"Oh, I just have a little something to take care of." She told me mysteriously. "It's nothing big."
"Fair enough." I replied, feeling mild curiosity at what that "little something" might be. But we talked no more on the subject.
She came over to my house about an hour later than usual. Dad was already home by then so we did nothing but study and exchange kisses on the porch as she was leaving.
As January wound onward Nina and I got together as much as we could. Usually it was at my house to study or to listen to music or to talk or to make out on the couch before Dad got home. On Saturday and Sundays, before I went to work, we would typically spend the day together doing something. Skiing was a passion we both shared and when the weather permitted we made the drive to the Idaho ski resorts and spent the day on the slopes. We would hold and kiss each other as we ascended on the ski lifts. We would cuddle together in the warmth of the lodge afterword, sipping coffee and talking of things that lovers talked of before making the long drive home. We were in love and the time passed quickly when we were together, slowly when we were apart. Our intimacies did not progress beyond my sliding my hand up under her shirt or her feeling the outline of my erection through my pants. Most of the time we merely kissed and held each other.
Things reached an uncomfortable impasse at the Blackmore household. According to Nina her mother no longer protested when she went out with me or went over to my house. She never withheld the car from her since she knew that I would simply come pick her up in mine if it was required. But she was obviously not very happy about her continued rendezvous with me either. Her mom and dad also stopped fighting with each other. But at the same time there was a strain in their relationship that hadn't been there before. She told me it was like they were constantly waiting for a hammer to fall, a hammer that simply kept hanging there above them. Nina felt considerable guilt for the way her parents were feeling, as did I when I heard her stories, but not enough to stop our visits. I only hoped that someday they would accept me as part of their family because I intended to be a part of it whether they liked it or not.
One afternoon after school we were watching television on the couch. Dad was not yet home from work and Nina was lying in my lap with her feet outstretched. I stroked her hair for a while and then her face. She cooed as I did this and I noticed that she had a few pimples near her nose and on her chin. They were not large or unsightly and she had done a decent job of covering them with make-up. I noticed them primarily because I'd never seen acne on her face before. She had one of those smooth complexions that just wasn't prone to it.
"Pimples." She said with disgust when she noticed me looking at them. "Are they bad?"
"Not at all." I assured her. "Every teenager gets them from time to time."
"I know." She answered, "But I've never had them before. Not until last week anyway."
"Maybe the stress of being in love has given them to you." I suggested jokingly.
She chuckled. "In a way you're completely right." She answered.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"I'll explain later." She said.
"What do you mean?"
She reached up and grabbed me by the hair, pulling my face to hers. "Later." She whispered, licking at my lips. "Your Dad will be home soon."
We made out in that position for a while and then finally twisted around so that she was lying atop me. As we kissed she rubbed her crotch gently back and forth across mine, arousing me greatly. My hands slid under her shirt once more, caressing her bare back, finally working around to her front. However this time, when they slid under her bra she winced as if in pain.
"What's the matter?" I asked, instantly withdrawing my hand, bothered by the thought I might have hurt her.
"It's nothing." She told me dismissively. "They're just a little sore."
"Sore?" I asked, remembering uncomfortably what that had meant when my wife had begun to complain of that. That certainly wasn't possible with Nina. If it was, I'd sadly misread her.
"It'll go away." She said. "Don't worry about it."
But the mood was broken for that day. When Dad came home he found us sitting together on the couch watching the Phil Donahue show while we held hands.
I was officially given an offer of employment from the trauma center on January 15. I accepted it later that day. When I went to work at the pizza joint that night I officially gave notice to the manager that I would be leaving his fine employ. He gave one more try at convincing me to stay, offering to make me an assistant manager and bumping my salary to a whole four and a quarter an hour.
"I know the hospital is offering you more than that." He told me. "But I'm offering you a management position. That looks awfully good on the old resume."
I respectfully declined his offer and he took it well. He told me that if I ever found myself in need of a job, that I should see him first. I told him I would.
January 24 was my last day there. I clocked out at 10:00 and turned in my uniform to him. We shook hands and he told me he would miss me. Though I didn't particularly like him, he had given me a job and had helped me earn money for college. I felt I owed him a little bit.
"You know what you need to do?" I told him just before I walked out the door.
"What's that Bill?" He asked.
"Get into pizza delivery." I suggested.
He looked at me strangely. "Pizza delivery? Nobody does that. It isn't financially feasible."
"If you do it right, it will be." I said, "You see, Americans are lazy. If they can get someone to drive their pizza to them, then they'll do it. There are two tricks to this that you need to employ. One, you need to make sure their pizza is still hot when it arrives. You'll need to come up with some sort of insulated carrier for that. Shouldn't be too hard," I assured him. "The technology is out there. The second thing you need to do, and this is hard for a business person to accept, is NOT charge people for the delivery."
He laughed. "That's very interesting Bill." He said. "But you don't know a whole lot about business. How could I NOT charge someone a delivery fee for driving their pizza to them? How would I pay for the driver? How would I pay for the gas?"
"Ahh." I said. "That's the thing. With all due respect, I know a considerable amount about business. It's what I'll be majoring in in college and I've studied quite extensively on my own. If you were smart, you'd listen to my advice. I'm not wrong about this."
He seemed more amused than awed by my speech. "Okay Bill." He told me patronizingly. "Tell me how I can magically deliver pizzas at no cost to the customer and still make a profit on them."
"It's simple." I said. "You hire an eighteen year old kid with a car and pay him four dollars an hour or so. You stipulate that he pays for the gas, insurance, and uses his own vehicle. His main job will be the deliveries but when there are none going on, you can also have him help out around here making pizzas for the regular customers, sweeping up, doing dishes, whatever. You will have to shell out a little cash for advertising to make it known to the general public in your area that you deliver. Your target group is those people that are too lazy or too busy to make food and who don't really want to go out to pick something up. They will be the people that would otherwise have made some hamburger helper or something instead of going out. If they know that they can call your number and have a hot pizza at their front door in less than an hour, they'll do it. Pizza will triumph over hamburger helper every time. When you do your ads you need to put in something like "guaranteed hot and fresh in forty minutes or less" or some crap like that. You also need to put in "no delivery fee". Your pizza sales will go up enough to cover the four bucks an hour that the extra employee makes and will give you considerable profit. Remember, you're snaring people who would not otherwise have come in here and bought a pizza.