Kyle had the apartment mostly put back together by early afternoon, so he called Chelsea to fill her in on how it went. All in all, he told her, the shoot had gone pretty well, although Echo had been a while really getting into character.

“So tell me,” Chelsea giggled, “Did her boobs hang down to her knees?”

“No, they drooped a little but they really are pretty firm. But I’ll tell you what, she sure is proud of them. I mean, she really likes showing them off.”

“She must like it, otherwise they wouldn’t be as big as they are, and she wouldn’t display them like you say she does.”

“Oh, no doubt,” Kyle replied. “Would you like to see a proof from the shoot?”

“I’d sure like to see if they’re as big as you say they are.”

Kyle was at his computer, which was often the case when he called Chelsea. He pulled up the file of final selections, and copied one to Chelsea’s e-mail. “It’s on the way,” he told her. “It was like most photo shoots, easy getting down to the final handful of photos, but selecting one of those is tough. I’m going to give her eight by tens of the finals, but this one we’re going to get blown up to twenty four by thirty six and framed for her to give to Corey.”

A few seconds went by before Chelsea replied, “Wow, you’re not kidding. They are big, and you’re right that she sure seems proud of them. That smile on her face is pure lust. I have to admit, she is rather pretty, but those boobs sort of overwhelm the rest of the package.”

“That’s how she wants it, I guess. She’s really obsessed by them, almost like they’re a fetish or something. In a way, she sort of reminds me of you.”

“I’d never want tits like that, Kyle. Those are way too big.”

“That’s not what I was talking about,” he chuckled. “I mean, who do we know who’s obsessed with swimsuits to the point where it’s almost a fetish?”

“Well, yeah,” she said slowly. “I think I see what you mean. Though, honestly, I think my fascination with swimsuits is mostly harmless, but she’s going to have problems with a chest like that, especially as she gets older. I don’t think it’s quite the same thing.”

“You’re probably right, but think of it this way. Corey obviously enjoys her wearing a chest like that, and I enjoy watching you wear your swimsuits. I think something like the same mechanism is going on there.”

“You’re just saying that all men are lecherous pigs.”

“Maybe so, but I’m also saying that at least some women like to cater to that. Your website wouldn’t be the success it is without it.”

“You’re right, of course, but I think we’d better change the subject or you may have me thinking second thoughts about both swimsuits and the website,” she laughed.

“I can do that,” he laughed with her. “So what’s the news in Arlington, other than the fact that you’re glad you’re done for the weekend and have time off until Monday?”

“I wish I had something to do between now and Monday,” she sighed. “I’m not looking forward to the weekend. About all I have to kill time with is reading and maybe working on another swimsuit.”

“I wish there were something I could do about that.”

“You and me both. I guess I’m a little down right now, but at least your calling has brightened my day.”

“What’s to be down about, other than you’re in Arlington?”

“Oh, Mary Beth had her baby yesterday,” she sighed. “I’m not looking forward to what’s going to happen when she comes back to work.”

“I don’t think I’ve heard about this before. Who’s Mary Beth?”

“She’s my so-called assistant,” she said in an exasperated voice. “She was the one who essentially ran the last librarian off, although I didn’t find out about it until too late. She wanted the librarian job for herself when I first came here, but since she was pregnant and would be off for a while, the board decided not to give it to her. There are some people on the board who would have been against her getting the job anyway. She’s not happy that I got the job instead of her, baby or no baby.”

“It’s too bad you didn’t know that when you took the job in the first place.”

“No fooling. It wouldn’t be quite as bad if she actually knew what she was doing. She can handle the routine stuff all right because of how long she’s worked there, but she’s never had a minute of library science, so when something new or different comes up she has no idea of how to handle it. She was some help to me when I came here because she knew she had to be, but I don’t want to bet it will continue when she comes back to work.”

“You’re saying she’s going to be looking for every opportunity to stick a knife in your back?”

“I don’t think it will go that far, and maybe having the baby will change her viewpoint a little.”

“Chelsea, I don’t know what to tell you, other than you’re going to have to be careful.”

“I know,” she sighed. “I’ve been working to try to drag this place up to the modern era ever since I’ve been here, and I’ve made some progress. I’m just afraid she isn’t going to like anything I’ve managed to do since it isn’t the way it’s always been done and this goddamn Yankee has screwed everything up, to use her words.”

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to stick to your guns and make it work.”

“Yeah, but I’m not General Sherman, either. He burned a path through Georgia not far from here a hundred and fifty years ago, close enough that the locals have never forgotten it. Sometimes I wish he’d rise from the dead and burn this town to the ground. I knew I was going to be walking into a tight political situation when I came here, but I thought I could handle it and wanted the line on my résumé. I wish now I’d just stayed in Wychbold, but with you out in Colorado it wouldn’t have solved anything.”

“About all I can say is hang in there. I’ve learned over the years that situations that look bad often don’t work out as bad as they appear to be,” he replied, trying to buck her up. This was something new to him; she’d indicated before that she’d been having trouble with the library board, but she’d never gotten into details like this before.

“I keep telling myself that,” she replied. “Maybe you’re right.”

Kyle did his best to steer the topic away from that situation as they continued to talk, mostly about the details of the photo shoot. He really wished she could have been there, since it would have been a lot more fun.

A couple of weeks passed and the subject didn’t come up again, which made Kyle hope the situation had been resolved at least a little. It had been clear right from the beginning that Chelsea was less than happy in Arlington, but there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it but hope for the best.

In that two weeks he had two more dates, one a double date with Gwen and the Bolenbaughs, where they went to see an amateur theater group do Fiddler on the Roof, which wasn’t as much fun as Paint Your Wagon. They had a good time, even though Gwen was her usual non-conversational self.

He also had another “real” date, this time with a girl he’d met in the Mercer-Howe lunchroom. He hadn’t gotten to know her very well there, but she wasn’t one of the predatory sharks, either, and it seemed like she could hold up her end of a conversation, which was more than could be said about Gwen. It was a dinner date at Sotelo’s Hacienda, of course, and as usual Serafina had a smile for him when he came in, probably wondering what the drama was going to be this evening.

The girl proved to be less than a winner. Oh, she could hold up her end of the conversation, so long as it was a topic covered in the National Enquirer, which seemed to be about all she ever bothered to read. He thought he’d detected some intelligence in her, but that proved to be wrong. It didn’t take long for him to have his fill of her talking about alien invasions and who got which Hollywood starlet pregnant. The dinner may have been good, but he was glad to get out of there. The lunchroom was just not providing him with much luck with dates, although he and Chelsea had a good laugh about her afterwards.

That experience made him even less enthusiastic about dating, especially girls he met in the lunchroom. The only fun single girl he’d met there was Echo, and she was already taken. He really wasn’t going out all that much – sometimes as often as once a week, but that included his excursions with Gwen. Even that seemed like a little too much, and the only reason he persisted in looking for a decent date at all was that Chelsea kept pushing him on the subject.

“The heck of it is,” he told Chelsea one evening, “that if I were to use you as a yardstick, the best that any of these girls could manage would be about six inches, and that would be the gal I ran into in the bookstore that time.”

“Hang in there, Kyle,” she urged him. “There’s bound to be someone out there for you. It’s not like around here, where there isn’t anyone for me.”

One day Echo came up to him in the lunchroom; he’d only seen her briefly and occasionally since the glamour photo shoot. “Hey, Kyle,” she said, “I gave Corey his birthday present over the weekend. He loved it!”

“Good. I was afraid he’d see it and fly off the handle.”

“Oh, not Corey. He’s not like that at all.” She snickered a little and dropped her voice, then went on, “I had that outfit on under my clothes, and he really liked it for real, too. We, uh, we wound up in his bed and he wouldn’t let me take it off all night. That was kind of what I was intending.”

“Then it must have been worth the trouble,” he laughed, glad that all the hassles involved had worked out for her.

“Oh, yes it was,” she giggled. “You know that one where I was wearing the handcuffs?”

“Don’t tell me. You didn’t?”

“Oh, yes we did,” she laughed. “It was more fun than I thought it would be. A lot more fun! I don’t think it’s something I’d want to do as a regular thing, but sometimes a little extra spice can be worth the trouble. When you talk to Chelsea, thank her for the idea.”

“I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear about it.”

“I sure would like to meet her sometime,” Echo continued. “Anyway, Corey and I talked it over, and he’d like to thank you for taking those photos. If you’re not doing anything, maybe we could all go out to dinner on Friday night. It wouldn’t have to go real late, because I, uh …”

“Have other plans for later?” he guessed, not that it was any real reach. At least someone he knew was obviously having an active and fun sex life.

“Well, yeah,” she grinned. “Is Friday night about six all right?”

Up until then Kyle had only met Corey very briefly at the warming hut at the ski lodge, but on Friday he proved be a lot of fun and had a good sense of humor. He was clearly taken with Echo and liked her playfulness as evidenced by her idea to do the glamour shots in the first place. They wound up sitting in Sotelo’s Hacienda and talking for several hours, even though both Corey and Echo clearly had something else they wanted to be doing and anticipated spending a good share of the night doing it.

Of course, he called Chelsea and told her about it when he got back to the apartment, and they had a few laughs and a long conversation of their own, but he still felt lonely when he hung the phone up and got ready for bed. Right about then he could imagine Corey and Echo and what they had to be doing at that minute, and he envied both of them. He thought she would be an active and playful partner, one who would be fun to be with. For some reason he felt especially lonely that evening, and he would have loved to be the one in bed with Echo, not that it would ever happen. Something had to turn up in his life sooner or later, he thought.

The days and weeks rolled onward; by now it was late March, and winter was clearly dying. The days were longer, and the prairies were showing signs of coming to life. One day he loaded up his cameras and took the pickup out into the grasslands east of town, where he had been told there were some particularly picturesque mesas and rock formations, and so there were. He took a number of photos, even though nothing really quite grabbed hold of him – he was going to have to learn how to deal with this new landscape, and the learning probably would come slowly.

Winter was slowly dying in the mountains, too. The following weekend proved to be another ski weekend at the Mason’s cabin, with the same group as before, including Gwen. The weather was much warmer, and a couple of times Kyle noticed girls out on the slopes wearing swimsuits; he thought it would be fun to see Chelsea doing that, and he didn’t doubt for an instant that she would do it given half a chance. The combination of the clear skies, the thin mountain air, and the light reflecting off of the snow gave him a memorable sunburn on his face – everything else was covered – and he wondered how much pain some of those girls would be in come Monday morning.

He was getting a little better on skis, and on Sunday he bucked up his courage and tried the Intermediate slope with Gwen close to him in case he ran into trouble. It was about at the limit of his skills, but it did show he was improving at least a little.

Gwen didn’t seem any different than normal to him that weekend, which was to say that she wasn’t saying much or doing anything that indicated any real interest in him or anything else, except perhaps for the skiing. In a way, she was perhaps the best date he’d had since he’d come to Colorado, except for the fact that she was so irritatingly neutral all the time. He’d often wondered if there was some way he could break through to her, but he also wondered if it would be worth the effort, so he hadn’t pushed matters.

By now, Gwen had pretty much become his default date for when he wanted to go somewhere and take someone, but it stayed at that. She didn’t seem to mind his dating other women, not that the dates ever turned out to be anything more than what they did. She even seemed amused at some of his war stories about his dates – he told a few of them in front of the fireplace in Greg and Jill’s cabin.

Jill was especially amused at his stories of his poor dating history, and one evening after their return, she called him and set him up for a date with a woman she knew. “This is a good one, Kyle. I promise you that.”

By now, he didn’t have a lot of optimism about any date, and with good reason, so he wasn’t expecting much when he called the girl. After some opening conversation, which seemed at least halfway promising, they agreed to meet at Sotelo’s Hacienda for dinner.

Kyle occasionally ate there by himself – he really liked the place – and Serafina, his favorite waitress, was a little amused when he showed up by himself. As he often did when he was alone he flirted with her a little bit, which was fun because she was more than a little bit of a flirt herself. Unfortunately, it was dead certain that nothing was ever going to happen since she was too happily married. He waited quite a while for his date to show up, and was starting to get irritated and was thinking about ordering dinner anyway when she showed up, wearing a T-shirt and running shorts, with an electronic timer and heart rate monitor strapped to her arm.

Oh, God, he thought. A runner. Heaven, help me.

Kyle was reasonably fit, although not a fanatic about it; he was careful about his diet, and tried to do some exercising now and then. In the summer he liked to ride his bike while out looking for photos, but he wasn’t trying to maintain a target heart rate, either. This girl, on the other hand, was clearly a nut about it.

It turned out that she’d run six miles to get to the date! It was still cool enough outside that she hadn’t seriously broken a sweat. At that it was better than the chemical warfare perfume that one of the sharks in the lunchroom had been wearing earlier in the year, but still he would have thought that she’d make a little more effort to dress up for a date. Not that dressing up would have helped her much; she was tall and very thin, with a build like a sack of handlebars.

It turned out she was also a competitive biker, and her idea of a fun afternoon was a hundred-mile workout if she wasn’t getting in her normal ten miles of running a day, and sometimes even if she was.

If that wasn’t enough, she also proved to be a vegan, and a zealot about it at that. At least she wasn’t one to eat an awful lot, but it took a couple of discussions with Serafina and a consultation in Spanish with the cook to work out that there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in her salad that was on this girl’s prohibited list. However, she almost blew a circuit breaker when he ordered a couple of beef tacos, so it was clear from that point onward that she was a non-starter in this event.

Fortunately the dinner didn’t last long; the girl was eager to get out and finish her ten miles for the day as she still had four miles to go.

After she left, Serafina came over to him and said, “You know, you really know how to pick them. I always like to see what kind of loco woman you’re going to come in with next.”

“That was a blind date,” he sighed. “And a man would want to be blind to date her, anyway.”

“You need a good woman, not a girl like that,” she replied. “I should introduce you to my cousin Josie.”

“What’s wrong with her?” he replied cynically.

“Oh, she’s a very nice girl, very active in the church. She’s always going to Mass and praying for people.”

“Thanks for the offer Serafina, but I think I’ll take a pass on that one. I’m not very religious, but the way my dates have been going, would you ask her to pray for me?”

“Oh, I will. I’d like to wish you better luck next time, but I enjoy watching the girls you bring in here too much. I can hardly wait for the next one.”

On his way back to his apartment, Kyle made a mental note to brush off any more set-ups that Jill came up with. If that was a good one, what would a bad one be like?

Of course, he called Chelsea to report on the date. “You might have booted that one,” she snickered. “A girl with that kind of endurance ought to be able to wear you out in bed.”

“I don’t know that I’d want to go to bed with her. I could stab myself to death on those hip bones, and let’s not even talk about some of the other sharp spots that were protruding, even through her clothes. And if Echo is way too well equipped in the breast department, this gal went just about as far the other way. If she had any, I didn’t notice them. Besides, I’d starve to death on the kind of things she eats. Look, I’m getting to the point where I don’t think I’d mind a nutcase for a girlfriend, so long as it was the right nutcase. She sure wasn’t.”

After he ended the phone call, he hoped he hadn’t upset Jill by not clicking with this girl. She and Greg were becoming friends of sorts – married friends, it was true, but he was building the kind of friendships that would sustain him in what was a strange town. By the time he added it up, between the Masons, the Hotchkisses, the Bolenbaughs, and Echo, Corey, and Gwen, he realized he was building a network of casual friends that already exceeded the one he’d had in Wychbold. With that to sustain him, he didn’t see a real imperative need to get married or even to have a serious girlfriend, at least until the time was right and he found someone who suited him.

The weather warmed up nicely the following weekend, the first one in April. He’d been waiting for months for a good short-sleeve weather weekend day, as he had something to do. He loaded up rags, a bucket, and other useful tools and drove over to the storage shed where the Triumph had been parked since before the first of the year. It seemed to have gotten through the winter all right, but it was also clear he hadn’t done all that good a job of cleaning it up when he’d come to Fort Collins in the first place. A little to his surprise, it started right up, so he loaded his gear and drove to a drive-through car wash to give it a serious cleaning.

After he’d given it a serious wash-down, he pushed it out into the sunlight – it was an older English car after all, so didn’t run worth a damn when it was damp – and started in on the detailing and polish job. It was a pleasant day, and he was in no hurry; there were few things he enjoyed more than just spiffing up the car. Of course, he remembered the time when Chelsea had joined him in the project last summer, getting her swimsuit wet, smiling and laughing, and once again he would have liked to have her with him.

There were others out there doing the same thing, including a gal who was washing an older Corvette. She was blonde, pretty, and bright, and they talked cars for a while – she seemed to know what she was talking about, so that made it even more of a pleasure. He was giving some thought about asking her to lunch or dinner, but gave up the thought when she mentioned she was cleaning up the car as a present for her boyfriend.

Well, so much for that, he thought. It just showed once again that the good ones were already taken. It sure would have been nice to have a girl who would wash and polish a guy’s car for him, just as it was nice that Corey had a girl who would pose for hot photos for him. He just wasn’t having that kind of luck, and that was that.

At least when he was done, he fired up the Spitfire – the ignition had dried out – and drove around town a little, and even up into the mountains for a ways, not pushing it very hard. The car seemed to get along all right at the higher altitude, and he hoped to have a lot of fun driving it around over the summer.

And maybe the summer would bring him more luck in the girlfriend department, too, although right at the moment it seemed like too much to wish for.

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