the financial software, the word processor, a couple spreadsheets, and for some unknown reason a power point presentation, all while trying to play a music CD in the background. For the moment, I decided that both browsers were locking the system up.

"What are you done with here," I asked.

"What the hell is that power point thing," she demanded.

"You tell me, you opened it," I retorted.

"Shit, shit... SHIT. I don't need that," she snapped, "and I'm done with the word processor."

"Ok, did you save the stuff you need on word?"

"Yes, dammit, will you just fix it!"

"Relax," I soothed, "it's going to be fine."

Renee just glared at me as I softly chuckled and began force-closing windows. I shut down the Power Point presentation first and that freed up enough memory to bring up the word processor. Just to be safe, I saved it before I shut it down. Now that I had the toolbar active again, I pulled up the web pages. One from the bank, one from the credit card and the third was just the home page. I closed the home page down brought the screen back to the financial software.

"Voila," I said triumphantly as I clicked the mouse and brought up the balancing page on the financial software.

"Thank you," murmured Renee quietly as I stood up.

"Welcome," I answered as I kissed her on top of her head and wandered back out to enjoy my movie. The commercials came on just as I settled back on the couch, so I began flipping while waiting for them to end. I didn't get very far down the spectrum before the next screech came out of the office.

"DAMMIT, J," howled my wife, "where are you!"

I stuck my head back in the door. "Right here, dear."

"Wasn't this check supposed to be for five thousand?" she snapped, waving a piece of paper at me, "not twenty-five hundred?"

I walked over and took the paper from her to look over. "They are supposed to pay a total of five thousand, dear," I replied cautiously, "for both articles, but since they only published the one article, we only get half."

"What do you mean, you submitted both of them. I was here when you sent them both off!"

"Yes, but at this time, they've only decided to run one of them. The contract was for two articles, but they only pay when published, and they only accepted one at this point."

"Ugh... we need that money," she groaned, "I was counting on it."

"Hon, we'll be fine," I reassured her, "there's a good likelihood that they'll use the other article in February and we'll get paid then."

"Yes, but I was expecting the money this month," she groused, "We're really running tight."

"Renee, running tight to you means that we might have to sell out a little of an investment or take a little from savings for Christmas presents. It's not like we're not going to pay the important things."

"Actually, we're going to have to dip into the savings to make the house payment," she grumbled, "I think that's where we're going to be short."

"We'll be fine," I reiterated as I stepped behind her and slipped my arms around her shoulders, "we'll be fine."

She sighed, tapped my arms then leaned forward again to resume her work on the monthly bills. I let her go and wandered back out to my movie.

I managed to see the rest of "A Christmas Story" without further interruption. Renee appeared soon after and curled up next to me on the couch. She immediately commandeered the remote and began flipping channels. When she came across another holiday movie, "Miracle on 34th Street" this time, she stopped and moved the remote out of my reach. This was not an unexpected action as she hates the way I flip around during commercials and sometimes end up missing the first few minutes of a show when it comes back from the break. We watched in silence for a long while then the phone rang. Renee reached across me for the cordless handset and answered.

"Hello... oh hey Stacy, having fun... Good... Oh you are? Ok, I guess I'm not surprised... Tomorrow, instead? All right, I'll tell him... Anything else? All right then, enjoy your Chinese... Love you too..."

"Let me guess," I said as Renee hung up, "they were having a great time and decided to spend the evening in the city at Stacy's apartment and order in Chinese."

"How do you do that when you only hear half the conversation?" Renee demanded.

"Easy, I know how to eavesdrop properly."

Renee smacked me in the shoulder with her hand and snuggled back into my side. "The whole story is that they were wiped out from shopping all afternoon and decided not to make the drive with the lousy weather. We're going to meet tomorrow at that dinner theater place you like. They have some Christmas program that Stacy thought would be fun." "Fine... What lousy weather is she talking about though?" "She says that it's all cloudy and starting to snow again in town, so I guess we can expect it sometime tonight."

I shrugged and pulled Renee closer as I checked the time. She snuggled into me until the next commercial came on. She slipped away and headed into the laundry room to pull the sheets and towels she'd washed at some point out of the dryer. I helped her fold them while we watched the end of the movie. After the movie ended she took her laundry basket and headed upstairs. I figured it was safe to return to my office and try to get some work done, so that's what I did.

I opened the novel and began rereading the next to last chapter. I'm forever making adjustments and changes to a chapter if I'm continuously looking at it, so I've forced myself to write it out, then forget about it for a few days while I write the next one. That way when I go back to looking at a chapter, I tend to catch all the mistakes and typos the first time through and I can do some editing at the same time. I've found that if I work about a chapter or so ahead, I'm a little more efficient. At any rate depending on chapter length, it can take anywhere from thirty minutes to an hour and a half to work though a chapter. I turned on one of the media players in the background and found one of my favorite play lists to run while I worked and settled into my chair to glare at the screen.

I had just shut down the spell check utility and made a few minor grammatical corrections when I heard Renee calling out to me, but I couldn't make out what she was saying. I saved quickly and walked out to the base of the stairs.

"What is it," I hollered.

"Can you come up here and help me," Renee called down the stairs from the bedroom.

I sighed and began a slow walk up the stairs. Most likely she wanted me to help her get down the decorations from the top shelf in the closet. She had insisted on having huge walk-in closets when we had the house built, but she couldn't get anything off the top shelf without help. The box in question was rather unwieldy anyway, so I was guessing she was standing on her little stool balancing it against her head and the shelf. I was wrong.

I entered the bedroom to find her lying on the freshly made bed. She had on her four-inch 'do me right now' white pumps, lacy white thigh-highs, a skimpy pair of satin white panties and a lacy white camisole I'd purchased for her last Christmas. My mouth was about at my shoe tops because she rarely wears exotic lingerie around me. She doesn't wear it for Stacy either, says it's too uncomfortable. She patted the bed next to her and I sat down.

"So what brought this on," I asked quietly.

"Well, Stacy and I were talking about what you said yesterday on the way to the airport and she pointed out that I was being a little selfish. She said that you had every right to feel hurt that I was blowing you off, and she suggested I do something about it."

"So you decide to find the easiest way to push my buttons," I murmured sardonically.

"It's not my fault that you are so easily visually stimulated."

"Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs. Reynard?" I teased her gently as I traced a finger up the inside of her left thigh.

"Now why would I do a thing like that," she replied coolly, "it's not like it takes a whole lot of effort."

I ran my finger further up, over the lacy top of the stocking and along the soft skin near her crotch. My fingers grazed the edge of her silky drawers before running back to her bare hip and down the outside of her muscular thigh. Stacy shivered in response.

"You're really into this aren't you," she asked with a growl.

"Well, yes... I mean, how often do you appeal to a fetish of mine?"