• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

“Men need to—what?” I asked, lost.

“But I don’t want you to see her anymore. You understand?”

“I…who? Ms. Nuckeby?”

“Don’t even mention that slut’s name!”

“Um, all right.”

“So you won’t see her again?”

I glanced at Grandfather. Then back to Mindie.

“I’m not seeing her now.”

She smiled at me, and some of the darkness that had enveloped her seemed to lift.

“Thank you,” she said and dropped into my lap, putting her arms around my neck. She adjusted to make herself more comfortable, and me less so, managing to wedge her substantial chest under my chin. Being as she’d never so much as even bumped into me in the past, this was a bit of a shock, and I looked at her like I’d been pithed. (It is a great word.)

Smiling a bit sadly, she looked back and forth from one of my eyes to the other as if comparing their sizes and relative positions on my face. Eventually she decided they were more-or-less where they were supposed to be, or could be with minor plastic surgery, and she turned to Grandfather.

“You can bring in the others, now,” she told him.

He smiled—seemed almost relieved—and quickly opened the door to my den, brusquely waving in the rest of my family. They filed past him, gleeful, and most of them were eating snacks they had likely not been offered by Woodruff. My older brothers in particular were ravenously working over some week old chicken legs from somewhere in the back of my fridge which were skirting that razorthin line between ‘leftover’ and ‘natural laxative.’

“I can’t really be mad at you, I suppose,” Mindie told me, smiling and sniffing. “You don’t even know the real reason for my coming here tonight, do you?”

“I…er…no,” I admitted. “Not really.”

“I’ve decided to accept your proposal of marriage.”

“My…my…my what? My proposal of what?”

Suddenly I felt more naked than when I’d been naked. I looked at everyone in the room, and most of them were—more or less—smiling. All except Morgan, who couldn’t manage it around another large lollipop he’d found. But he still gave me the thumbs-up.

“What proposal of marriage?” I asked.

“The one Morgan told me about. The one he said you’d been wanting to give me all these years, and I—Oh, God, Corky! I had no idea!” She hugged me tightly, and her boobs cut off my air.

As she scrunched me, vise-like, I turned to Morgan—who slurped, winked, and mouthed the words, ‘You’re welcome.’ He held his hands out and made the universal symbol for gigantic breasts, nodded briefly toward Mindie, then grinned even bigger, and gave another thumbs-up. Blue spit dripped on my carpet, plopping down beside my brother’s greasy chicken-leg fragments.

“I’d just about given up on you ever even asking me out, and then this! I was over the moon! I wanted to come right away, and see you— start making plans, discussing dates.”

“But I did ask you out, Mindie. Many times. You always said ‘no.’”

“When did you ask me out?”

“Well—there was the time I invited you to the air show. But you said,” I screwed up my face in an annoyed and dismissive expression—not unlike how someone might look if they were having their face shoved forcibly up a baboon’s ass—that, I’m sure, paled in comparison to the one she had actually given me at the time. “No! Get away from me!”

“Well, why would I want to go to an air show?” she said, capturing the expression far better than I had. “Dirty planes and engine noise. Smelly gasoline everywhere. A date involves dining, Corky. Dancing. Gifts. Two people being seen spending romantic time together. Not jet fumes!”

“Well, there was the time I asked you to stroll with me that evening in Monaco by the sea…”

“In the sand? It was cold! I was wearing Manolo Blahnik’s, for God’s sake! A thousand dollars a pair! I thought you were being flip!”

“Not to my knowledge, no. I…”

“We’ll go on a proper date, Corky. Lots of them. I’ll show you what a proper date really is, and how much it should cost. Oooooooh, Corky.”

She kissed me. I almost managed to kiss her back before she pulled away and picked something