Extreme Elvin by Chris Lynch

Author:Chris Lynch [Lynch, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0449-6
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-01-16T21:08:00+00:00

Bread

“PARPIES?” BARBARA ASKED. “PUTTIES? Elvin, I’m having trouble understanding you.”

I was handling the telephone with even more mastery than usual. Easy boy. Calm. Breathe. Better. Girls like it when a guy can breathe.

“Puppies,” I said, very calm, very breathy. Good, don’t start with the party thing. What kind of animal calls a girl for the first time and invites her to a filthy late-night orgy. That’s like second-date stuff.

Puppies, though. Puppies are another thing entirely. Puppies are the opposite of orgies. Bet you didn’t know that, did you?

“Hello,” she said. “Hello, Elvin? Are you still there?”

Guess I was working that out for a while.

“Ya, sorry. Puppies. I wanted to know if... you remember, the puppies I was telling you about, at the dance...”

“Right, the puppies.”

“Ya, the puppies...” I was really cruising now. This was going very well. Much better than I’d expected. You couldn’t even tell, probably, that I’d never done this sort of thing before. And just wait till her parents met me...

“Hello? Elvin, are you still...”

Whoops. “Puppies,” I said.

“Yes, we’ve established that,” Barbara responded. “Now whadya say we try laying a verb in there, huh, Elvin?”

Say. I like that. Peppery dame, isn’t she?

“Sure. Sure, I can do that. Ah, okay, puppies... gotta love ’em.”

Smooooth, there, Bishop. Straddle that line. Kiss them babies. Eat that apple pie. Say nothing she could possibly disagree with. “Gotta love puppies...”

“Make me,” she said.

Make me? Make me, love puppies? Holy smokes, what kind of a devil woman had I... I mean, Darth not liking puppies was one thing... I started squirming in my seat, nowhere to go, until I heard her giggling on the line. Whew.

“Are you calling me for a date, Elvin Bishop? Or are you trying to sell me a dog?”

“Well... ah... which one would you be more likely to say yes to?” Good thing you can’t hear sweat over the phone. I added a completely accidental and nervous-sounding ha-ha at the end. Dope. You never laugh at your own material. Jeez, this was so hard, it was so hard, why was it so hard? Like, boxing, hard. The bell, the bell, mercy where’s the bell?

“Lemme go see what I have in my piggybank,” she said.

That made me feel better. Good tension-breaking. Well-timed joke. God, there was something great about this person.

“Hey, good one, Bar—”

I stopped short at the sound of her actually dropping the phone on a hard surface.

“Hello?” I called hopefully. I heard her footsteps doppling away from the phone. “I can’t believe this,” I said out loud. “I didn’t really want her to—”

Stopped short again, wouldn’t you know. By more footsteps. These, however belonged to my mother, who was now bounding down the stairs.

I had not, up till this point, so much as mentioned Barbara’s name to my mother, which was something even I didn’t understand. Something wild was happening to me, and the more real Barbara was becoming to me, the more I felt like hiding from Ma. Not that that was possible. She knew something was up from the very first zing of the string of my heart, but I was not up to facing it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.