Chapter One

 

Simone hated the flu. She hated anything which screwed up her careful schedule. Simone took comfort in familiarity. Everything in its time and place. She liked rules. She liked predictability. Which was why the world was such a frustrating place. Sickness threw all her plans and schedules into the trash.

Her work required an intense focus which made her excel at coding. She had her own intensity, a near-perfect memory, and over a hundred words per minute typing skill to let her command the more urgent jobs her employer assigned its most trusted employees. She'd gone to college - not university. But when she zoned out of the world and focused on the screen, on the task, with her fingers flying, the lines of code started to race up the screen almost non-stop.

People told her she ought to become independent, that she'd make more going after one-off jobs in the gig economy. But she needed predictability. Her company gave her that. They had an agreement. One job at a time. Nothing new till the last one was turned in. No changes in the middle of the job. No hassles. No pressure. No team meetings. No team. Leave her the fuck alone.

She didn't like people very much. They were too unpredictable. Men? Men were baffling. Who understood them? They weren't as flighty as women but they too could get crazy emotional for no understandable reason she could see.

She was a little OCD. Just a little.

She lived in a basement of a bungalow a little south of the airport. It was one of the newer build types, with high ceilings, even in the basement, so the windows gave a lot of light - or would if she hadn't covered them in black curtains.

The finished portion of the basement was thirty-two feet, eight inches long, and twenty-six feet, four inches wide. The landlord, otherwise known as Mrs. McGovern, had said it was thirty-three by twenty-six, but she'd measured. That didn't count the bathroom. The unfinished part, which held the furnace, water heater, and air handling system was almost as big.

It had apparently been intended as some kind of big party room. McGovern had shown her pictures of it with a pool table, card table, bar, lots of sofas, and a ping pong table. It was a big room. McGovern was retired - as old as dirt, she said - and didn't care what Simone did downstairs since she couldn't get up and down the stairs anyway.

Simone had put in a dark grey carpet, painted the walls a light grey, then put in a hundred-and-twenty-inch screen and a projection TV attached to the ceiling. The sectional sofa was another shade of grey, U-shaped, and could have held half a dozen people comfortably. It was just perfect for her. She liked being able to stretch out when watching a movie. Sometimes she stretched out sideways along the center part, propped up on cushions, pillows, and her arm. Sometimes she sat back on the right side. Sometimes she lounged along the left.

This, to her, constituted change.

This part accounted for a quarter of the room.

Behind the main part of the sectional, and facing the screen, were a treadmill and rowing machine. Behind that her desk, and behind that bookshelves. On the other side of the room were her king-sized bed, dressers, and a kitchenette with a table. And she still had lots of room. She could have put in a pool table if she'd been so inclined. Instead, all that occupied the remainder of the floor was her yoga mat.

Her agreement with McGovern was simple. They pretty much left each other alone. Simone cut the grass, front and back, using McGovern's lawn mower. She shoveled the snow in the driveway if she wanted to use the driveway (she did). She also took care of the pond in the back yard if it needed cleaning or filling (or emptying). She would also change light bulbs when they burnt out upstairs since that required the use of a ladder (kept in the garage). She let the woman piggyback on her streaming services and cable. With all of that, her rent was very low.

She and Mrs. McGovern communicated by text, when necessary. Neither sought the other's company. She occasionally heard the woman moving around up there, but for the most part, McGovern stayed in bed or in her chair in the corner or sat out back by the pond.

Simone was feeling better than she had earlier, surprising herself by deciding to eat something. Not that she'd made it herself, of course. She almost never did. She either bought pre-made meals at the giant grocery store that she just had to heat up or had something delivered.

Tonight, she'd decided to just send out for a pizza.

She was stretched out along the sofa, wearing little, with a soft, fuzzy throw blanket half-covering her as she examined her options up on the screen. She had HBOmax, Disney, Netflix, and Prime to choose from. That always made it difficult unless she was streaming a particular show.

She'd just watched Reacher on Prime. Now there was a guy she could get with. Not just a kickass body but a logical, coherent mind. She was willing to bet he wouldn't leave a mess when he made dinner. And that he COULD make dinner. Probably had a pretty good idea what to do with a girl's body, too. Unlike the guys she'd so far had the misfortune to give that opportunity to.

The problem she often had with TV shows and movies (and life) was people making inexplicably dumb decisions when the obviously better decisions were right there in front of their noses to choose. Why would they do that? Why wouldn't it even be explained in the plot somehow? If she was writing a TV show she'd have all her characters making intelligent decisions.

Now she was considering The Punisher on Disney. There was another guy with a great body, another strong, decisive guy - though a bit more emotional than Reacher. Granted, the emotion was usually anger, so that was okay. She expected that sort of thing from big, musclebound guys being attacked by evildoers.

She liked very black-and-white shows, where the good guys and the bad guys were fairly obvious and she didn't have to puzzle out complications. She watched TV to be entertained, after all, not to work. She didn't like puzzles. She liked to know exactly where she was going and exactly what the situation was.

Her phone tinkled with the notification that the pizza guy was outside. She didn't want them ringing the bell and disturbing Mrs. McGovern. She yawned and threw the fuzzy blanket aside, swung her long legs over the edge of the sectional, and stood up. She walked around the little coffee table and grabbed her card off the sofa table that sat behind it as she headed for the door and stairs.

She was halfway up when she wondered if she should have changed into something else. The track pants were fine, though they sat low on her hips. But so what if some guy saw her belly? The top was what caught her attention because her breasts were moving pretty freely within it. But she'd just be standing there when she opened the door, and it was kind of late to dash back and change just so as to not offend the pizza guy.

She combed her fingers through her long, tangled brown hair. She hadn't washed it in the last few days and had spent a lot of time horizontal. Oh well, it wasn't like she was trying to impress the delivery guy anyway. In her vast experience, most of them were pudgy middle-aged immigrants.

Mrs. McGovern had had a renovation guy wall off the little hall that led to the side door, as well as the garage and laundry room so her tenant couldn't get into where she was living except through a locked door. Which made perfect sense to Simone. She had a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, too but never used it since the woman couldn't manage stairs.

The side door was next to the laundry room. She opened it, card in hand, and found herself looking at a pudgy, middle-aged East Indian guy standing a step down and whose face was consequently about at the level of her chest. His eyes immediately locked onto her breasts with the kind of focus she herself devoted to onscreen coding.

She waved the card at him, unimpressed, and he jerked his eyes upward with a kind of manic grin on his face.

"Hello! You order pizza!"

"Yup."

He handed it to her as if it were some great gift he was bestowing. She took it and put it on the top of the dryer, then watched as he fumbled his machine up and poked at it with his fingers, pausing every five seconds or so to jerk his head up to beam at her - skimming across her chest as he did so.

Simone had a bit of a sinking sensation, because while she was comfortably endowed she generally didn't draw this kind of stare. She was going to have to look in a mirror. She'd pulled the halter out of her dresser as something to wear that was loose and comfortable. She'd kept the lights low downstairs both to stave off headaches from the flu and because of the TV.

It was not low here.

"Sorry!" he said, after making a mistake and starting over. "It is lovely day!"

"Uh uh."

"You have lovely house!"

She nodded without speaking.

"Your husband is very lucky man!"

She nodded silently again, still holding the card up meaningfully.

He beamed at her and held out the machine at last. She put the card in front of it and it beeped.

"Is place to mark tip here!" he said, pointing at the little screen.

She sighed and took the machine in her hands. His eyes focused on her chest and widened as she pressed the buttons because of course holding the little machine up in both hands required her to bring her arms in together which pressed against the sides of her breasts and kind of... pressed them together.

Simone liked her breasts but sometimes they were just annoying.

She thrust the machine back at him and he took it with another big grin.

"Thank you," she said.

"You have very nice day, Miss! Very nice day!"

She nodded and closed the door.

"Fucking people," she muttered.

She picked up the pizza and carried it back downstairs. She paused and turned into the bathroom, flicking on the lights to look at herself in the mirror, then grimaced. It wasn't as bad as it could have been. The halter wasn't at all see-through, nor tight. Which had been her first suspicions. In fact, it was loose enough the hemmed bottom sat an inch out from her soft skin.

That was because it was lightweight and clingy enough that her breasts thrust the main part forward so the material was draped across them just tightly enough to clearly show the indentations of her small nipples along with the clearly defined shape of each individual breast.

Oh well.

She snapped off the light and took the pizza into the other room, setting it down on her little kitchenette counter and opening it. She flicked on the light there as she inhaled the scent, then took out a knife to cut herself a couple of slices. She slipped them onto a paper plate and then pushed them into the microwave just to heat it up a bit more.

She opened the little fridge and took out some milk, pouring herself a cup, then slipping the top on and screwing it in place. She flicked off the light and took milk and pizza back to the sectional, sitting down and setting them on the coffee table.

The cup was tall and slender, with a screw top and a large, washable straw. It was to ensure that if she made any kind of mistake and knocked the cup over nothing would spill onto the sectional or carpet. She wasn't in the habit of spilling things, of course, being careful with her movements, but mistakes could happen.

Being stared at always irritated her. Though she supposed she couldn't really blame the guy this time. Then again, they were just breasts. What was the fascination? At his age, he'd surely seen some before. Granted, they were truly excellent breasts, far better shaped than most. Bigger than most, too.

She had a grudging sense of satisfaction in her looks. Admitting the obvious wasn't narcissism, after all. Not that she'd seen a lot of them personally. But wasn't hard to compare what she saw in the mirror to what she saw on TV, in movies, and on the internet. Not to mention what she'd seen on the faces of the men she'd shown it to.

That didn't mean she wanted every male between sixteen and sixty salivating at the sight of her just trying to live her perfectly ordinary life. She was willing to bet that if she was a guy and had gone to the door wearing just the track pants and no top at all and the delivery guy was a woman there wouldn't have been any wide-eyed ogling going on.

Okay, if she was Reacher there might have been some of that, she conceded. But Reacher had a one in ten thousand body. She didn't think she was that rare. It must surely be easier to maintain his short hair, too, she thought enviously examining the brown tendrils hanging limply on her chest.

I need to wash my hair, she thought.

I need to wash myself.

She was feeling better. Tomorrow, perhaps, she'd get back to coding.

She munched on her pizza and sipped on her milk as the Punisher beat people up in wildly improbable choreographed fights. There were more than a few advantages to being a guy, she thought. Like the ability to punch people so hard they stopped bothering you. Not to mention picking them up and throwing them against walls.

Granted, the walls in this show tended to be oddly weak, with people smashing through them at a surprising rate. But hey, you didn't watch a Marvel show and expect realism.

She finished eating, tossed the crusts, rinsed out the cup, then got her little portable vac and went over the sectional, coffee table, and floor between them, just in case of crumbs. She wandered over to her desk and yawned as she checked her mail.

Jerry inquired about her health, almost hiding his impatience well. And mentioned a new job, which he wasn't supposed to do until she'd finished the one she was working on. But this one was with the military which meant she'd have to get an increased security clearance in advance. She almost passed but the job actually looked kind of interesting and paid well. It took her a few minutes to puzzle out exactly what they wanted and to decide she'd have to have some kind of video meeting with someone to get things clear before she started.

Jerry had included the security forms she could complete and return. She started doing so, then got annoyed that every time she hit 'next' there was another full page with another 'next' at the bottom. Fucking government.

She left it open on her screen and wandered back to the sectional, spilling herself across the back so she was draped along its length again as she picked up the remote. She'd finish the stupid forms later. She finished the episode of The Punisher she'd been watching, then yawned and went across to the stairway. The bathroom was on the left and her towels were already draped across the shower cabinet.

She peeled off the halter and shucked the track pants before leaning in and turning on the water. She slid the door across from outside, turning and combing her hair back with her fingers again as she examined herself in the mirror. Definitely time to wash her hair. She let herself imagine having really short hair like Reacher. But then everyone would think she was a lesbian.

She dropped her gaze lower and let a faint smile curve her lips, cupping and lifting her breasts a little as if offering them.

I should have done this to the delivery guy, she thought in amusement. I wonder how far out his eyes would have bulged.

She slid the door to the shower back and stepped inside, letting the hot water pour down around her head as she slid her fingers through it again.