Community Service Read Free

which
she agreed to. If nothing else, it was a big and not very pleasant
job, and he was only here for four hours or so he said. She didn’t
really question it. Spring was well-advanced and quite frankly she
had been procrastinating.
    “ All righty then.” She
said it confidently enough.
    Marion desperately needed her coffee,
her paper, and a shower, in approximately that order.
    It was pretty much the same on any
given Saturday or Sunday.
    She was surprised by how dependent she
was on her little routine, as she patted him on his hard and
surprisingly high-off-the-ground bicep, turned and went into the
house to get her own drab and miserable little life back into some
semblance of order.
     
    ***
     
    She watched him briefly through a
crack in her bedroom window curtains, thinking she really ought to
get moving. He was down on hands and knees. But he had set to with
a will, and at least had some idea of what he was doing if the
little piles of dead greenery stacked here and there along her
herbaceous border were anything to go by. Not that she could see
well enough from here to see what they were. Turning away, she
caught a furtive look in the mirror of her vanity table.
    She smiled superciliously at herself
in passing.
    Bitch. You’d better put
some eyes in.
    She quickly showered, very much aware
that she was naked and there was a strange man in the backyard
tending to her flowers. The thought brought a grin. An exploratory
pinch of her nipples, and a light kneading of her breasts brought
some rather unwelcome answers to her unspoken questions.
    Oh, God, yes.
    That might
work.
    She could not deny the language of her
body. Marion shoved those thoughts aside and finished up her
ablutions in a hurried and determined manner. One could even say it
was a bit forced.
    It was a bit early in the year, and
most of the flowers really hadn’t come up yet.
    Toweling off quickly, she tried not to
fall into the trap, but sure enough, sooner or later, she had to
catch a glimpse of her eyes in the mirror. They had a sneaky look
in them. A guilty look.
    What in the hell are you
thinking?
    And just what in the hell do you
expect?
    And thank God it wasn’t that Alan
Deering guy from two or three weeks ago—what a piece of work that
one was. Deering would be upstate in a special place for about the
next fifteen years, hopefully longer.
    Once back in her bedroom,
and again very much aware of him still—she thought she heard
him breathing out
there from the exertion, she purposely ignored the small, two-inch
open chink in the curtains and flung off her robe.
    And there was that damned mirror
again.
    “ Clothes, clothes for the
day. What in the hell are we going to wear?”
    She settled for some khaki shorts,
quickly shortened into hot-pants by rolling the cuffs and
safety-pinning them into place. She had a white silk top, a
strapless bra, and she had some beige sandals. Dropping into her
seat in front of the vanity, she did a quick and bang-up paint-job
job on her nails, finger and toe, and then applied a bit of
matching lipstick. She ran a quick comb through her hair and it was
only then that Marion felt able to face the day. A little scent,
and an ankle chain, and some nice black pearl earrings to set off
her silky pale hair, and that was it.
    There was coffee, and the paper, and
the news channel, and it would come to her sooner or later, but
there had been something she desperately needed at the market. She
wasn’t really fooling anyone with that one, but she
tried.
    Doyle…Salvatore Doyle.
Who was he,
exactly?
    She peeked out the bathroom window
again, tempted to get rid of the bra, but she had to go out soon
anyways and it really wasn’t her personal style.
     
    ***
     
    There came a knock at the patio
door.
    “ Oh.” Her heart fluttered
again, and her still so young.
    She closed the kitchen cupboard door
and went over and slid it back.
    “ Yes?” Her tone was of
polite inquiry.
    The day was warming up and he had his
shirt off,