Of course, Kyle kept Andrea updated on these adventures, although not quite in the same tone. “Not all the women around here are that bad,” she told him, “but I can see how you could be a little disappointed.”

“I’m glad you told me,” he replied sarcastically. “If you hadn’t, I would have been well on the way to believing that all the women in the state of Colorado are rude, screaming lunatics.”

“You’ve just had a bad run. You need to have a quiet, peaceful, fun, safe date to even things out a little bit. This would be a great time for you to go out with Gwen.”

“I don’t know but what maybe she goes too far the other way,” he replied, more serious now. “But after last night, she actually sounds appealing. I can’t believe she’d go out with me though. I mean, even if she wanted to, I don’t know if she could summon up the courage and enough words to say yes.”

“Oh, she’d be willing,” Andrea smiled. “She likes you, Kyle. She likes the way you’re kind to her and not pushy. She told me just a couple days ago she liked what she saw of you at New Year’s and she hopes she can see you again.”

“Andrea, are we talking about the same Gwen? Short, plain, brown hair? The woman who wouldn’t shout ‘fire’ if her pants were burning?”

“She’s not that bad,” Andrea laughed. “Well, not quite. But tell me, after last night, doesn’t that sound a little bit appealing? I mean, someone you can be with and not feel stressed about? Someone where you don’t have any expectations to begin with, so you don’t have to be disappointed when things don’t work out.”

Kyle thought about it for a moment. “You might have something there,” he admitted finally.

“Look, there’s a local amateur theater group that’s doing Paint Your Wagon here in town this weekend. Have you ever heard of it?”

“Vaguely. It’s a musical, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It dates from back in the fifties, but it’s Lerner and Lowe, they were pretty good. I’ve never seen it myself, but some of the songs are familiar. It’s actually a comedy about gold mining in California back in the gold rush days. Bruce and I were talking about going and seeing it. You and Gwen could come with us, so you wouldn’t feel too lonely if Gwen isn’t in a talkative mood.”

“She actually gets into a talkative mood?”

“For her, at least. Most people wouldn’t consider it to be very talkative.”

Kyle thought quickly. Gwen wasn’t exactly the most appealing girl he’d ever met, but she certainly wasn’t pushy, loud, or rude, which would be welcome after the cell phone junkie or the fastest mouth from the South. Going out to a play with Gwen would at least mean that someone wouldn’t be yapping on her cell phone or texting someone or just talking about nothing while he was trying to pay attention to the play. Besides, going out to a play sounded like a great change of pace from his dull and/or trying evenings. On top of that, he felt like he owed Andrea for all the help she’d been in getting him up to speed on his new job – and for just being a friend. “It sounds like it has potential,” he conceded. “Should I call her up and ask her, or do you think it would be better if you did it?”

“Good question,” Andrea replied. It seemed to Kyle that she was surprised that her sales job had succeeded so easily. “Maybe I’d better talk to her tonight, and if she seems receptive, I’ll tell you to ask her.”

“I guess,” he shrugged. “You know more about her than I do, and I do like the idea of going to a play. It sure has to be better than sitting in a restaurant listening to my date run off at the mouth on her cell phone and ignoring me. But do you think Gwen will be free?”

“Oh, there’s no doubt about that. She never goes out unless someone takes her by the hand and leads her. Actually, she can be a pretty nice person if you lead her. I don’t mean push her, but lead her. I think you’ll see that once you get to know her a little better.”

“You might be right, but I don’t think it’s going to be quite as easy as you seem to think.”

“Come on, Kyle. You’re just down because you’ve had some bad experiences recently. Look, I’m not trying to sell you on a girlfriend or a big romance or anything like that. I’m just talking about having a fun evening out with a girl who will appreciate being with you, even if she’s the sort who doesn’t show it very much.”

“That’s kind of what I’m worried about. I mean, how do I tell if I’m doing the right thing or the wrong thing?”

“There are ways. They may be a little subtle, but they’re there. You’ll start to pick up on them after you’ve been with her for a while.”

“All right,” he sighed, bowing to the inevitable – it was obvious that Andrea wasn’t going to give up unless he gave her an emphatic ‘no,’ and he didn’t want to piss her off that way. “I might as well give it a fair try.”

Kyle was more than a little dubious about the double date with Andrea, Bruce, and Gwen. It was just as clear as could be that Andrea was trying to set him up with Gwen, but he felt like he was between a rock and a hard spot about the whole thing. On the other hand, Gwen was at least a nice quiet girl, which he had recently learned had some advantages if they were going to a stage show. True, she wasn’t the prettiest girl in the world, not by a long shot, but he had a hunch she could be cleaned up to look fairly attractive if she would be willing to put some effort into it.

He also had to admit to himself that, the old saw from college days about the quiet ones and firecrackers was also sitting around in the back of his mind, although he couldn’t make himself believe things could ever get that far with her.

The next day Andrea reported that she’d talked with Gwen, and she seemed excited – for her – about the idea of going to the play, so that evening Kyle called her up and asked her, noting, of course, that they would be going with Andrea and Bruce. He finally got to the part where he asked, “Would you like to go with me?”

After only an instant’s hesitation, in a soft voice, she said, “Yes.” As far as he could tell, for her that counted as excited.

Somehow, with Andrea’s involvement, the evening morphed from just going to the show into a dinner date, as a foursome of course. Kyle figured he probably ought to dress up a bit, so he dressed about like he would for work, adding a sport jacket; while suits and ties were appropriate for some things at Mercer-Howe, things were a little more casual on a day-to-day basis.

It had been worked out that he’d meet the other three at the Bolenbaughs’ on Friday evening, and they’d take their van to dinner and the show. To his surprise, he discovered that Gwen was looking pretty good, wearing an ankle-length skirt and a jacket over a blouse. She didn’t seem quite as neutral as she had seemed all of New Year’s Day, and he figured that Andrea had to have something to do with that.

The dinner was at a chain family restaurant. It wasn’t terribly good, but it wasn’t bad, either. Kyle, Bruce, and Andrea had a fair conversation about other plays they had seen – it had been a while for Kyle, not since college days, in fact – but Gwen, not to his surprise, didn’t have much to say. However, it seemed to Kyle that she was soaking up what was said around her like a sponge, even though she didn’t say much about it.

The play was fun, if not exactly professional quality. Like most musicals, the story line of Paint Your Wagon was on the inane side, but the man who played the lead role of Ben Rumson had a magnificent bass voice that almost knocked dust down from the light fixtures of the auditorium. The whole evening was worth it to just hear him sing.

Other parts of the play were mixed, especially the piano player, who missed a lot of notes, sometimes in places that even made relatively non-musical Kyle cringe. She apparently couldn’t tell a melody from a harmony and there were times that it was hard to make out the familiar music she was playing. But overall, Kyle enjoyed it a lot more than listening to his date talk about nail polish on her cell phone.

When they got back to the Bolenbaughs’ house, Kyle offered to drive Gwen home, and she accepted readily. It wasn’t far away, and when he got there, like a gentleman he walked her to her door. When they got there, she shook his hand and said, “Thank you Kyle. I enjoyed that.”

Wow, he thought. Six whole words strung together. We’re talking a new record here! “I did, too,” he replied, thinking that she had been a refreshing change from the lunchroom girls. “Would you like to do that again sometime?”

“Yes, I would,” she told him.

“Andrea tells me that there are some other shows coming along. We’ll have to see what’s happening. I guess I’d better let you go.”

“Good night, Kyle.” Somehow, her words sounded vaguely disappointed to him.

“And good night to you, Gwen. I enjoyed that more than I thought I would.”

He drove home singing a couple of the songs from the musical. It had been a good evening after all.

Because of the hour and the fact that Chelsea had to work on Saturday morning, it was after noon before Kyle could call her up to report on the date. She said that the idea of going to a show like that sounded like a lot of fun; there wasn’t anything like that around Arlington, and even if there were she didn’t want to have to go by herself.

“You know, Kyle,” she told him after he’d told her about the date, “I think you blew that one big time.”

“What makes you think that?”

“It’s apparent to me that she’s not very good at expressing herself in words. Maybe when she said she enjoyed the evening it was her way of saying, ‘Take me in and fuck my ears off.’”

“Chelsea, I can’t believe that. This girl, well, you’d have to meet her to believe it. Most of the time it almost seemed like I was sitting next to an empty dress. I didn’t even notice that she had much reaction to the play. Oh, there were a couple of times that she clapped politely, but that was about it.”

“But you said she acted disappointed when she realized you weren’t going to make a move on her.”

“I don’t know. It was just a feeling, and I’m not sure I was right about that. If you’re right, which I really doubt, I guess I’m just not very good at picking up her signals.”

“Are you going to go out with her again?”

“I just may,” he conceded. “Andrea was right, it was a very enjoyable evening compared to the dates I’ve had recently. I feel a little awkward going to something like that by myself, and at least she was someone to go with.”

Kyle thought about what Chelsea had said from time to time over the weekend, which was otherwise on the boring side. A couple of times he thought about calling Gwen up and seeing if she would like to go to a movie or something, just for the sake of having a little – very little – company, but he could never quite bring himself to do it.

Instead, he spent much of the weekend working up some of the photos he’d taken the previous summer, more getting his hand back into his art than anything else. Rianna had recently sent him an e-mail saying that the sunset shot of Chelsea in the black latex swimsuit – a twin to the one he had hanging in his living room – had sold almost as soon as she hung it. Was he willing to run off more of that one, and did he have any others like it – different pictures with similar enhancements?

He was of slightly mixed emotions about running off more copies of that photo, mostly because he felt art ought to be unique, rather than a production job. He and Rianna had batted e-mails back and forth for several days on the issue, and for now the decision had been to take it under advisement and think about it; it was a decision that could be made later.

He did have a couple hundred frames of Chelsea in the nude, but as far as he was concerned, they were for his own files, not for his artwork – not that he didn’t go through them every now and then just remembering the good days. However, he did have a handful of non-Chastity White swimsuit shots of Chelsea that could be worked up into something similar, and she’d given him permission to use them if he felt like it. None of them seemed to have the impact of the one on his living room wall, but they were something to work with. He was looking forward to the weather warming up, when he could get out and explore the new landscape, and hopefully come up with some new photos to work with. The openness of the plains east of town had some appeal as photographic subjects as much as the mountains to the west.

Monday rolled around, as Mondays have a way of doing. While they were buckling down to the project of the day, Andrea told him that she’d talked to Gwen, who had said she’d really enjoyed the evening and liked him. “You ought to get together with her again sometime,” she suggested.

“It didn’t come out nearly as bad as I expected,” he admitted. “I still am having a lot of trouble reading her, though.”

“You aren’t the first person to say that, but if you can learn, you might find it worth the effort.” It almost seemed to Kyle that Andrea was saying much the same thing as Chelsea had said, even though he had trouble believing it at all.

He and Andrea had fallen into the habit of often having lunch together in the lunchroom – at least it kept the sharks at bay a little. Occasionally Andrea’s friend Denise, who worked in production control and was often on a different lunch schedule, joined them. The three of them were kicking around the idea of a frequently suggested ski weekend up in the mountains. Although Kyle was from snow country, it was flatland country, and he’d never been on skis, but he was willing to give it a try. The winter was moving along, Denise said, and the season couldn’t be expected to last a whole lot longer.

After a while, a blonde woman Kyle had frequently seen around the lunchroom but had never talked to came and sat down with them. She was memorable indeed; small, only around five-foot-two at his estimate, and relatively slender, with a tiny waist and small hips – but she had on a shirt that he suspected had a pair of volleyballs stuffed in it. They weren’t volleyballs stuffed in there though; the shirt was cut low enough that he could see quite clearly that those huge breasts actually were skin, although he obviously wasn’t seeing the whole view. He thought her chest was so disproportionate as to be grotesque, and it seemed pretty clear to him that there was a lot of silicone involved. She was wearing a lot of costume jewelry, including an elaborate necklace that seemed to draw attention to her cleavage.

A little to his surprise, she all but ignored him, but handed a magazine folded back to a page with a picture on it to Denise. “I really like this shirt,” she said. “But I can tell it just won’t fit. If I get it big enough to fit my boobs, it’s going to look like a tent around my waist. Do you think you could do something with it?”

“Oh, probably,” Denise said after a glance at the picture. “It would involve some cutting and fitting, but maybe not too much. If you like that style though, it might be better to start from scratch.”

“Could you?” the blonde asked. “I love the style, but the color just wouldn’t do anything with my hair.”

“Pick out the material you like,” Denise replied. “And we’ll set up a time. We can use the same pattern as last time, but detail it out differently. That ought to come up pretty close to this.”

The two talked back and forth about the details of the shirt for a few moments. It was a conversation that under the circumstances was just background noise to Kyle because there were two other things drawing his attention, although he tried to be discreet about it. Finally the two women came up for air. “Echo,” Denise said, “have you met Kyle Murray?”

“I’ve seen you around,” she said to him. “You’re pretty new here, aren’t you?”

“I transferred in a little over six weeks ago,” he told her, hoping this wasn’t going to turn into another lunchroom shark deal. She seemed like a nice girl, but her breasts were big enough to be off-putting, although he knew of plenty of guys who thought bigger was better with no limits. If anything, she proved that there was such a thing as too big in that department.

“Neat,” she said, showing some interest. “I’m Echo Morrison. My boyfriend and I really like it here, too.”

Thank goodness for that, he thought, now noticing an engagement ring on her finger. This chick looks to be high maintenance too, but she sounds like she might be a little more tolerable than some others I’ve seen around this place.

He didn’t really want to brush her off, so didn’t want to seem too disinterested, just out of politeness. “Denise,” he said, “I didn’t know you did sewing.”

“Oh, it’s just a hobby,” she replied. “It’s something I picked up from my grandmother. She was really good at it and taught me a lot of things. I’ve made a number of pieces for Echo, and it’s kind of a challenge.” She grinned and went on, “She has a couple reasons why she’s hard to fit.”

“I can see that,” he laughed. “But I know my mother used to do quite a bit of sewing as well, and I learned a little bit about it listening to her. She used to have this huge collection of envelopes with patterns for all sorts of different things. But it seems to me that it would be about as hard to find a pattern that would fit Echo as it would to find the actual clothes.”

“Ten or fifteen years ago it would have been,” Denise explained, “but that’s all changed now. There’s software these days where you can input a design and the measurements involved, and the program will spit out a pattern that will usually come pretty close to fitting, even with someone of Echo’s build.”

Kyle shook his head. “I should have figured that out,” he said. “It seems like computers pop up in all sorts of places you don’t expect them.”

“It’s not a perfect solution. There’s still some fitting involved, but much less than would be required if I tried to use a standard pattern for someone who is built like Echo. To take advantage of it I need a large-sized printer. I can get the pattern to print out on a regular laser printer, but then I have to patch the pieces together with tape or glue before I can cut them. The good software is very expensive. I have some cheap software that will do the job for most normal people, but for Echo I have to use a demo version of a much more expensive package, and it does a very good job. It’s crippleware; it’ll output to a laser printer, but it won’t save the pattern. But we make do.”

“That’s interesting,” he replied, fascinated by the concept. “I’ve seen the same thing happen with photography. I’ve never done very much darkroom work, but I had a course in college when I did some just to see what it was like. In the old days, back in the days of view cameras, it took a lot of work to make a negative at all, and then it involved messing around with chemicals in a darkroom. Then I had to go through much the same process with prints. I happened to read recently that Ansel Adams only took about thirty-three hundred shots with his view camera in his lifetime. Hell, I took more than that of my girlfriend last summer with my digital cameras.”

“Not up to the quality of Ansel Adams, I’ll bet,” Echo smirked. It was clear to Kyle that she knew who he was talking about; that was pretty rare.

“Well, no. But he was working to the limits of the technology he had. The technology has vastly improved, and the processing software is incredible compared to what he had to work with. My real hobby work is impressionistic processing, trying to bring things out of a scene that the eye just doesn’t quite see. It would have been impossible for Adams to even attempt such a thing.”

“I know what he’s talking about,” Andrea put in. “He has several framed photos in his living room, and they are just plain gorgeous. I mean, things that you wouldn’t think are there at all do really stand out. He has this one shot of a girl in a swimsuit in the sunset that’s so beautiful it just absolutely makes chills go up my spine.”

“I didn’t exactly recognize that quality at the time I took it,” Kyle explained. “My girlfriend was modeling for me last summer, and I sort of shot it as a grab shot while I was trying for something else, but when I got it on the computer I kept coming back to it. Something was telling me to push it. That’s sort of what I mean by bringing things out of a photo that you don’t see at first glance.”

“Is that the girl down in South Carolina I hear you talk about occasionally?” Andrea asked.

“That’s her,” he replied. “Unfortunately she’s there and I’m here. We’re still good friends, we talk on the phone a lot, but I don’t think I can call her my girlfriend anymore.”

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