The Lone Defender of Castle Deeniegard

The one thing the army pressed into you that stuck the most was setting up a secure perimeter. Where are the fences, where are the entry points, is anything sitting too close to an edge, are there **** signal or supply routes.

And who's watching?

Which is pretty funny because the closest you got to facing an adversary since basic training was someone trying to pull rank on you out of your chain of command to tell you how to manage the repair shop or the motor pool or to get around paperwork.

Some days your clipboard of official forms and checklists felt like a shield.

Once Brian and Mary are on the road with the RV -- you never actually understood how they're getting back once they drop it off. Bus? Train? Hitch-hiking? -- anyway, once they're gone, you do a circuit of the house, checking doors and windows, making sure that everything that locks and closes is locked and closed and secure.

For what it's worth, anyway. How secure is a double-wide manufactured house going to be?

There are motion detectors and floodlights, and they seem to be A-OK, but they look more useful to someone coming home at night.

The house complete, you grab a rake from Brian's shed. A faint odor of old tobacco smoke tickles your nose and gives you a craving, but you left your cigs back at Mom's, and there's nothing making you really want one right now.

Rake in hand as a walking stick, you walk the property line, at least where it's walkable. The hillside drops off to one side of the house and beyond the back deck. It's a nice view across the valley. The trees are closer than you'd like if you were going to keep a look-out. The weeds are a little high near the downhill side of the house.

There's one spot where your phone gets good signal and it burbles with little update chimes. You sight back to the house and up and down the the property line to mark the spot. Maybe you could drag a folding chair out here.

There was a weed whacker back in the shed. Twenty minutes of clean-up, a fill of the fuel tank, a tune-up it doesn't need, and it roars to life, the two-stroke engine loud in your ears but probably a distant whine to Brian and Mary's closest neighbors.

Weed whacking, then raking, is your morning workout. Satisfied with your improvement of the perimeter, you put away the tools and figure your next official duty is walking down to the mailbox cluster on the county road. Brian and Mary have one box out of a bunch on a little turn-out next to the road.

Heck, maybe you should stake it out and see who comes and goes.

Or fill the bird feeder on the back deck.

Or take a nap.

After you flip through the women's work wear catalog from Duluth Trading. One gal had pointed out a photo of a broad-shouldered model wearing a heavy plaid shirt while cleaning her chainsaw. "Look, Dickie, that could be you!"

Yeah, even Natalie had picked up on "Sergeant Dickless". But she was a sweetie, and the catalog was a bunch of soft butch thirst traps as far as both of you were concerned. Confident, strong, doing things, pretending they weren't showing off for you.

Later you and Natalie had sat together with a finger on each other's clit, jilling each other slowly as she turned pages and made up stories about the pictures.

That one pic with the surveyor in boots and safety vest with a two-meter flagpole that Natalie described as doing wide, come-get-me swings, then humping the pole. Blastoff. Natalie had to hold a hand over your mouth to keep you quiet enough.

Yeah. You still had that catalog.

Mailboxes? Personal time? Sit out where you get good signal and call your old friends?