When the pain wasnt harrying him through the deep stone grayness of his cloud, he was dumbly grateful, but he was no longer fooled - it was still there, waiting to return.
She giggled like a child at the jokes on M*A*S*H* and WKRP, laughing especially hard at the jokes which were mildly off-color (which, in the case of WKRP, was most of them. Yes, he supposed he had been his own Scheherazade, just as he was his own dream-woman when he grabbed hold of himself and jacked off to the feverish beat of his fantasies.