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Humming a tune to herself, C?r?l?a skipped between the shelves. She ran her finger along the spines of various ancient books, looking for one in particular. Smiling, she identified the tome and pulled it out from the shelf. It was bound in leather or some other less wholesome material. The title, Daemonica Malefique, looked like it had been scorched into the cover with a brand. It looked like an exact duplicate of the book lying open next to Phil's prone body.
C?r?l?a tapped her tail on the floor and Mr Grinstead rose up out of the centre of a glowing arcane circle.
"You can put this one back now." She passed the book to the imp. Bowing, it grasped the book to its chest and sank back down into the floor.
C?r?l?a looked over to where Phil was lying on the stone floor. The rise and fall of his chest indicated he was still alive. She smiled and fires sparkled in the depths of her ruby-red eyes.
The End.
Regrets
We burst through the door as we entered our home; happy, exuberant and eager to undress and make love. It was after midnight and we were returning from celebrating our 20th anniversary with a small group of family and friends.
"Twenty years," I told my wife Lila, "twenty years and not a single regret. I love you more now than ever and I thank you for every minute we have been together."
"I love you too." she replied, "You are the only man I have ever loved or want to love. I am happier now than I have ever been."
"No regrets?" I questioned, picking up on her omission.
"Not a one......except..........well........maybe...."
"Come on, out with it. You know you can't keep any secrets from me."
"It's not a secret; it's just some thing that I realized when I was having a talk with Kerry this afternoon."
"She's in college and nineteen years old. She must be accustomed to being away from home. Surely you talked to her about the birds and the bees before this."
"Of course I have," she replied, "our daughter is very knowledgeable when it comes to sex; much more so than I was at her age."
"You were nineteen when we got married, so how can she know more than you did?"
"That's exactly it. I was a virgin when we married. You are the only man I have ever been with. She has been with two boys in high school and Ryan is the second one she has slept with in college so far."
"So far? Are you telling me our daughter is a slut? What the hell is going on under my nose? I'm not about to support a son and daughter to sleep around in college. And what about if she has a baby.......?"
"Calm down honey," she interrupted my tirade, "her virginity is long gone and no one seems to care about that these days anyway."
"Then why are we talking about this? How did we get on this subject when we were so happily celebrating our anniversary?"
"You asked if I had any regrets and all I could possibly think of is that Kerry already has had a much more varied sex life than I ever had."
"Well let me show you that quality trumps variety anytime," and I took her to bed and made love to her the best way I knew how. When we cuddled afterwards I kissed her and said, "Good night Lila, I love you, you're all the woman I will ever want."
"I love you too Max, good night."
************
I am a lawyer, a pretty good one, and I put in a lot highly paid billable hours. Lila and I lead a very comfortable life. But I come from very humble circumstances. My paternal grand parents come over from Eastern Europe bringing my father as an infant. Grandpa worked in the steel mills around Pittsburgh and my father followed him into the mills until they closed down in the seventies and eighties. Times were tough for us then but somehow my parents made it through and my Dad made sure I went to college and law school so I would never have to be dependent on a mill job like he was.
My way of giving back for what they did for me was to run the pro bono section in our law firm. Pro bono is a free service we provide for people who have been wronged, often by the intricacies of the law, and cannot afford the legal fees needed to obtain justice. I did it once a week, after office hours, from 6 pm until we finished up, often until midnight. I donated my time and paid the one secretary who stayed late to help me. I had been doing this for many years every Thursday evening and Janet Hobbs was the secretary who most often stayed as my assistant. She needed the money because she was a recent widow with two teen aged children to support.
About a week after our anniversary we were finishing dinner when Lila brought up the subject again.
"Max," she said, "I have been thinking....." She let the subject hang.
"About what?" I bit.
