The Kids Grow Up by Trish Hanan (novel24 .TXT) 📖

show and seemed happy so people didn’t question him.
Sherwood was magnificent with its beautiful mountain peaks and its rich meadows and miles of coasts. Harry began on the coasts like he had in Savannah but these coasts were different and teaming with wildlife and on the western shores the ones that faced the Greek Islands he found there were no sharks only a different variety of dolphins who were very friendly. He filmed a whole show on them.
And he loved it so much in Sherwood he spent the first winter holed up in the ski resort that they had built and no one came to anymore because they were too busy selling their stuff to the alterians. He skied and had a great time and filmed himself doing it and some of the kids remembered the great times they had had on the slopes and asked to be brought over so he made a few trips over for them and had visitors for a while. They had a great time and he enjoyed their company.
The second spring he concentrated on the meadow fields and the wild life found there and brought back some for the zoo but by summer he had moved on to his first mountain and moved up the slope. Then he began to climb with the dogs and cats as company. Everyone was amazed at how easily the two dogs got up the steep ledges; they didn’t know of course that Harry was lifting them up. That was his little secret. Then one day in September as he was nearing the top of the first peak the worst thing that could have happened did. Harry had just ended the taping for the day and was returning the camera to his back pack. In order to do this, he had to unhook his harness for a brief second, put it in, put the backpack back on, and then snap the harness back on. While he was putting the back pack on, a large, angry purple eagle swooped down and flew right into his face and distracted him. Harry pushed the bird away from him and felt himself slip away from the rock face and the little ledge he and the dogs were standing on. The harness should have caught him and kept him from falling but he had unhooked it so he kept on falling right off the ledge and into the sky. His first thought was relief, now he didn’t have to go through the motions of living anymore and could die in peace. Then he heard the dogs barking furiously and realized that without him they would die on that ledge. So he had to do something very quickly or he would die and they would die. He was falling very quickly and time was of the essence.
“Harry,” he screamed and he pushed with his mind and all of a sudden he stopped falling. Just like that, he stopped. Harry felt his heat beating a million miles an hour and looked down at the ground only about a hundred feet away.
“Holy crap,” he exclaimed when he realized how close he had actually come to dying. Then he thought of how long it was going to take him to reach his dogs and panicked thinking what if they didn’t wait for him but tried to climb down on their own. That’s when Harry realized that if he could stop himself from falling, what was to stop him from lifting himself up? Nothing. So he pushed and felt himself lift up a few inches and pushed some more and soon he was lifting in a standing position and it was more like he was flying up the mountain and it felt fucking amazing.
“Gertie, Bo, here I come, I’m back, stay on the ledge, don’t come down,” Harry shouted as he approached the two dogs who began to bark when they saw him coming. He reached them and hugged them with tears in his eyes. “Shush, I wouldn’t leave you, I love you too much, I would never leave you Bo, Gertie, where are those cats, there you are Bear, Darla, I bet you wondered where I was didn’t you, now I’m back, let’s all go to the top shall we,” he said and lifted them all up and flew to the top. The cats hissed at him, they hated to be lifted but the dogs grinned, they loved it. Then Harry lifted his supplies and made camp. He was extremely glad he was alive and at the top of the mountain. He feed everyone including himself and ate with a gusto he hadn’t felt in years.
“Nothing like a dear death experience to make you feel alive is there, huh, Gertie, huh, Bo,” he teased and they both jumped up on him and wagged their whole bodies. He figured they must have been really glad to see him. Harry lied on his sleeping bag and stared at the stars and thought about his life. He had a pretty good one even if he didn’t have Jake. He had his work, his animals, his kids and now he could fly, one day he would have a man to love and who loved him, what more could a man ask for? He fell asleep with a smile on his perfect cupid bow mouth.
Jake on the other hand wasn’t so content with his life. Oh, the first five years had been extremely happy ones and he had had a hell of a lot of fun but now the bloom was off of the rose so to speak. Whenever he asked his sweet wife when they were going to have those children she seemed so eager to have, she put him off saying she was waiting to have children with her twin sister Amy and she wasn’t ready to have children yet. After all, they were only a hundred and twenty and they were going to live to be thirty thousand years old, they had plenty of time to have children.
And now that they had been married for seven years Violet wasn’t as sweet to him as she had been when they were first married and she wasn’t as nice and considerate to live with as Harry had been. He found out soon that if he wanted clean clothing he had to wash them himself because she never washed until she was out of clothes and sometimes wore dirty ones over. He hired a housekeeper and someone to come in and do the laundry, with his busy medical practice; he just didn’t have the time to do laundry. He didn’t know how Harry had managed to keep up with the housework, the cooking, laundry, and manage two stores. It amazed him to think about it.
Then there was the cooking. Violet did not cook. Not ever. All those wonderful meals she had brought in from home to share with him at the clinic had been cooked by her mother or his. She laughingly confessed to tricking him because she had been in love with him. He had been flattered by this at first but after a while coming home late from work and having to take her out to dinner every night got to be annoying. Sometimes all he wanted was a nice home cooked meal and his couch. And she’d just laugh and get all dressed up and insist on dragging him out to the latest hot spot for dinner and dancing. Violet was always ready for a good time. Sometimes he would just go over to his parent’s house and his mom would cook him dinner while Violet pouted and went out with David and Gloria who like her were always in the mood to party.
And then there was the matter of breakfast. Violet always insisted on the same brand of English muffins from the store with low fat cream cheese and low fat milk and God forbid if he ate any of them. Every week she would buy enough for the week along with orange juice and special flavored creamer for her coffee and if Jake touched any of it she would hit the roof.
“Jake, did you eat one of my muffins, I know I had three left and now there’s only two, you know I hate it when you eat my food,” she’d snapped. He’d shrug and promise not to do it again.
If she went to the store, she never picked up bread or milk or anything for him, she only bought stuff that she liked or wanted and said it was for her, even though she was spending his money, the money she insisted he leave out for household spending. And when Jake went to the store and bought food for himself and didn’t bring home her stuff, she’d bitch that he never thought of her, how inconsiderate he was and how rude he was. And if he bought fatty foods in the house she’d bitch about her waistline and how he was tying to make her fat or she’d tease him about how fat he was getting and he didn’t need that fatty lunchmeat, his belly was getting big enough and soon he wasn’t going to be able to see his feet.
Another complaint he had with her was her personal hygiene. Violet was not a very clean woman and didn’t bathe as much as she should, or at least as much as Harry and he had. Jake always took a shower at night before he went to bed; he wanted to be fresh for his partner; that was polite. But Violet would come to bed all stinky from the day and just spray some perfume over herself which over sweat and female odor was slightly nauseating. What was even worse was when she expected him to go down on her and that really made him want to puke when he smelled her when she opened her legs really wide and pushed his face down there. That musky aroma would hit him in the face like a slap and he would gag and make a retching noise. She’d look at him with frustration.
“What’s the hell the matter, I sprayed perfume on, it can’t smell that bad,” she swore. He shook his head.
“Why don’t you take a shower, sugar, I can wait for you,” he said gently. She glared at him.
“You know Jake, some men love the smell of my pussy and I don’t have to take a God-damned shower for them,” she yelled. “Your father went down on me for an hour last Saturday and swore it was the best pussy he’d ever tasted, you’re just a sissy.” Jake shook his head.
“Violet, today is Tuesday, the last time you had a shower was Monday morning, that’s practically thirty hours without a shower, sugar, you stink and your pussy is rancid, no one could go down on you like this,” he stated and she flushed with embarrassment and closed her legs.
“Go to hell, Jake Jackson, in fact, go sleep in the other room, I have a headache and I’m not in the mood,” she shouted and with a sigh, he climbed out of bed and went into the spare bedroom. To tell the truth after smelling her funky pussy, he wasn’t in the mood anymore either.
She complained to her mother and his mother who both laughed.
“Honey, some men are like that, he’s not a sissy, your father is like that too,” Sarah told her.