Read I Just Want My Pants Back for Free Online Page B

silly until it stopped. Jane was up like a shot and into the bathroom. I heard tinkling and the balling of toilet paper followed by a flush and the slurping of water from the tap. She reemerged.
    “Hey,” she whispered. “Can I borrow these pants?” I rolled over to see her wearing my favorite pair of Dickies, ones I’d had forever, made supersoft by thousands of washings. Despite the small white paint splotch I had gotten on the hem of the left leg (from sloppily painting the apartment—like father, like son), they were a key player in the very limited trouser rotation of new jeans, old jeans, old Dickies that I relied on. “Just to get home,” Jane explained. “I don’t want to wear my skirt right now, it feels too cold.” She turned around and wiggled her ass at me.
    “Sure,” I croaked. I closed my eyes again. I heard some more getting-ready noises, and then warm lips pressed against my forehead and I opened one eye wide enough to see Jane and my pants quietly make their exit.

4
    The week flew by, and to paraphrase Ray Davies, “I wished I was a different guy—different friends and a new set of clothes.” Well, that wasn’t really true; I had spent a good amount of time breaking in both and was quite content with them.
    It was now Saturday morning. I lay with the pillow over my head, trying to block the sun out for at least another hour. I had just awoken from my recurring Godfather dream, wherein I made love to two hairless Sicilian girls who, after I finished pleasing them, plied me with decadent desserts. “Tiramisu, signore ?” they’d giggle. “Profiterole?”
    The ringing of my home phone shattered my sleep plans. Jesus, who called my home number anymore? Four agonizing rings later I got the answer as the machine picked up. BEEP . “Jason. It’s Stacey. Are you there? Are you sleeping? Is someone sleeping with you? Yeah, didn’t think so. Just kidding! I’m getting sick of the phone tag, so when you get up, call me. I really need to talk to you, call my cell.”
    It was closing in on eleven, so I got out of bed and let the poison drain out of my system. Then I curled up on the couch with the phone, dialed, and caught Stacey on her way to the gym. We decided to meet for brunch at twelve-thirty so I could hear the giant secret that had apparently taken Manhattan by storm.
    Since she was exercising, I decided to do some myself. Hell, I was hoping to be seen naked again soon—Jane wasn’t exactly a prude. Although I was thinking maybe we should grab dinner the next time we hung out, you know, something somewhat normal before the next sexplosion. I pulled off my shirt and did three sets of push-ups, three sets of sit-ups, and three sets of curls with the dumbbells I kept in my one itty-bitty closet. I had calculated my square footage at about three hundred, so I guess the closet wasn’t as much tiny as it was proportional. I managed to work up a bit of a sweat lifting, so I showered, bringing a cold glass of water in with me for hydrating purposes.
    At a quarter to noon I exited my apartment and ran into Patty, my neighbor from across the hall, who was coming back from the grocery store, her numerous white plastic bags a dead giveaway. She had a red bandanna tied around her head Aunt Jemina–style, and a weird-looking cigar/twig in her mouth. Or maybe it was some sort of sugarcane. Hard to tell. I helped her get her stuff inside her apartment.
    This was a groundbreaking moment. I’d never seen the inside of her place; by her low rent I figured she must’ve lived there thirty years, and I was dying to see what it looked like. I stepped inside carrying two bags. Her door opened right into the kitchen. Disappointingly, the kitchen didn’t reveal much—it was pretty much identical to mine, just flipped, and cleaner. She had a bunch of magnets on her fridge; one big one in the middle was an illustration of a cowboy on a bronco with the words W YOMING I S B UCKING A WESOME!
    “Nice magnet,”