Unexpectedly, Milo - Matthew Dicks [33]
That old guy is one lucky man. I hope he knows it.
Milo thought that he understood the scene better than most. He knew that as people become older, many begin to feel a loss of control over their lives. Their mind and body begins to fail them and their families stop relying on them as they once did. In response, they try to find ways to reassert the control that they once possessed. It was entirely possible that taking a crowbar to Biker Dude’s pickup truck had been a way for that old guy to remind the world that he wasn’t in the grave just yet.
And Milo suspected that Freckles was right about the wife too. Understanding and supporting her husband in a moment like that was unusual. Special. The kind of relationship that few couples enjoyed. Milo suddenly found himself envious of this man whom he had never met.
The screen went black once again, and when Freckles returned, she was still on the bed, pillows piled in the same mountainous formation as before. Milo marveled at the number of decorative pillows that women seemed to require on a bed.
You know what? I think this needs to be for me. My visions of posting this diary online might have been a little crazy. I’ve been sitting here for the last fifteen minutes, thinking of all the things that I’d like to share on this video but can’t because I plan to let other people watch. Maybe that’s not what I should be doing. Maybe this should just be for me. At least for now. I can’t keep a diary that excludes all of my secrets, my own windshield-bashing moments that I don’t want the world to know about. It wouldn’t be worth my time. So I think that for now, this will be for my eyes only. Maybe someday, when I’m good and dead, someone can watch this.
Freckles paused for a moment, let out a deep sigh of relief, smiled, and then added:
You know what else? I suddenly have a lot to say.
Milo pressed the stop button on the camera and set it down on the coffee table. In a single moment, things had drastically changed. Prior to Freckles’s decision to start recording just for herself, Milo had justified his eavesdropping with the expectation that the videos were intended to be made public someday. But now the rules had changed. Who knew what Freckles would share next?
The color of her underwear (Milo couldn’t bring himself to use the word panties without feeling stupid)?
Her bra size (Milo guessed a 34B or C)?
Her voting record?
Bizarre bathroom rituals?
Secret sexual fantasies?
Incidents of undertipping waitresses?
The list of secrets that Milo kept from his closest friends and wife was long, and the idea that someone might come along and have access to all of them made him shudder. Could he now violate Freckles’s privacy in the same way?
Fortunately, in the midst of his thoughts, the phone rang. Milo picked it up and saw the phone number that had been his for more than three years. Christine was calling.
His decision on Freckles would have to wait.
chapter 9
Milo didn’t expect that his second first date with Christine would take place in his apartment, and neither did he expect it to end with sex against the kitchen wall. But his wife had requested the location for the date, apparently curious about how her husband was living, and before Milo had time to serve dinner, the two were half naked and trying desperately to stay upright while remaining effectively engaged in the task at hand. This was not Milo’s choice of position, to be sure. Had it been up to him, the two would have been in bed with the lights off, enjoying any of the more easily achieved positions that did not require the balance and agility that Milo was now mustering. Contrary to what was often displayed in movies, sex standing