Free The Leap Year Boy by Marc Simon Page B

Miller. Look at you with those big brown eyes.”
    “Hi, Delia.”
    “What you gonna do, stand in the doorway? Come over here.”
    Delia’s dark bangs clung to her forehead. She wore her New York City hat and a red silky robe that hung down below her ankles, so that Abe couldn’t tell if she were wearing those dark stockings with the seams up the backs, but he sure hoped so.
    On the far wall of the flat was a glass and mirror breakfront, her mother’s, with a variety of porcelain figurines, also her mother’s, on the shelves. In the center of the room, over a faux oriental carpet, was a round coffee table with a fringed tablecloth and a photograph of Delia’s parents, sitting ramrod straight, three feet apart on a large stuffed sofa. Next to it was another photo, an eight-by-ten of Delia as a little girl in a buckskin dress, sitting on a pinto pony.
    Abe said, “Nice place.”
    Delia imitated his voice. “Nice place? That’s all you got to say to me after all this time?”
    “You look good, Dee.”
    She twirled a lock of hair around her finger. “Damn right I do. So what are you doing all the way over there? Come over here.” She tightened the sash of her robe so that her breasts rounded against the material. “You nervous or something? You look like you got the heebie-jeebies.”
    “No, I’m just…you know.”
    “Relax, Abe, I won’t bite. Unless you want me to.”
    Abe grinned. It was going to be all right. “That’s some nightgown.”
    “You like it?” She spun around. “Criminy Dutch, you men can be so weird sometimes. I thought you’d be all over me by now.” She turned her back to Abe. She took a cigarette from a glass box on the table. Before she could put it to her lips, she watched Abe’s hands slip over her breasts from behind. She pressed her hands over his, squeezing and massaging. She ground her buttocks against the front of his trousers, up and down, then in tight circles, her grip on his hands never relaxing. Abe thrust himself against her, and she moved her hips in rhythm. She pulled his right hand into her mouth and sucked his fingers. “Now, this is more like the Abe I know. You like that, don’t you? Did you miss me?”
    Abe grunted like a Neanderthal in heat. The sound excited her. Abe was a real man, muscle and rough whiskers, not like that prissy pants creep Devon, who was like a fancy dessert, and she was a meat and potatoes kind of gal.
    “Does your wife do this for you, does she do things for you like I do, does she?”
    The chapel bells at Glory Episcopal Church chimed one o’clock. Delia pulled Abe’s hands between her thighs and clamped them. “Does she do this for you? Does she?”
    Abe mumbled something about never, never.
    She pushed back hard against his thrusts. “Well, well, Mr. Man.” She turned and ran her hand against the front of his pants. “What do have we here?”
    “You know what it is.”
    She ran her fingernail over his fly. “Did you miss me?”
    “Ever since I heard you come back from New York, you were all I could think of. Hell, even before I knew you was back, not a day went by I didn’t think of you. But I figured it was over between us, that you were gone for good, and here I was, a married man with three boys.”
    “You should have left that pill years ago.” She stepped away. “So don’t ask me to feel sorry for you.”
    It hurt Abe to think that maybe it was true, his wife was a bitter pill now, and yet there had been a time before the boys were born, it seemed so long ago, when Irene had been playful, provocative and so pretty. But here he was with Delia Novak, and wasn’t that the truth. “All I’m saying is, well, compared to my life, you have it free and easy, you come and go as you please to New York and such, you have no responsibilities, you have no one to answer to.”
    Delia sat in a chair and crossed her legs, exposing most of her thigh. Her stockings gleamed in the lamplight.
    “We all have to answer to