So I can eliminate him, and have her all to myself.
Moving across the floor of the bar, people predictably congregated in groups as they do, I pull up just short, putting my body perpendicular to this pair so my ear can listen.
“Here’s the deal. I’m gonna go outside for a quick smoke. When I get back, we’re getting out of here. Together. That’s enough time for you to come to terms with the fact that I’m the man and that you only turn twenty-one once. You gotta live it up, do some primal shit, girl. With me.”
He nods, cocks his head and raises his eyebrows as if he’s answering in the affirmative for her at the same time he’s issuing her a warning if she doesn’t agree with him.
Placing his whiskey glass down on the table he moves past me, his elbow applying just enough pressure to notice as it finds my ribs.
He keeps moving. No apology.
That’s when I place this prick. I’ve seen him before, running the same schtick all over town, trying to take advantage of unsuspecting women night in and night out.
My eyes roll back in my head, as my dome tips back slightly, my eyelids taking their sweet time closing. Taking in a deep breath I begin counting backward from thirty.
By twenty-five I have a raging erection, half for her and half for what I’m about to do.
I’m a logical guy, who got a perfect score on his math SAT’s all those years ago. My mind works like an engineer, and actuary, someone who lives and dies by facts, reason, logic, and accountability.
Which is why it’s a fucking fact that I’m going to hold his feet to the fire, making him accountable for the way he’s talking to this gorgeous girl that resembles…my mother.
Her elbows aren’t but five feet from me. If I swayed to the music and shuffled to the side a bit I could instigate a real life version of a movie meet cute. I’ve got the charm and charisma to pull it off. That’s been proven time and time again, but not on women.
Women aren’t my thing, not like that at least. Women are the only thing, but not sexually. Protecting them, keeping them safe, and ridding the trash of society that annoys them, men who are so socially unaware, men who are predators, men who want only one thing.
Well, I want one thing myself. The same thing I’ve always wanted…revenge for my mother’s death.
And I’ve gotten it time and time again. And tonight will be no different.
But where the difference lies is that tonight this isn’t just about mom. There is this foreign feeling inside me, something that makes my dick hard as a rock while at the same time so damn confused I’m nauseous, ready to puke my brains out right here in this bar. Something that tells me that this life I’ve been living could suddenly come to an abrupt halt.
Because of her.
But first, there’s work to do.
Pulling myself from my spot I curse under my breath at the thought of leaving her alone. But those ideas are quickly shelved as I walk out the back door to the area where people are allowed to smoke, in the alley where I see one of the few Californians who still willingly indulge in the vice of nicotine.
“Bum a smoke?” I ask.
The guy from inside, the man who doesn’t even realize he’s on the clock, exhales just hard enough in a passive aggressive way to let me know he doesn’t want to give me the cigarette, but society deems he must.
If he’s going to give it to me anyway, why doesn’t he just do it with a smile, with a kind word, instead of creating an enemy when he could have had a friend?
But friends was something we could never be. Maybe this is fate telling me a joke that I’m slow to get because I’m in such a hurry, my foot tapping so hard on the cold concrete below me.
“You really need your nicotine,” the guy states, watching the tip of my boots tap on the ground. He’s noticed the top of my foot all right. But not the bottom of my soles. How could he? Even if he did would he find it odd that there are no grooves, that the footwear is new but the soles are smooth as a baby’s bottom? Would he wonder why? Would he be able to connect the dots that the man he’s dealing with right now isn’t about to leave a trace of evidence, which is why I’m careful to accept the cigarette not in the top joints of my thumb and index finger, but with the second.
No fingerprints. If you’re going to go off script at least stick with the practiced methods that will keep you from getting caught, Sam.
“Sorry to ask, but you don’t happen to have a lighter too, do you?”
Another exhale, but no words when I lean in, letting him light my cigarette instead of taking the lighter in my own hand.
He’s angry and anger is an emotion I try to avoid. Hell, I can play Bach or Beethoven on repeat while a man pleads for his life, screaming for hours. Do I get angry at him? No. Am I…displeased with the actions he took which lead him to my insulated, windowless apartment that will double as his oversized coffin?
Absolutely, which is why he finds himself here in the first place.
But not this man. Not tonight. He will be the first to die in a different way, in a way that’s exciting me so much I’m damn near ready to come in my pants. But I don’t, because I’m saving that for the girl in the club. The thought of it confusing me and exciting me more than enacting revenge ever has.