Chapter 1: Getting the Call

After the wedding (read: A Photographer’s Fantasy – The Wedding), Lou and I decided to stay an extra day. Actually, I really hadn’t planned on getting back to our town until late Monday to begin with, but Lou hadn’t made any plans. After Sunday’s bacchanalia, we decided that an extra day wouldn’t hurt us. We did a little sight-seeing and shopping, but by early afternoon we had both decided that enough was enough. It was time to get back to our real world.

Our first indication that things were not as rosy as we would have liked them to be came when we entered Lou’s digs and saw that the answering machine was blinking. Below the flashing LED, the number indicated there were twelve messages. Lou looked at me with alarm.

“Oh, Jonny, I never have more than one or two messages. Something tells me there’s trouble ahead,” she said.

Ever helpful, I said, “Well, why don’t you listen to a couple of them and see just what’s going on? That way you’ll know and the mystery of so many calls will be solved!”

Lou kind of glared at me and waved the one-finger salute in my direction. I beat a hasty retreat to her kitchen and hauled out my cell phone. I could check my messages remotely, but I didn’t have any expectation of trouble on my end.

In the background, I could hear Lou’s machine repeating the messages. They all sounded alike to me and so I was able to push them further into the background when my machine started talking to me.

“You have 15 new messages,” the disembodied voice on the machine began. I quickly punched the pause button. 15 new messages? Naomi was supposed to be at the office until 4 PM and it was only 7:30 PM now. What was going on? I punched the button to end the message playback. ‘I’d better call Naomi,’ I thought.

Just then, a stunned Lou came into the kitchen clutching a notepad and a pencil. As tight as she was holding onto the pencil, I was afraid she might break it. “So, what was all that about, love?” I asked, gently taking the pencil from her.

“It was...” Lou cleared her throat. “It was...” she tried again and stumbled to a chair at the kitchen table. I stepped over to the cupboards above the sink, got a goblet, filled it with water and then turned and handed it to Lou. She gulped down several swallows before she took another breath.

She took a deep breath and then another. “It was Mr. Tralmark. I guess he is a vice-president in his company. He suspects there’s some fraud going on, or some embezzlement or something ‘fishy’ as he calls it, going on in his company. He wants to hire me to do an independent forensic audit of the company. He was two of the messages. The rest were from other companies wanting me to look at their books and evaluate their accountants. What am I going to do?”

I paused. What could she do tonight? Nothing, as far as I could see. I sat across from her at the table, took both of her hands in mine and tried to be calm as I spoke.

“There’s not a lot you can do tonight. I’ll listen to the messages with you a second time and we’ll note the ones who you think you can handle and which ones you can’t. Before that, though, I think you need to call Mr. Tralmark and get a better handle on what he’s thinking. You should probably also make an appointment with him so that you can figure out what to do next. By the way, love, you aren’t the only one with a stack of messages on your machine. I have 15. I need to call Naomi and find out just what’s going on!”

“Yeah, you call Naomi. Hopefully, by the time you’re done I’ll have my wits back about me,” she replied.

So, I proceeded to call Naomi at home. I took the pad of paper and pencil from Lou, turned to a new page and waited for Naomi to answer. Her voice was not its usual pleasant tone when she answered.

“Where the hell have you been?” she said, even before she said ‘hello’. “Never mind. I’ve been fielding calls all day long!” she ranted. “What did you do out there this weekend? Hypnotize everyone to call and make appointments?”

“Whoa, slow down,” I said. “What’s going on?”

She took a deep breath. “You really don’t know?” She couldn’t hear me shake my head, but she must have sensed it. She took another deep breath. I could just see her and her baby-feeding tits pushing her t-shirt to its limits.

“The phone’s been ringing off the hook all day,” she said. “Business people wanting to have their portraits done for everything from their brochures to billboards to pictures to hang in their waiting rooms! Some of the calls came from women wanting to get family portraits as Christmas presents.” There was a pause.

When she started talking again, her voice was hushed, like she was passing on some secret. “There was one call that was a little weird. It was someone named ‘Harold,’ and he said he had a special assignment for you. Something about a calendar. He said it was something you and he had discussed a few years ago when you did the golf course calendar. That must have been before my time, right? Because I don’t remember you doing any calendar.”

Then it was my turn to take a deep breath. After all, it was a lot to take in! “Yeah, that was before your time. I did this calendar for a local golf magazine that they used as a fundraiser. You said his name was Harold? That had to be Harold Admunson. He’s a promotions specialist with his own business. This might be interesting.”

Naomi piped up again. “Well, you’ve got a bunch of calls to return. Or, I can call ‘em all back and open up your calendar. We’ve still got a bunch of high school seniors to do, too. I know it’s almost mid-September, but there aren’t many openings for the rest of the month. What do you want me to do?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Let’s just let it be for tonight. We’ll tackle it tomorrow, OK? Not much else we can really do, right?”

“Right,” she answered. “But I’ll probably sleep a bit better tonight now that you’ve called.”

We said our goodbyes, and I went and found Lou.

She was in her office, writing furiously. I made a little cough and she turned around. “It’s OK,” she said. “What did you find out from Naomi?”

“She said she was going a little batty with the phones today,” I said. “Looks like we’re both about to see a huge boost in our businesses!”

“Yeah,” she said, a little dispiritedly. “I was hoping that we could get some things settled and work on being married, though. Doesn’t look like that’s going to happen, does it?”

I looked at her with her slumped shoulders and hang-dog expression. “No, it doesn’t,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy one more night of our ‘honeymoon’, does it?”

“No,” she said, glumly. “But feels like things are going to be really hectic for a while.”

“So,” I said, “why don’t you go get into something frilly and I’ll get us some wine and we’ll make it a night we won’t forget while we’re so busy? I’ll pretend you’re my present and I’ll unwrap you again!”

She laughed at that. “OK,” she said. “Bring up some cheese and crackers, too, and we’ll make like Khalil Gibran in my bedroom!”

Hmm. That sounded fun. “A loaf of bread/a jug of wine/and thou” might be what the doctor ordered to take our minds off tomorrow.

By the time I was able to get the crackers and cheese on a platter, grab a couple of wine glasses and the bottle of wine and get up to the bedroom, Lou had changed from her traveling dress into a little red chemise that went down to her ass. She came up to me and put her arms around my neck, got up on her toes and gave me a kiss that would have given a statue a hard-on. Well, I’m no statue, and I had a hard-on.

It was impossible to kiss her properly while I was holding the goodies, so I wriggled free of her grasp and put the platter down on her hope chest and set the glasses next to it. I had a corkscrew in my back pocket and I pulled the cork from the bottle, all while Lou draped herself over my back.

“Woman,” I said, “how am I supposed to do this with you all over me?”

“You did just fine,” she giggled. She reached up and started unbuttoning my shirt. When she was done with that, she started in on my belt. I kicked off my shoes, and while she was divesting me of my pants and underwear, I somehow managed to pour wine into the glasses without spilling any. Now, I suppose that doesn’t sound all that difficult, but you try it sometime: it’s hell on the concentration!

She liberated my cock and immediately attacked it, making the pouring of the wine that much more difficult.