Chapter 10

The last 24 hours were mostly spent with the love of my life and I was in an amazing place emotionally. At the same time, I was still troubled about the loss of Katie. My thoughts alternated at random between the two as I drifted off to sleep.

I found myself walking along an all too familiar road. Up ahead stood a girl facing away from me and I knew who she was before I got to her; she wore a yellow sundress. As I reached her, I stopped next to Katie.

Without needing to look at her I said, “Hello, Katie.”

I could sense her look up to me and she said, “Oh; hello David.”

We stood before “the intersection” and I said, “Why are you here? Wouldn’t you rather be somewhere else?”

Katie took my hand and said, “Yeah. I don’t like it here. This needs to be different; it looks scary this way.”

I looked down to see her face and she looked up at me again. For the first time, her eyes looked normal to me. They were deep brown like her hair that was blowing lazily in the breeze. Seeing her eyes with life behind them for the first time gave me an anew sense of the tragic loss.

I looked back at the intersection and agreed, “It is scary; you’re right. And it definitely needs to be different.”

Katie asked me, “Can you do it? Make it different?”

I shook my head saying, “No; that’s not what I do. Remember? I’m just a fireman.”

Katie said, “I remember.” After a few moments she asked, “Do you know someone that knows how to make roads different?”

I thought for a moment and said, “I might be able to find someone.”

“You should try,” she suggested.

I said, “I’m going to find someone to fix this; I promise.”

Katie hugged my arm and moments later, she was gone. I woke up to see it was still the middle of the night. Not wanting to forget the dream before morning, I wrote notes to myself and went back to sleep.

I had another dream, but this time it was about Cherry—and much more pleasant. The dreamed focused around the possible pregnancy we were facing together, but there was never a moment that said definitively that she was either positive or negative—just as the results were to be revealed to us, something would happen to stop us from getting the information we sought.

Unable to sleep in (even though it was a Saturday), I got up early and went straight to my computer. After a brief search online, I found that, as luck would have it, there would be a town hall meeting next Wednesday. I would be there: I had a mission.

I got dressed (still without having a shower), grabbed my HD camera, and went for a drive. I was going to “the intersection”, but this time it wasn’t about my work—it was about my mission and the promise I made to a little girl in my dreams.

I parked my car on the side of the road and got out before getting to work. I started taking pictures of the intersection from every angle imaginable; pictures approaching the intersection from both roads and both directions; pictures at the intersection showing blind spots and possible optical illusions that could cause a driver to miscalculate the speed or distance of a vehicle.

When I was satisfied that I had enough photos to document the intersection, I went home and got back on the computer. I did a satellite search and found the view of the area from directly above. I saved the image to disk and took it with me to have a large print made.

With the collected materials in hand, I began putting together a presentation of the problem; it was so easy even I was able to do it! It infuriated me that no one else had done this before now. It occurred to me that perhaps they knew it was a problem but just didn’t know what to do about it (or worse, didn’t care).

Knowing that it did little good to simply point out a problem and have no solution to offer, I began trying to work out how to fix the intersection. By no stretch of the imagination was I a civil engineer and the solution was evading me. Putting in an overpass only served to move the problem further up the road. There was already a light there and it was clear that was not enough. Signs did little or nothing to alert drivers not paying attention.

My project was beginning to frustrate me when my phone rang. It was Cherry calling to FaceTime with me. I took the call (of course) and she was still lying in bed.

I said, “Well, good morning sleepy head! You know it’s 12:30, right?”

Through a yawn she answered, “Yeah, I know. The game tired me out last night; my legs are sore—but in a good way.”

I smiled at her coded message and said, “I know what you mean: I had a good workout yesterday, too.”

As she got out of bed she asked, “What are you doing?”

I told her about my day to that point and how I was at a loss for a way to fix the issue. While I talked, I could see Cherry as she went about her business in her room and she took me with her into the bathroom. Without a bit of embarrassment, she sat on the toilet and peed. She wasn’t showing the graphic details of it; all I could see was her face and the picture over the toilet in the background as she listened to me, but I knew what she was doing.

She finished and set her phone down giving me an excellent view of the ceiling for a few moments before I heard a flush and then running water.

She came back to the phone and her hair was piled up in a bun on top of her head. She walked over to the tub and the sound of running water became louder. She propped the phone up on a shelf near the tub and I could see her sitting on the side of it as she added bubble bath to the running water.

I finished telling her about my project and how I was stuck at the moment and she offered, “Sometimes when you get to a point like that, you have to just stop and step back from it for a while. Think about something else and come back to it with a clear mind.”

I conceded, “Yeah. You might be right.”

I could just make out Cherry’s Mom yelling something to her when she relied yelling, “OK!” Her Mom said something else and Cherry said, “No thanks; I’m fine!”

Before I could ask what that was about, she informed me that her Mom was going to the store for groceries. Before I could finish the thought about going to see her while her Mom was gone, Cherry said, “Don’t even think about it: she won’t be gone long enough—unfortunately.”

Cherry was still sitting on the side of the tub and testing the temperature of the water. I was only able to see from her knees to the top of her mid-drift. She was wearing a pair of loose-fitting shorts that were cut from a pair of sweat pants and a t-shirt.

Cherry made an adjustment to the hot water valve before pulling the t-shirt over her head. I could see the very bottom of her amazing tits and found myself tilting my phone in attempt to see more. She stood up and all I could see was the very bottom of her self-made shorts before she pushed them down to her feet, giving me a brief look at her breasts, before stepping out of the shorts. She stepped into the tub and sank down into the bubbles, finally coming face to face with me on the screen.

I watched as she quietly luxuriated in her bubble bath. There were enough bubbles to hide her breasts from view, but not her shoulders and upper chest. However, I was really just focused on her face; she wore no makeup and she was still stunning. The hair hastily piled on top of her head was just as sexy (perhaps because of the setting) than if she had spent an hour fixing it.

Cherry sang a sweet song; replacing the words with various sounds like ‘la’, ‘de’, ‘dum’, and etc. Her singing voice was like that of an angel and I was not surprised. She would periodically took over at me on her phone and give a mildly amused smile—probably due to the stupid look on my face.

I continued to watch as she reached for something out of frame. She leaned back and one leg rose above the bubbles—toes pointed. The item she had grabbed turned out to be a lady’s razor and she began gliding it along her silky skin. I had been with her just over 12 hours ago and they were like silk then; I guessed she shaved them regardless of need. She continued to sing while finishing her legs. Once she completed the task, she bent her knees up and leaned forward into them; wrapping her arms around her legs while we continued to talk.