Chapter 21: Debbie

Late Sunday afternoon, there was a minor exodus from Camp Forge. Doug got an Uber to the Philadelphia airport for a shuttle flight north to Boston. He’d gotten an ‘Okay-to-Come-Home’ message from Karyn, his wife that morning. I bet they’d have an interesting discussion later that evening.

June drove Kim and me to the nearby airport. We’d both done our preflight planning that afternoon, collecting weather and route data for the route from Camp Forge Municipal Airport to the Chapel Hill Airport, near Kim’s home. Something was going on near Washington, since there was a NOTAM – notice to airmen – to avoid the entire terminal area and surrounding airspace. Accordingly, we both put a big dogleg into the route to loop around that airspace.

Kim and I both picked up our IFR clearances shortly after takeoff from the frequency given for the non-precision approach to the Camp Forge airport. Kim took off first, and I heard her get cleared-as-filed, along with the ATC frequency for departure, and the transponder squawk code.

I took off two minutes behind her. She had a slightly faster airplane. We were both assigned 8,000-feet as our altitude, but at her speed and with me still climbing out, she was more than a few miles ahead of me by the time I got up to cruising altitude. I did hear her talking to ATC on the radio. We’d also agreed to use one of the Unicom frequencies to contact each other, but other than an initial contact, we kept the chatter to a minimum.

We reached Chapel Hill just at sunset, parked the planes with hers in her hangar, after she retrieved her car from inside. We were home about nine-thirty. We had a full-week ahead and it had been a highly sexual weekend with near constant activity, so we went to sleep after a brief lovemaking episode.

The next morning, we were in the groove, and out of the house by seven-thirty. TNA’s offices were only a fifteen-minute drive from Kim’s house. We got coffee on the way, and I also bought a coffee and donut for Deb Haywood, Kim’s assistant-girl Friday-secretary-and-confidant. As we got to Kim’s office area, I left the coffee and pastry on Deb’s desk.

I had a cubical with a window a few doors down from Kim’s office area, and that also gave me access to what we’d called the ‘IPO War Room’. Around the walls were the various charts, schedules, and lists of everything we needed to do in order to get listed on the NASDAQ Exchange before the end of the year. We’d already acknowledged that we’d miss the last week in November and that the last two weeks of December were also a loss due to the holidays. Our aim was to finish before the holiday season.

I noted that several ‘DONE’ checkmarks had been added over the weekend for some of the legal stuff. I assumed that Mark Shapiro, one of the lawyers we’d engaged for this work, had been in and knocking off some milestones.

I was standing in the War Room when the door opened and Debbie came in with a very happy smile on her face. She made a beeline for me, and before I could even react, she had me in a serious lip lock with her arms around me and her body pressed against me. The kiss was nice, and I responded after I got my wits about me. One of her hands went to the back of my neck in a sexy move to keep me kissing her. The one kiss became a couple more, and then we separated. She fanned her face and I had a really happy grin.

I looked as the pretty lass and asked, “What brought that on, not that I’m complaining?”

She chortled, “Well, for one you bought me a coffee and sweet. That was so sweet of you, and I wanted to thank you, and that seemed the best way for me. For another, I’ve always been drawn to you and wanted to do that. You’re ... hot.” I think her last remark kind of embarrassed her. I felt she wanted to say more, too.

I responded, “Well, that was a very nice way to start the workday, I hope for both of us. You are more than welcome to do that every day – providing ‘our’ boss is okay with the activity.”

A voice from the doorway behind me stated, “Well, the boss is very okay with it. I think the two of you are cute together.”

Debbie turned and affirmed to Kim, “I’m not trying to steal him from you. I know that you two are an event, and I applaud that. He’s just so ... hunky and sexy and all. If you’re really okay with that, I might do that every now and then – every hour? I know that PDAs in the workplace are frowned on, so I’ll keep things more or less proper as far as others are concerned.”

I winked at Kim and said, “Well, the feeling about being nice and sexy is mutual, Debbie.”

Debbie was almost the youngest person in all of TNA, probably about twenty-two or -three. I knew from idle chatter that she’d graduated high school at sixteen, and then gone to a junior college for a business associates certificate. She’d wanted to get into a job to work and make money rather than go to college, so even when in school she’d started to work for the small solar panel company that Kim had bought as the initial impetus of what had become TNA after more acquisitions and shaping by her.

Debbie was a luscious young blonde with long hair to the middle of her back, a lissome body that I rated as pretty sexy, and an outstanding rack that she occasionally let people sense by wearing just the right sweater or top, a few of which were body hugging. She always wore a skirt and low heels. Some of the skirts she wore were short, proving that God also graced her with some attractive legs.

On that note, we all went back to work. I pointed out to Kim the weekend work, and she went off to thank Mark for his progress. I settled in with some SEC forms that required various exhibits dealing with the volume of work over the past three years, and the associated revenues.

By lunch time, I realized that I had seen more of Debbie than any day previous in my work at TNA. She kept my coffee cup full. She updated some of the planning charts on the walls. She organized some of the piles of paper for each part of the submission. She was in and out of the conference room constantly. I figured she had some time on her hands, so I assigned her the task of digitizing and reformatting a huge stack of paper-based financial data. She seemed happy to interact with me and eagerly took on the job. I estimated it would take her the rest of the week.