Community Service Read Online Free

Danish.
    If he dared to look, he might even see
she that she was blushing too.
     
     
    Act Two
     
    Piddling Along in
traffic

     
    Marion was piddling along in a long
traffic queue, patiently waiting for her interchange, a mile or so
up on the right, wondering if there was an accident up ahead. But
likely not, it’s just that it was always this way on a
Friday.
    It was the weekend again, much more
tolerable now that she had Albert to look forward to, and yet that
situation could not go on forever. She’d even considered calling
somebody somewhere and asking for a replacement for him.
    Get me some stinking old
wino, please. I don’t care if he can mow a lawn or not.
    It might get Albert out of her life
and out of her restless mind. It seemed unfair to either one of
them, or so she had decided. He really hadn’t done anything wrong.
No, it was her that had the problem.
    She had a hunch it would feel dreadful
and that it would just backfire anyway. This would prey on her mind
for the foreseeable future…
    She accepted the fact the man had a
bad back and his community service required light duties. She’d had
quite some time to observe him now. He really didn’t impress her as
a shirker. While never working hard, he’d cracked a sweat when the
situation called or it, and yet he was always careful not to
inflame old injuries.
    He had also gotten a lot done. As
spring wore into summer, all of her perennials were up, in full
bloom, and all the shrubs were fully in leaf, and the bedding
plants that she had picked out and they had planted together,
Marion getting down on hands and knees beside him, were taking just
fine.
    Marion was enjoying her
garden again, taking pride in the simple accomplishment and getting
her hands dirty in the process. Her legs were tanning up nicely,
and she had a bit of colour in her cheeks that she hadn’t seen much
of in recent years. She had a glint in her eye when she looked in
the mirror now, a guilty glint perhaps, but it was there and she was going
to make sure it didn’t go away again anytime soon.
    She even started to think of men other
than Albert, and she even began masturbating again.
    Her sex life had improved, compared to
the way it had been before, when she had to sort of remind herself,
sometimes as much as two or three weeks apart it had been
getting…but of course in order to turn someone else on, you had to
be able to turn yourself on.
    You had to be able to think and
respond in those terms, and she had been in the habit of
self-denial, a kind of remorseless self-sacrifice on the altar of
respectability.
    She had been hiding from
herself.
    What, was she thinking of running for
Congress or something?
    Yeesh.
    That was never in the program. Her
life was not a Norah Roberts novel.
    That whole notion, entertained from
time to time and not just by her, but some real, die-hard (or
blow-hard) political types, flattering intellectually as it was,
was just sublimation for something else, pure and simple
    Oh, she had her own self figured out by this
time, and pitied those who didn’t.
    Albert had been sick the week before.
She had definitely found herself at a loose end, with nothing to do
and no one to really talk to; except her sister in Rhode Island.
She’d even tried calling, but Peg was out and her husband Don, whom
Marion had met at the wedding and once or twice since, wasn’t in a
talkative mood. That wasn’t much good.
    That day, Marion found
herself in some zombie-like state. She recognized herself, halfway
across town, on some impulsive shopping trip, and going into a
lingerie store, one of the classier ones, and buying an armload of
frilly things. Some of which were innocent and some not so
innocent, thinking of him all the while.
    Argh.
    She remembered being so
grateful, coming out the door, that the sales clerk, about
twenty-five years her junior, didn’t ask if it was her
fucking anniversary or somebody’s birthday or something.
    So it went on, from weekend