Chapter 14: Calm After The Storm

Calm After the Storm

“Hey Kaley, how was your weekend?” Kaley opened my truck’s door and climbed into the vehicle. It was two minutes after seven in the morning – I was a little bit late.

“Ah, decent. Yours?”

“Awesome here. Even going to work seems awesome to me. Those damn AP exams…I’m still waking up smiling because I don’t have to touch them ever again.” I said as I backed quickly out of her driveway. It was spring, which meant crappy parking if you didn’t get to the school by 7:15. Which meant I had to go 6-7 miles in 10 minutes. “Do anything interesting?” I asked her, taking a left out of her track and onto the main road.

“Not really. Colin and I saw a movie.”

“Are you two dating yet?”

“Yeah, we are now. He asked me finally last night.”

I took a right at the next intersection and got up to my usual sixty in a fifty five speed limit. I waited for her to continue, and realized that was all she was going to say about it.

“Sleeping any better?” I asked her, reaching over to change the radio station, which was blaring car and antique commercials at us.

“Nope, of course not. I slept about five hours last night.”

“Me too. But, Roger called around one and we talked until two thirty, so its alright for me.”

“Colin didn’t call me in the middle of the night, I would have killed him. But he called around ten and kept me up for a while, so I didn’t really sleep that well. He would not let me get off of the phone!”

“Well, you’re lovable. I mean, look at how much time we used to spend on the phone together.”

“I don’t have that much time in a normal day anymore. I don’t even know what its like to juggle work between all that, seeing as I don’t have a job.”

Kaley’s not having a job meant that she had no money. Which meant that she couldn’t have her own vehicle, because she couldn’t afford to pay for gas. Which basically meant, well, she was stranded at home for most of her spare time.

“Are you working tonight?” Kaley asked me, and I shook my head. I glanced at the clock. A mile or two more in four minutes. It could be done. Vaguely, I wondered how fast I had been going to get that much time for getting to school. No cops or deer around, I suppose it didn’t really matter.

“I have to work tomorrow though.” I admitted as I began the long, slower route into the campus.

“That sucks.”

“Yup. Shelving books for a living, gotta love it. The best part is, I’m going in right after Charles, and he has no fucking clue what he’s doing. He does half of the work that any of the girls do, and he does it messier than us. I don’t know what he does with all his time.”

“I think you’ve mentioned that before.” Kaley teased me. Everyone around knew that, as an employee, I hated Charles’ habits as a Library Page. I had nothing against him personally – just he sucked as an employee.

I pulled into school in front of a car in the other lane taking a right exactly a minute before 7:15. I claimed one of the last decent parking spaces with success. Mission accomplished.

“What do you have today?” I asked Kaley as I locked the truck.

“Uh…Gym, Math, English, Public Speaking.”

“Psych, Choir, Math and Gym, here.” I filled in my schedule for her as we walked towards the school.

“So, I have a question.” I asked her.

“What’s that?”

“Who do you think owns the copyright to the black silhouette of the deer on the yellow warning sign?” I laughed. I really was curious though. Who drew the original deer warning sign?

“I’m not even going to answer that, Storm.” She said after stopping her burst of laughter. I held the school door open. “Who cares, anyway?”

“I was just curious.”

“You ask some of the stupidest questions sometimes.”


Lunch in our school occurs during one of three times. Our schedules are broke into what’s called block scheduling. We have A, B, C and D days at our school, cycling. Each day has four periods. So a common A day schedule would be today’s for me – Psychology, Choir, Math and Gym. Our first class runs from 7:35-9:00. Our second from 9:06-10:31. Third period runs from 10:37-12:42. That block is split into three different lunches. Fourth runs from 12:48-2:12. So you either have first lunch, 10:37-11:17, Second lunch – 11:17-11:57, or third lunch which runs until 12:42. Most of my days, including this one, I have second lunch. Everyone knows that third lunch is the biggest, and second lunch is the smallest. First lunch is in between because some classes, like gym, need to go for the entire 85 minutes.

Most of this year, sometimes because I had homework, sometimes because I had extracurricular activities to pursue, I ate lunch and then went to the library. And since I was going to the library, I generally stopped and made a phone call to Roger. It was easiest, considering I could check to make sure he was still alive, and make sure he was having a good day. As I may have mentioned before, I had fallen for him long before we were actually dating. This was one such phone call.

Before I show you our conversation, I have to point out a little known fact. The phone that he was using at that time rang exactly four and a half times, or for 32 seconds. The message machine kicked on at thirty-two seconds, no matter what. So, I had it timed nearly perfectly, where I could hang up before I heard that awful message machine telling me to leave a message in its computer generated voice. Sad? A little bit.

“Speak, and it better be good.” He sounded angry or frustrated, maybe tired.

“Hey, sexy.”

“Oh.” He paused, and his voice went up to its normal octave, at least when he was around me. He sounded less intimidating that way. Personally, I think his natural voice is hot. Hearing it actually turns me on regardless of how he’s feeling to cause him to have that voice – sad, angry, frustrated, lonely…

“Hey baby.” He continued. “Can you hang on a second?”

“Sure.” I waited. Normally the most interesting things happen after he says that phrase. I heard in the background:

“Hey, mother fucker, you get your ass out of here if you’re just gonna fuck around all day. The boss doesn’t pay you to stand there and drink soda.”

“Pop.” I softly corrected him. His attention turned back to me.

“I know you did not just correct my proper English in exchange for your weird Yankee dialect. No, not like that! Oh Jesus Christ!” I heard the phone drop to his waist, and I waited patiently. “Careful, okay, easy and gently set it down. Don’t worry, I’m right here, you ass, I’m not going to let you drop it. You ok? Alright. Now you sit tight, I have to finish this phone call.”

I heard a small rustle, and then Roger picked the phone back up. I was laughing, gently, trying to cover it up.

“Hard day at work? I can leave you alone if you want.”

“No, baby, just one of these idiots doesn’t work, and the other one thinks he’s superman, which leaves me to clean up after them.”

“Isn’t that why you’re the foreman?” I asked him. To his credit, a lot of the time the people that worked under him were exceptionally idiotic, but that’s why he was paid.

“I guess. How’s your day going, baby?”

“Eh, alright. No worse than usual. Yours?”

“Besides that little incident, its been going pretty well. Hang on…Sit the fuck down man! You didn’t just drop three hundred pounds on your fucking head for fucking nothing! Sorry, I’m kind of busy. Can we talk tonight?”

“Of course. I was just callin’ to say I love you.”

“I love you too, beautiful.”

“You’re cute.”

“Aww, no I’m not. I’m mean and grrr.”

“Sure you are. Liar.”

“You did not just call me a liar.”

“Yup. Whatcha gonna do, spank me?”

“Right over my knee, just like a little girl.”

At this moment, I felt the familiar twinge inside that accompanied such comments. Its such a beautiful feeling. Guys often complain about being turned as being painful. For women however, being turned on and not satisfied can, in some cases, vastly improve their mood and reduce any pain they have.

“Okay baby, you obviously didn’t like that, so I’m gonna go back to helping these fuckers since they can’t do it themselves.”

“Okay, I love you.”

“I love you too. Bye, sexy.”

“Bye.”

I hung up the phone with the usual smile that I had when I was talking to him. I turned around and went the final few feet into the library to spend the rest of my lunch break. Christy mimed a squeal and ran over to me, giving me a hug. She whispered to me, so as not to alert the presence of “The Raptor” – our school librarian.

“You were just talkin’ to him, weren’t ya?”

“Yeah. He had someone nearly kill themselves while he was talking to me. It was amusing to listen to him yell. Granted, its cute too.”

“You have the weirdest idea of cute.” She complained. She grabbed my hand and led me to where her and Steve were sitting.

“So, anything new?” I asked Steve as I sat down. He rolled his eyes and shrugged, Steve-speak for ‘nothing but Christy’s antics’.

“There’s a few comics that are good. And we decided to look up the most random facts we could, out of boredom. But that’s about it.” Christy said, a little too loudly. The “raptor” looked up from her book and sent a glare from hell towards us. I smiled sweetly at her, as did Christy.

“What about with her? D’you eat lunch in here again, or did she catch you?”

“No, I finished it outside the library.” Christy refused to go into the school cafeteria, claiming it was grimy and too noisy. I didn’t really mind, but I always tuned stuff out. “I don’t see why she gets so excited about it. We’re not anywhere near the books, I don’t have a drink, and I always clean up after myself.”

“Well its partly her co-workers that get on her about it, you know.” I suggested. The other people were just as bad as the official librarian. She just caught all the blame for it.

“Yeah, I suppose. Why do they have to be so damn bitchy all the time?”

“Well they have to deal with whiny brats that don’t really want to be there for eight hours a day, five days a week, forty weeks a year. I’d be a bitch too.” Steve commented, and I burst out laughing.

“Steve, you may be straight, but you ARE a bitch. Get over yourself.”

“At least I’m not sixty.” He said, grinning. I rolled my eyes, pulling my bag up to my lap.

“First of all, my boyfriend is,” I looked towards the circulation desk, making sure the librarians weren’t listening, “twenty eight. Second of all, he’s hot. Third, I’m going to marry him.”

“We know. And you’re going to have lots of children because you’re going to fuck like rabbits for the first few years.” Christy piped in. The librarians were still oblivious.

“I’m not going to have lots of kids. I hate small children. They smell funny.”

“That’s just because you’re scared of them. You can admit it.” Steve said. I nodded.

“I am. They’re creepy.”

“You’re creepy.” Christy piped up, a goofy, adorable smile on her face. If I wasn’t straight with a boyfriend, and she wasn’t taken, I swear I might marry her.

“I love you, Christy. You make me want to hurt you sometimes, but I love you.” I beamed.

“Guys? Quiet down over there!” One of the librarians yelled, not angrily, but loudly. Aren’t librarians supposed to whisper? “You’re a little too loud.”

“Yes ma’am.” I called back across the room, just as loudly to the woman at the desk. She smiled at me, her gaze full of venom for a split second before she returned to reading her book. That was another thing – didn’t they have books to shelve or something?