Sunday, August 24, 2014
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A Perfect Punishment Partnership
Published: Jul 26, 2014
Words: 23,569
Category: general
Orientation: M/F
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OPENING EXTRACT
A Perfect Punishment Partnership
I remember that fateful day vividly. The previous afternoon, I'd made a routine stop at Wal-Mart on my way home. While there, I ran into a friend who wanted to know if it was true that the county health department was going to shut me down because of unsanitary conditions and a rodent infestation. Of course that was total nonsense! But if such a story got around, it would cost me a lot of business even though there was no truth in it. I asked him where he heard that, and with a few phone calls, I was able to trace the malicious rumor back to its likely source. Kristi Mason! I should have known. If customers avoided my place, many of them would buy from her instead.
I'll go back to the beginning. When I was a boy, my dad opened a produce stand at a crossroads just outside of town. He started selling fresh fruits and vegetables from local farms, and business was pretty good. When I was old enough, I started helping out on weekends and afternoons after school. Dad hired a lady to help us and we opened a snack bar on the side, and also sold home-made baked and canned goods. We put up a small building and had a store in the back, with the open-air produce stand out front.
Then, when I was about fifteen, Tom Mason came along and opened his produce stand directly across the road from us. My dad was furious. There was plenty of business for one produce stand to operate, but not for two. Of course, there was nothing he could do about it. It's a free country and Mason had a legal right. But Dad went from making a good living to barely staying afloat. He asked and then offered to pay Mason to move somewhere else. After all, Dad had a permanent building and Mason only had an open-air stand under a tent. But he refused, claiming there was no other reasonable location where he could set up. He and Dad argued numerous times and became bitter rivals.
Tom Mason had a daughter, just a year younger than me, who helped him at his stand. Her name was Kristi, and she was a cute kid, kind of skinny at the time, with light brown hair and a few freckles. But I couldn't like her because she was the enemy. We would look across the road and make faces at each other. It was childish, I know. But it got to be a habit every time we'd see each other. Then she got to be a couple years older and started... uh... 'filling out', if you know what I mean. If she had been anyone else other than Tom Mason's daughter, I'd have been all over her, asking for a date. She had a really nice ass! In the summer, she'd wear short cutoff jeans, and let me tell you, Daisy Duke had nothing on Kristi Mason!