He wouldn't try to put his hand back.
At least not this time. Not right now.
Why did he even want to put it on her sturdy, square-ish body? When she was seven or eight, he remembered, she'd had plump cheeks and dimples. The plumpness was long gone. Missy wasn't elfin, like a gymnast, nor graceful, like a figure skater. Very definitely female, almost maddeningly female sometimes. But a guy could see why, when a larger, masculine version of the build turned up on her brother, Chip had played football much better than basketball.
Grantville had quite a few girls who were prettier than Missy Jenkins. Up-timers and down-timers, both. The little Gertrude from Jena who was living with her family and going to school here was a lot cuter, objectively speaking.
But until and unless Ron managed to stabilize that upset karmic balance, the rest of them might as well be made of cardboard. That was fairly disgusting in its own right.
His hand went out again, tracing a line about three or four inches above her body, from neckline to groin.
"What on earth are you doing?"
"Confirming something I suspected."
"What?"
"I'd still be lying here wanting to put my hand on those parts of you if you'd never stopped being a dumpling or had already turned into a Sherman tank."
"Ron, that's gross."
"I think it's pretty basic data."
Chapter 26
Rudolstadt
"It is 'Thanksgiving' today in Grantville, isn't it?" Count Ludwig Guenther asked at breakfast. "A holiday. That's why there are so few up-timers here, going about their business, even though it is a Thursday."
His wife nodded. "Dankfest. Erntedankfest, more precisely. Mary Kat says that it is a harvest festival. Or began as one. But religious, not a fair, not a Kirmess. Though surely Kirmess and Messe, as in the Frankfurt Buchmesse, must derive from the same origin as Messe as a worship service, don't you think? In any case, in Magdeburg last spring, Caroline Platzer, Princess Kristina's lady companion, told me that it was the most intensely familial of their holidays. She hated it so much, the first couple of years after the Ring of Fire. Not that she was alone, because someone always invited her to dinner. But because it reminded her so much that her own family was gone that sometimes she would rather have been alone in her room rather than with someone else's relatives, pretending that she was all right."
Countess Emelie stood up. "Oh, how my back aches. I don't believe that I am hungry after all, dearest. There must be some tie to the liturgy. I'll go check in the library."
Grantville
"I'd expected the girl to come with you, but I suppose that it makes sense, since they have tomorrow off from school too, that Gertrude took the chance to go to see her sister." Eleanor Jenkins got up and looked out the living room window. "And, in a way, it will be nice to have just family for Thanksgiving dinner. Here they come."
"Who?" asked her daughter-in-law Debbie. "And, uh, it's not going to be 'just family,' Mom. Not even near-family, like Chip's Katerina."
"Wes and Clara. I see them coming around the corner. And what do you mean, 'not just family?'
"Missy asked Ron Stone and his little brother. That was when we thought the dinner would be at our place; before we decided to have it here with you. Gerry's come down from Rudolstadt for the holiday. They're out in your side yard, talking to Chip, right now. When they saw that Missy was heading straight for the kitchen, they sort of ducked around coming inside and having to talk to the grownups."
She frowned, mentally identifying and classifying the Stone boys, and then looked around. "What do you think about it, Chad?" she asked her son. "Really. About Wes' getting married again."
Charles Jenkins got up and looked over her shoulder. "Big brother? We couldn't have expected him not to, I suppose. By nature, he's inclined to go out of his way to be a happily married man. I know that you and Dad had more than a few doubts about Lena, too, at first, when he fixated on her when he was barely seventeen. I was five years younger, but even at age twelve I was old enough to figure that much out. That one certainly lasted. Clara seems okay, I guess. At least they didn't rush into it." He grinned. "Except right at the end."
Eleanor looked out through the curtain again. Her older son and his new wife had paused on the sidewalk. Clara looked up at Wes' face and gave a little skip; he put his arm around her shoulder.
"I worried about Lena," she said. "More than I did about Wes, really. When he started going out with her, she used to look at him more like a startled doe caught in the headlights than a girl in love. As if she were hypnotized but barely conscious enough to realize that something odd was going on. It didn't strike me as the best foundation . . . But Wes isn't . . . Never mind. As you say, it certainly lasted and they were happy together. At least it's pretty clear that Clara does love him dearly, his little foibles and all. Which is just as well."