Finally, I was going to get a vacation. My damn boss never gave me any time off, but since I'm self-employed I had only myself to blame. I run a small electrical contracting company and business is quite good. Having been through slow times before, my motto was "Never turn down work." However, I've been going for nearly two years with little more than a day or two for kayaking, or hiking, or taking Stephanie to some exotic location like an abandoned stable to show her new ways to use ropes, or maybe a jacuzzi suite at a nearby hotel. Due to her college course load and the fact that she still lived with her mom who had no idea she was screwing the older guy next door, I only got to see her two or three times a month. So it was with heavy balls that I marched into the local mall in search of one of those do-it-yourself photo booths. See, my passport was out of date and I needed a new one if I wanted to leave the country. Well, I could leave but I couldn't get back in again. I needed the photos to include with my passport renewal application, along with the requisite form, my old passport, and of course, their fee. They said four-to-six weeks to get my new one, so realistically I needed to get the paperwork on its way pronto if I wanted to leave before the next ice age. When I was a k** those photo booths were everywhere; a box the size of a closet where people go in, sit on a little bench, and mug for the camera. There's usually a thin curtain to conceal them from …
the passers-by, and they're often used by d***k k**s to get those I-can't-believe-I-got-her-to-kiss-me photos that the girls often regretted the next day but the boys hung onto forever. Sometimes more than kissing went on, but the curtain stopped a foot or so from the floor and the booths were usually in crowded places like boardwalks, fairs, and shopping malls, so it was tough to get too crazy. But when I had gone online earlier to find one I was surprised that Olympia had very few. The nearest location was the mall a few miles away, and that's how I found myself weaving among women in shopping Nirvana, k**s yakking on cells phones, and families with husbands who looked like they'd rather be at the dentist. At last I spotted the booth. It stood right in the middle of the broad walkway, people flowing around it like a river around a rock. There was a shoe shop and a couple of teeny-bopper clothing stores on one side, and a cheap import store, a black-light-filled head shop, and a (gasp) book seller on the other. Muzak echoed from the thirty-foot ceilings and a babble of voices filled the air. The place smelled of popcorn and women with too much perfume and too much time on their hands. Walking up to the booth, I noticed it seemed bigger than the ones I'd seen as a k**. I felt a little self-conscious going in alone, kind of like a guy who goes to an amusement park by himself. But no one paid me any attention so I stepped inside and pulled the curtain closed. The curtain was a
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