The Swarm Cycle Universe
Copyright© 2007 The Thinking Horndog

Joshua’s eyes narrowed as he and his fiancé finished their burgers. He glanced up and around the food court, looked up to the surrounding mezzanine walkways, focused for a few moments on two men standing there and then he relaxed. He still glanced around intently, but now he had a little smile on his face, while he continued to look and listen.

“I think we should celebrate with dessert,” he said. “Mmm, we can share a three scoop sundae with chocolate.”

“Celebrate? Celebrate what?” Angelique was picking up the wrappings and soiled napkins to dump in the trash. She was almost, but not quite, full, however, she was really trying to lose weight for the wedding. “You and your sundaes. Why couldn’t your last name be Friday like that cop on Dragnet? Then, we could have dinners at TGIF. But no! It had to be Sunday. I’m all for celebrating something, but let’s go home early and do it in bed, instead. I already have too many calories to burn off.” Most independent observers would have stated that she was not really overweight; she was not even close to rubenesque. However, she thought she still needed to lose ten more pounds and so she had chosen a wedding dress that was specifically designed to make her need to lose ten more pounds before it would fit her well.

“I’ll take you to bed later. First, I am going to celebrate by getting that sundae. And you are going to help me with it. Fiancé’s orders. As to what we’re celebrating, I think that I am going to get a brand new job pretty quick.”

“I couldn’t eat more than a couple of bites of a sundae. Wait. New job? But ... You love your job. And you just got a promotion to detective first class. You’re way too junior to get picked for the Lieutenant’s position and anyway, I haven’t heard anything about Mike retiring or anything. And ... Josh, what is going on?” Angelique was blonde, with lustrous, dark gold hair. Joshua knew from direct examination of the corroborating evidence that it was within a couple of shades of her natural hair color. Intensive, direct observation only. He had not sent anything to the lab. Regardless, she was not a stereotypical ‘dumb blonde’. She had just finished her fifth year as an elementary school teacher. By the summer’s end, she was due to finish her master’s degree in education. They had been together for two years and the wedding was in two months.

He leaned back in his chair, still looking every place but at her. “Bear with me for a few minutes. I’ll need to plan this particular dessert with great care. There are lots of flavors available today. Lets see, we will have to have a banana of course. Just the one, but it might be a bigger one than normal; just large, not super-sized, though. And then...”

“Josh, what are you talking about? The bananas are always the same size. Pretty much, at least. And the size of the banana is not the most important thing anyw ... Wait. Why am I even arguing about this? I don’t want a sundae.”

He grinned while still not making eye contact. “You’ll want this one. The banana is definitely going to be the center of attention. And I insist that you help eat it all. The entire sundae, that is. Not just the banana. I can just about guarantee you won’t need to starve yourself to lose any more weight. We’ll put some French Vanilla in the center just for you. I’ve always thought of you as a French Vanilla kind of girl.”

She wasn’t really sure how to take that, but she did like French Vanilla.

“And, I think, a good-size helping of Kiwi as the next scoop.” he continued.

Angelique stared at him. “Kiwi? Kiwi ice cream? That’s just weird.”

“It is, but I like Kiwis. And we’ll have just two cherries, one for you and one for me. Well, maybe I’ll let you share mine. The other one is all yours, but I want to watch you roll it around in your mouth for a while. You can try that trick where you tie the stem into a knot with your tongue.” Josh smiled at his increasingly confused lover. “We might wait on that for a while though. Too early would be bad. Cherries need to be ripe. What flavor do you want on the other end?”