SERIAL FICTION
Delroy and the Cheese — Part Nine
Accusations fly and a swelling subsides
This is the ninth chapter of an 18 chapter series about life in a Canadian tree-planting camp. If you’re new, you may want to start at the beginning or go to the complete list of Delroy and the Cheese chapters.
Andrea and I continued to shower as Delroy got dressed. Andrea had a huge smirk on her face which suggested she had, indeed, noticed a certain physical change on my part.
I did my best to keep my eyes (and everything else) pointed away from her, but even the sound of the water on her body created erotic mental images in my mind. I seem to have developed some kind of bat-like echolocation ability. I’m sure I could have drawn her breasts just based on the sound of the spray bouncing off of them.
Suddenly, we heard Delroy call from the other side of the tarp.
“Hey, you guys!” Delroy rattled the tarp. “Something’s wrong.”
“What is it?” asked Andrea. “Did you forget your towel?”
“The Hell with my towel. Somebody’s messed with my cheese!”
Andrea stifled a laugh. I felt the panic rising again. The only good thing was that as my panic rose, another part of me started to droop.
Andrea and I poked our heads around the edge of the tarp. Delroy had a clean pair of jeans on. His dirty jeans were on the ground beside him and he was holding the yellow cheese kerchief in one hand and a wedge of cheddar in the other.
“Someone swapped my cheese! This isn’t pecorino. This is cheddar.” He sniffed it to demonstrate the point.
“How you can smell anything in this dry shack amazes me,” said Andrea. “Everything just smells like feet.”
“This is not my cheese,” he said. “You guys stole it.”
“How is that possible?” said Andrea. “We were with you in the shower the whole time.”
“That was just a diversion! You were trying to distract me while your accomplice did the dirty work.” He pointed at Andrea. “You! With your shiny boobs! And you!” he pointed at my groin. “With your…” He seemed unable to find the right word. “…boner!”
This was too much for Andrea and she turned away convulsing with laughter. I hid myself a little further behind the tarp. “I promise you,” I said. “Whether or not I have a boner definitely has nothing to do with you.”
“Bullshit! You popped that thing up just so I wouldn’t notice what was happening on the other side of the curtain!”
“Curtain?” I asked.
“Tarp! Whatever!”
“Listen,” I said. “I’m not the Wizard of Oz. I can’t just pop a boner whenever I chose to. Believe me! When I went into this shower with you I had no intention of becoming tumescent.”
“I’m getting Griff!” Delroy pulled on a clean shirt, stepped into his boots, and left the dry shack.
Once Delroy was gone, Andrea asked, “So, why did you?”
“Why did I what?”
She grinned at me. “You know — become tumescent.”
“Hey, it’s like Delroy said, you and your shiny boobs can be very distracting. And a boner’s like a sneeze. You can try to control it, but it’s not always possible.”
Griff was sitting on a wooden box beside the kitchen area eating his supper and chatting to Morwenna, one of the cooks. He was tired. It had been a long day and he just wanted to have a few minutes to eat some dinner before he got to work on the day’s paperwork and planning the next day’s planting. He could tell by the expression on Delroy’s face he probably wasn’t going to get those minutes.
“Griff!” said Delroy. “Stu and Andrea stole my cheese.”
“Your cheese?” asked Griff. He shook his head and then held his hand up. “Delroy, I want you to listen very carefully to what I’m about to say to you.”
Delroy nodded.
“I do not give a fuck about your cheese,” said Griff.
“You don’t understand! It was my cheese and they took it!”
Griff sighed. “Morwenna, do we have any cheese we can give to Delroy?”
Morwenna was confused. “We had chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas tonight. There wasn’t any cheese to steal. Do you mean lunch cheese? I can get you some lunch cheese if you want.”
“Not that kind of cheese! My special cheese! I brought it with me from home.”
It took a while for Delroy to explain the nature of his special cheese and his relationship with it. Griff listened patiently as he finished his supper. Part of his job was to mediate disagreements between planters and prevent them from killing each other. It was not a part of the job he liked. He would much rather spend the evening doing some nice soothing paperwork, but he could tell that wasn’t going to be possible until the cheese thing was sorted.
Next chapter…
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