Honey's Turn

by Michael Cahlin & Beth Slick

About the Author: Michael Cahlin's writing credits include: AOL, Basketball Weekly, Family Circle, Literary Fragments, PC World, and most recently The Writer. In the 1980’s, he co-created The Official XTree MS-DOS & Hard Disk Companion (with Beth Slick), which became the blueprint for IDG’s (now John Wiley & Sons’) successful Dummies Series. Beth Slick is an accomplished writer with credits including Star Trek: The Next Generation, the aforementioned XTree Handbook, as well as several other Dummies books including Word 6 For Dummies and Norton For Dummies.

Excerpt

His Turn.

Click.

Midnight.

Finally.

He took another drag off his cigarette, held it in his lungs and let it out slowly as if saying goodbye to a longtime lover. He waited a year for this moment—thought about it daily, how he would react, what he would do, if he would still feel the same, would he really go through with it? And now that the time had finally arrived, he did none of the things he imagined. Instead, he took a final drag off his Lucky—God, he missed smoking—and watched the second hand circle around the dial in a race it could never win.

Click.

12:03

He crushed the butt, washed his hands in the kitchen sink, dried them on a faded gray towel looped in the refrigerator door and walked back into the bedroom.

Ready.

The footlocker was under the bed. For a year it lay undisturbed. He liked the idea of sleeping on top of it. Knowing what was inside. Knowing what he planned to do. Which is why he gave it a year. To think things through. Maybe he’d change his mind. Maybe he’d meet somebody new. Someone with a better smile or prettier face or sexier body. Someone who would love him more and somehow save him from himself.

But he didn’t.

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