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A Little Pity? Maybe More? | amativissimus | 3

 

You decide that nobody deserved to be treated like this, even if she didn't have a body that is an opportunity worth pursuing. You quickly make a 180 and jog back home. As you approach your house, Jerkboy zooms off in that over-priced muscle car of his, heading in the opposite direction from the Shanda took. You have a sudden flashback of the cartoon you once saw, of a bunch of teenage cuties shouting at a middle-aged man behind the wheel of a sports car, 'Sorry about your penis, mister!'

You hop in your Neon and pursue Shanda, who is wandering aimlessly through your shabbily respectable suburban neighborhood. You pull up next to her, and observe that tears are trickling silently down her face. She displays the fading remains of an old shiner, not nearly as spectacularly fresh as your own.

Quietly, you call out to her. "Shanda, it's me, Harry, from down the block. Can I take you somewhere? That idiot husband of yours just roared off to whereever assholes go after they throw out beautiful women!"

She seems to wake from her near-trance state. She smiles, seemingly involuntarily. "I don't know where he would have gotten the beautiful woman, but I've suspected he does have somebody on the side. God knows I don't seem to have been enough for him lately." She shakes herself, and comes around to slide into the passenger seat.

"I guess I better head home, if you can call it that. The one good thing about being with Mr. Excitement is that he doesn't like my books and things 'cluttering up the place,' so I can move out what little I don't have in storage before he comes back from whatever bar he is hanging out in lately. Another good thing, though; he isn't my husband, just my live-in. I must have had some tiny lick of common sense left in me."

She is speaking with little self-consciousness. You suspect that she's in a vulnerable state, in which sardonic humor serves as a brittle armor against breaking down completely; so you refrain from insisting on the 'beautiful woman' part right now. As you drive slowly back around, listening to her unload the bile of four years of a crappy relationship, you study her in a series of sidelong glances.

You're surprised at yourself for missing just how lovely a woman was living in your vicinity, even if you respected yourself too much to break up somebody's marriage. She is a well-built redhead, cuddly, not skinny; you like 'em like that. Her long, straight hair is rather unkempt right now, but she would clean up well. Her face is a delight, from those lips that you'd fantasized about to her now-dimmed hazel eyes. That shabby but clean housecoat does nothing to conceal her fine figure and creamy skin.

When you get back to her house, she hesitates. "Look, Harry: I don't know when Wayne will be back, and I don't know what kind of condition he's going to be in. I hate to impose even more on a near-stranger, but... could you stay here while I get dressed and try to pack up what little life he's left me here?"

 

Do you stay with her?

 
 

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