The more Kyle looked at the airline schedules and examined things in his mind, he realized that he wasn’t going to be able to make it to Arlington in less than ten or twelve hours. Still, he wanted to get there as quickly as possible, at least partly so Chelsea wouldn’t have time to change her mind, and partly to be there in case some kind of trouble arose.

The best option he could come up with from his computer screen was a flight leaving Denver before dawn, which came early this time of year. That meant he’d have to leave Fort Collins not long after midnight, but even with renting a truck in Columbia he ought to be in Arlington by mid-afternoon. A quick look at alternatives was not as promising.

He really hated to bother his boss this late, although the sky was still light given the time of year. But Bob had been about as aware of his problem as anyone else, although they hadn’t talked a great deal about it. The hell with it, he thought. He didn’t feel like screwing around and wasting time.

It only took a moment to call Bob at home. “So what’s up, Kyle?” his boss asked when he was called to the phone.

“Something has come up with my girlfriend in South Carolina. I need to go pick her up as soon as possible. I can get on a flight out of Denver in a few hours, but that means I’m going to have to duck out of work tomorrow, and probably not be back until the middle of the week sometime.”

“Well, I don’t see any problem with it,” Bob replied. “You’ve got vacation time hanging over from when you were at your old plant, don’t you?”

“I don’t want to say I’m maxed out, but it’s getting up there. I haven’t taken much of it.”

“Then take some of it. What does your desk look like?”

“There’s nothing pressing, and if something comes up I’m sure Andrea can handle it.”

“Then go get your girl,” Bob laughed. “But you probably ought to call Andrea and let her know what’s happening.”

“I’ll do that, and thanks. See you the middle of next week.”

“Take your time, and have some fun with your girl on the way.”

Kyle hadn’t doubted that Bob would approve. He could always have called in sick or something but it was at least courteous to let him know, he thought as he turned to the computer and started scheduling a flight. The airline website was slow and obnoxious, and while he worked at it he called Andrea.

“What’s happening, Kyle?” she asked when she heard his voice. “I’ve been talking with Gwen, and she seemed upset.”

“I’m not sure what happened myself, but apparently she doesn’t want her photo taken for any reason,” he replied. “I figured it was too much trouble to dig into why.”

“She said something about that, but I don’t know why she would be so upset, either. Give it a little time, and it’ll blow over.”

“I’m not worried about that now,” he said as he clicked another button on the airline website. On this short notice the prices were discounted, but it was still going to cost some serious bucks. That was secondary in his mind right now; he had plenty of credit on his credit card. “I just got off the phone with Chelsea,” he went on. “I don’t have the time to get into the reasons for it, but I’m leaving in a few hours to bring her here.”

“Bring her here?” Andrea asked in obvious amazement. “I thought she was stuck in South Carolina.”

“So did I, and so did she. But she wants to come here, and I want to get there quick enough to keep her from changing her mind. I squared it away with Bob, but you’re going to have to watch the office until the middle of the week, Wednesday or possibly Thursday.”

“I can do that. It’s not a big problem and I’ve done it before. There shouldn’t be anything coming up that I can’t handle. But what brought this on?”

“It’s a long story and I’m not totally sure about it myself,” he replied. “Look, I’m sorry about Gwen, I never intended to hurt her. I mean, she knows I’m a photographer, so even as quiet as she is I would have thought she would have said something before this. I’ll see if I can apologize when I get back.”

“Yes, it might be easier if you waited a few days anyway. Kyle, I’m sorry it didn’t work out between the two of you I thought there might be a possibility, given enough time. But I’m very happy to know that Chelsea is coming here to be with you. I’ve watched you mooning over her for months, and you were so frustrated with the fact that you thought none of the girls you met could hold a candle to her. This is the best possible outcome.”

“I hope so,” he replied. “Like I said, I’m not very clear about the situation down there in South Carolina, but I’m going to be glad to have her out of there and here with me. I never thought it would happen.”

“Just be glad it has. See you next week, Kyle.”

A few hours later, and as ready as he could be with the short notice, Kyle got in the pickup and drove down to the Denver airport. The wait in the terminal was agonizingly long, but eventually he was on a plane, carrying only a single small carry-on with a few clothes and his shaving stuff. Unusual for him, he didn’t even have a camera with him. Getting to Chelsea and getting her out of Arlington as quickly as he could was the main thing on his mind.

The wait caused by the layover in Chicago was longer than he would have liked, but just a few minutes after noon he grabbed a taxi at the Columbia airport and had it take him to a truck rental place he’d spotted on the Internet. The rental company website had a special on car dolly rentals, and the cost was cheap enough that he decided it would be worth it to have Chelsea in the truck with him rather than have them drive separate vehicles. It would give them a lot of time to catch up with each other after their months of separation.

So it was that in the middle of the afternoon, he pulled the truck and car dolly up in front of her house in Arlington, where he’d moved her in eight months before. It was hotter than blazes, much hotter than Colorado, and the intense humidity didn’t make the situation any easier on him. That was just going to add to his joy in getting her out of town.

When she saw the truck pull up, she came to the door to greet him. Kyle was pleased to see that she was wearing one of her more diminutive tie-on monokinis. Now that was the Chelsea he knew and loved! “My God, Kyle, you’re here already. It’s so good to see you,” she cried, running out to greet him.

“It’s good to see you, Chelsea,” he smiled as he took her in his arms. It felt so good to hold her again! It had been far too long since he’d seen her, since he’d held her. “Is what you’re wearing because it’s hot, or because you’re glad to see me?”

“Both,” she laughed. “Besides, if anyone from the library board drops by to complain about my leaving on short notice I wanted to show them that I’m not their prim and proper little librarian anymore.”

“Good for you. So did I win?”

“Win what?”

“You said you’d be packed before I got here. Did I make it?”

“You won. Not by much, but you won in spite of my staying up all night to work on it. I would have been ready but I had to spend several hours running around town canceling stuff and doing what I could to piss people off.”

“Did you manage that?”

“Not as many as I wanted, but I did a pretty good job with those I got to.”

“Good. Let me change into some shorts and I’ll start hauling stuff out to the truck. With any kind of luck we can be out of this town by sundown.”

“It won’t be soon enough for me, Kyle.”

A few minutes later Kyle had on a pair of running shorts. He unhooked the car dolly from the truck, backed it up to the porch, and started carrying things out. It was a sweaty chore in the South Carolina summer heat, but he wasn’t joking that he wanted to have her out of town by sundown, even if it was no further than a motel in the next town. It would be unfair to say he was frantic about it, but he wasn’t wasting time either, except for an occasional stop at the water faucet to rehydrate a little. In only a couple hours, sometimes with her helping to carry things, he had the majority of it in the truck.

The end was getting into sight when a big, jacked-up pickup truck with a loud diesel exhaust pulled to a stop in front of the house. “Oh, shit,” Chelsea said. “It’s that asshole Pettis. I didn’t want to deal with him again.”

“Looks like we don’t have much choice,” he said. “This is a time to stand, not to run.”

Pettis came storming across the lawn to where Chelsea and Kyle were standing on the porch, both holding boxes of her stuff. He was just as fat and ugly and obnoxious as Chelsea had claimed. “Miz Walsh, I got to have a word with you about all the lies you been spreadin’ aroun’ town about me.”

All of a sudden Kyle realized how to handle this, and it wasn’t something he would have thought of in advance. “Anythin’ you got to say to her you can say in front of me, you fuckin’ cracker,” he said with a thick southern accent, in a tone that would have started a fist fight in any country-western honky-tonk within five hundred miles of Arlington, South Carolina.

“This is ’tween me and her,” the fat man replied, in a similar tone of voice. “I don’t need no goddamn Yankee tellin’ me how to handle our women.”

“Who the fuck you callin’ a Yankee, boy?” Kyle sneered. “I hear’d what you done said to my lady, and where I come from, that’s a shootin’ offense. Now get yoah ass outta here ’fore I haveta do somethin’ about it.”

To Chelsea it looked like World War III – or maybe the Second Civil War – was about to break out on the lawn at any second. Pettis flexed his fists a couple times with his arms hanging at his side, then abruptly turned and walked away, muttering, “Ain’t worth the fuckin’ trouble.” In a moment he was in his pickup truck and burning rubber away from the curb.

“Now you see what I mean,” Chelsea said softly. “But Kyle, where did you learn to talk like that? I never heard you do it before.”

“It got pretty lonely out there in Colorado at times,” he said. “Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep I’d turn on the TV and watch old Westerns in the wee small hours.”

“My God, you were magnificent, Kyle. It was like John Wayne himself was standing there.”

“John Wayne would never use language like that, at least not on camera.” He shifted back to the fake accent, dropped his voice down a little and added, “Let’s get done loadin’ and get you out of heah, Missy.”

“Oh, God, I love you, Kyle.”

They were pretty close to done and the sun was getting low in the sky when a car pulled up in front of the house, and two older women got out, they didn’t look particularly happy, either. “Is this going to be more trouble?” Kyle asked in a whisper.

“No, these are good people,” she replied. “You don’t have to get all John Wayne on them.”

The two women came up to the porch. “Miss Walsh,” one of them said. “We just wanted to come and tell you we’re sorry you have to leave us this soon.”

“I hated to do it and leave you hanging,” Chelsea replied courteously. “But things weren’t going to get any better, and they were going to get worse if I stayed.”

“You’re probably right,” the other woman said. “But it’s caused trouble all the way around.”

“It was Frank and Mary Beth who caused the trouble.”

“We still have a majority on the board,” the first woman said. “I don’t think it would be any trouble to arrange to fire Mary Beth. I can see she was the big cause of the problems, anyway.”

“True, but you’d still have Frank causing me trouble, and even more than before,” Chelsea told them. “It would have only gotten worse. I think you’d better look for another librarian, and maybe someone from around here so there wouldn’t be all that ‘damn Yankee’ stuff floating around. Get rid of Mary Beth, and then you might be able to work out your troubles. It’s either that, or you’re going to be in real trouble.”

“That may have to be what it comes to,” the woman replied. “There is a possibility that Pettis could be off the board, and that would simplify things a lot. His wife is not real happy with him right now. I mean, sleepin’ in his truck not happy. I mean, the word is all over town and it got to her, and this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. She’s about had her fill of it.”

“Good for her,” Chelsea grinned. “Would you tell her from me that I’d be willing to tell a judge what he said to me? It may be hard, since I’ll be in Colorado, but I’d likely be willing to come back for that if I had to.”

“Colorado? I thought you were from Michigan.”

“My home is in Colorado now,” Chelsea grinned, and took Kyle by the arm. “At least as soon as my fiancé gets me there. He may be even less happy with Frank than Frank’s wife is.”

“Well, good luck to you, Miss Walsh. I hope it won’t be necessary, but I’ll pass along what you said. Thank you for trying to make things better for us.”

“I tried, I really did, but it wasn’t good enough. I’m sorry, but maybe you can work things out if I’m not around to stir the pot.”

“Maybe so, Miss Walsh. Good luck to you.”

“And good luck to you ladies.”

Kyle waited until the two women had gone before he turned to Chelsea and said, “Fiancé? When did that happen?”

“It was just to make my point,” she said. “But I didn’t think you’d mind, and I know I don’t.”

“I hadn’t thought it quite that far out,” he smiled. “But since you mentioned it, you might have something there.”

“I think so,” she grinned. “Let’s not talk about it now. Let’s finish loading and get out of here.”

They were finished in the next half-hour. While Chelsea made one last pass through the house to make sure she hadn’t left anything behind, Kyle hooked the dolly onto the back of the truck, ran the front wheels of her car up onto it, and tied the car down. She came out of the house still wearing her almost-there monokini, threw a small duffel bag into the front seat of the truck, and got into the seat. “That’s it,” she said. “Let’s get out of this goddamn town. I have never been so happy to leave a place in my life, and that includes my folks’ place down in Texas.”

“Suits the hell out of me,” he agreed as he started the truck. “I’ve never been quite so happy to get someone out of a place, either.”

They drove down the main street of Arlington, and were out to the edge of town before anything more was said. “Damn it, Kyle,” she said sadly. “I really wanted to make a go of it here. I wanted to prove that I knew what I’m doing, and that I could help people, and that I could make a difference. I tried, Kyle, I really did, but I had to fight for everything I managed to get done here, and now it’s all going to get thrown away. Now, in spite of everything, I’m leaving with my tail between my legs, and it hurts.”

“All I can say is to put it behind you. The important thing is that you tried, Chelsea. Maybe you did make a difference. Maybe those ladies will be able to use this to make their point and bring in someone who won’t have the baggage hanging over their head that you had.”

“Yeah, you’re right, and I know I’m just being down about it. I should be happy that I’m leaving town with you, and I am. It’s just that right now it’s a little hard to feel it. I think I’ll feel better the farther away from that place we get. How long is this going to take, anyway?”

“Good question. It’s sixteen hundred miles by road or thereabouts, so it ought to take at least three days, not counting today. This rig is going to be a little slow, especially towing the car, and we’ll be going through Nashville, St. Louis, and Kansas City, so we might want to stretch it out to four. I don’t want to go too far tonight, other than to just get a ways out of Arlington. I didn’t get a hell of a lot of sleep last night, and then only in small pieces here and there, so I’m bushed.”

“I must be as tired as you are, and that may be the reason I’m down,” she replied. “I told you I was up all night packing, and that’s no lie. All I could think about was that you were coming for me and I couldn’t make myself lie down. I don’t know why I’m awake now. Kyle, I don’t like the thought of putting you off, but I think maybe we’d better just sleep tonight. I mean, if you want to make love there’s nothing I’d like better, but I think I’d be too tired to do you justice. That doesn’t mean I can’t sleep snuggled up close to you, just so I can be sure you’re really with me and that this isn’t a dream.”

“Funny, I was just thinking the same thing. Let’s stop somewhere, get a good dinner, a good night’s sleep, and then a good breakfast in the morning. Then, maybe tomorrow we can make some sense and have a little fun getting things back the way they’re supposed to be.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” she agreed. “If you say we’ve got the time, let’s find some places to stop and shoot some Chastity photos, just to get things back the way they’re supposed to be.”

“That’s fine with me. In fact, I figured that’s why you’re still wearing that monokini.”

“That’s mostly because I didn’t want to spend the energy to change,” she admitted. “I’ve got some shorts and a T-shirt in the bag. I can put them on when we go in someplace.”

“The only problem is that I didn’t bring a camera.”

“I still have mine,” she grinned. “It’s packed near the top. I’ve got a bunch of swimsuits in the bag, and more back in the back where they ought to be easy to get to.”

“Now, that’s the Chelsea I know and love. See, it’s getting better already.”

“Yes it is, Kyle. It really is.”

Less than an hour out they found a big chain motel – one of those with a reputation for quality and a price tag to match. That was just fine with Kyle; this whole thing was going to be expensive, but he had little doubt that it would be worth it. She pulled on the shorts and T-shirt a little reluctantly, but at least realized she had to for the sake of propriety. They got a room, and went to get dinner. They were exhausted by now, and a little sore from the hectic rush to get the truck loaded.

Their dinner was fine, even though they were almost too tired to eat it, but at least it perked them both up a little bit. “You know,” she commented as they were on their way back to their room, “they have a hot tub here, and I’ll bet we’d both feel better if we let it relax us a bit. It might make us fall asleep easier.”

“I don’t think I’m going to have any trouble falling asleep, but I’m up for it if you are. I didn’t bring a swimsuit, but I suppose I could wear these shorts. The question is, do you have a swimsuit you could use?”

“Of course, I have a swimsuit, Kyle. What a stupid question.”

“I mean one you’d be willing to get wet in public.”

“Oh, I see what you mean. I’m sure I have something in the bag, and if not there must be a couple of hundred swimsuits out in the truck.”

“How many do you have, anyway?”

“I’m not sure any more. Lots.”

“Some people collect stamps, and some people collect coins, but I have a girlfriend who collects swimsuits. That seems like more fun than stamps and coins to me.”

“I think it is.”

Kyle had to use the bathroom while she changed clothes since apparently the monokini wasn’t something she wanted to wear in the hot tub. When he came out, she was wearing absolutely the dowdiest swimsuit he’d ever seen her wear; it had a high neckline front and back, and a skirt. “That doesn’t look like it’s exactly the thing for a Chastity White photo shoot,” he commented when he saw it.

“I re-cut it for one, but I could never figure out how to use it,” she smiled. She turned her back to him and lifted the skirt, to reveal that the panty part underneath was a rather thin thong. She turned around and showed him that it didn’t cover a heck of a lot more in the front.

“I see what you mean,” he grinned. “Chelsea, sometimes there’s no stopping you. Let’s go get that one wet in the hot tub.”

It felt good to be in the hot tub with her, to have her up close to him. While he was still so tired he was having trouble staying awake, it seemed as if his world was getting back to where he thought it ought to be. He had Chelsea back, and it looked like she was going to be a keeper this time.

But they still had some problems. He could feel it, but he couldn’t quite get his finger on it. He was sure she was down about having to run from a job she’d long dreamed of having, and it couldn’t feel good to her. What was worse, even though he was sure he’d have her with him, he felt he didn’t know what was supposed to come next. There were things that had to be thought out, but he was too tired to deal with them right now.

Maybe it didn’t matter. They’d have four days in the truck to talk and brainstorm things out, and something told him that there was a good answer lying there right under the surface, if only he could figure out what it was. Finally, he shoved the thought aside. This was no time to worry about that, now that he had Chelsea back again.

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