Nobody

Dinner and a Shower

It was dark outside, the sound of wildlife and insects coming in through the open windows as I stood by the stove, drinking sun-tea and cooking. I'd already made a salad, complete with fried and crumbled bacon, boiled egg slices, shredded cheese, and diced vegetables on top of lettuce. When I'd finished I'd put it in the crisper to chill and turned my attention to the main course.

As soon as we got home, Miss Lily-Rylee and I had unloaded the truck. She was happy that the fact she had muscle under those sweet soft curves didn't bother me. When I'd gotten winded, my chest burning, she'd told me to go inside and unloaded it herself.

We'd put the furniture together, laughing the whole time, as the afternoon went into evening. When she started working on the wiring for the two big LCD TV's I'd gone in and drilled the holes next to the desks, running the cable under the house to where she'd had me put the big Cat-5 cabling switch-box. She'd been surprised I knew what all that was.

I'd set up enough of them to remember back when I was Special Weapons.

Now I was cooking us dinner while she installed the operating systems on the computers and hooked them all up. She'd already hooked up the DVD players to the two televisions. The one in the frontroom was playing a movie I wasn't really paying attention to. The other TV had gone with the gaming computer in the bedroom right off the front room, which I'd decided was where I'd keep all the gaming stuff.

I'd bought two X-Boxes and a bunch of games. Some of them looked pretty cool. She'd had me buy wireless controllers and headsets even though I'd bought headsets for the computers.

Her enthusiasm was nice. It was refreshing, and I hated to admit it, but it was something I hadn't even known I was missing. It made her light up somehow.

"Goddamn that smells good," she said, leaving the bedroom. She moved up next to me. "Whatcha making?"

"Steak with fried onions and mushrooms on them, diced potatoes with peppers and onions, with steamed cauliflower that I'm going to pour cheese on," I told her.

"That's it, I'm eating over here from now on," she said, hopping up on the stood by the kitchen island. She poured herself a new glass of sun-tea and sipped at it. "It's the 'now we wait' part of installing an operating system."

I nodded. "I'm used to it being on the chipset or just a single terminate and stay resident program," I told her. "But back then, my buddy bought a hundred megabyte harddrive for like eight hundred bucks."

She whistled then giggled. "I can't believe you let me go crazy like that. Your rig is better than mine."

"Gonna make a difference when you, and I quote, pull my lungs out in Left 4 Dead?" I tipped some broth into the potatoes.

She shook her head. "Not really. I mean, that beast is overpowered as fuck, but in a year or two it will probably be normal."

I'd noticed she swore more when she talked about computers and gaming.

"So how come you didn't have me buy any computer games?" I asked her, stirring the potatoes with one hand and grabbing my cigarettes with the other.

"You've never heard of Steam?" She asked.

"I take it you don't mean like boiling water?" I said.

She explained it to me, even though I got it pretty quick I let her go through the whole spiel. Apparently download speeds had gone from Tony's 900 baud modem to being measured in the megabaud, which meant you could download an entire game in an hour or so. That allowed an online retailer to sell you a key to download the game.

Handy. Tony had always been replacing his floppy disks.

She stopped in the middle of explaining game microtransactions, staring at me through a cloud of cigarette smoke. "Why do you let me explain things when you've already figured them out?"