Fiction
I wrote this at work while sitting through a long meeting…seriously
I wrote this in about a half an hour during a meeting at work today that I was obviously not involved in. I had no idea in my head, just a scene, so I made something up to pass the time. What really happened here, or what it means, you can decide. This has not been edited.
A man sits in a bar alone. A woman enter; she can smell his emptiness as he sits staring into his empty shot glass, trails of smoke drifting up from the cigarette forgotten between his hard fingers, adding it’s grime to the hazy, dim light. His eyes are hard and grey, his face scarred and grim and beautiful in the way of leather with a thousand miles of road behind it. Every line is an inscription, a line to a story that’s just one more shot, one more filthy bar away from becoming a legacy. A beautiful man, broken into a hundred shards of carbon whose razor edges now point only at himself.
She smiles. Exactly the kind of man she likes.
Although the bar is empty, and half a dozen split and stained stools stand free at the quiet bar, she slides in beside him, flashing him a smile that barely cuts through the fog of his mind. He barely
notices her, doesn’t at all wonder why she sat next to him when she could have sat anywhere, or why a woman like her would even be here right now.Doesn’t dawn on him to give her so much as a slight smile and a nod, that gesture that often passes for conversation in places like this. The other kinds -the kinds with words – always brings tears or violence, or rarely, a story about a past event that nobody cares to remember. This is a bar where dreams come to fade and the walls get more than their fair share of silent staring. Not the kind of place where a beautiful woman comes to initiate contact with an empty veteran of wars both real and imagined.
None of this dawns on him until she slides a full shot glass in front of him without a word. He looks at her for the first time, then, wondering vaguely how she knew what he was drinking. Must be the smell of the stuff; it’s practically his blood by now. It never occurs to him that he never heard her order anything, and that he hasn’t seen the bartender since she came in. He shrugs to himself, and downs the shot. Then he wonders if that was rude. Perhaps he should say something? He can’t seem to remember how to speak, or what words to speak if he could. He looks over at her, really looks, and notices her for the first time.
Her eyes are grey as his, but lustrous as jewels where his are cracked concrete. A wide smile lifts her face as she leans in towards him, casually pushing aside his reeking forgotten cigarette. Frozen, he lets it drop from between his fingertips. Something in his chest pulls outwards, towards her, and she reels him in. A lifetime’s worth of dust falls from his eyes when he looks at her. She seems painfully clear, reality in diamond clarity. Her hand touches his face – how long has it been since anyone has touched him this way? – and he breaks. His hand grabs hers, presses it to his cheek, eyes closing for a moment to concentrate on the feel of her skin, so smooth and soft pressed against his scars. His eyes open in time to see her leaning in towards him; those jewel grey eyes closing behind a forest of thick lashes as she presses her lips to his.
It’s an electric shock; a thunderstorm. A fire rages through him, red and shrieking, then white-blue and pure as he tastes her mouth, one hand sliding around her waist. Their tongues meet, and he crushes her to him, a pain growing in his chest, blinding him with his need. Nothing exists but her mouth, her firm waist, her breasts pressed against his chest. His rough fingers tangle gently in her scented hair. His voice is thick as he tries to tell her everything…no sound escapes him. She presses a perfect finger to his lips for silence, then kisses him again, deeper this time. He lifts her onto his lap and her arms encircle his neck as they melt together,
The man silently begins to cry, every shattered piece of him grinding together trying to become one, every edge ground down and reconnected, nerves and emotions long dead flaring back to heated life in her embrace. Dirty tears slip down his cheeks and he kisses her, kisses her, kisses her…
Later that evening, the bartender told the police that the man had been the only customer that part of the night. Sitting there with his head on his arms, he figured hes passed out again. Happened all the time, you see. Didn’t think about checking to see if the man was still breathing. Weren’t no other customers around, figured he’d just let the man have his time to his self. Man had been alone the whole night, always was, matter of fact. Hadn’t seen a soul with him.
Beside the body are two shot glasses, one grimy with use, but the other clear as crystal…
Hey, hey, come back here, did I hurt you?
Sitting in an airport is an exercise in surrealism. A hundred places to get on and off. Ladies and gentlemen, step right up into the airplane you never see. Spend hours cramped in a tin can with a hundred strangers pretending not to see each other, jostling past you and nervously smiling when they can’t hold their piss anymore. Exit into the terminal that looks just like the one you left. Bam! You’re somewhere else in the world, and this somewhere else is just as flat and grey and stinking of 15 year old stale cigarettes and Lysol as your life was before you got here. You haven’t escaped anything. You’re still you.
I looked him right in the eye and told him to quit bullshitting me. That it wasn’t necessary to impress me because I didn’t really give a shit about the truth but that sitting through the lies was getting tedious. He didn’t believe me – they never do. The stories just got wilder. Men always think that they need to feed you a line to get you in to bed, but what do they know? Sometimes I just want to fuck and pretend everything is okay for a day or three. You’d think that we could come to an accord on this. But there’s been too many years of listening to their buddies and reading bullshit news articles about how to deal with chicks, all written by brainless mongoloids who’ve probably never seen a real woman in their life. Those trophy fucks the money brings in? Those aren’t women, those are fucktoys you have to feed. Except fucktoys don’t lie to you. They can’t even get that much right.
How far do I want to push it? He’s insistent on playing this game and won’t even respect that I’m not interested and just want to get down to business. It’s as ingrained into him as a mating dance is for some beast in the wild. I’d act like I believe him just to get somewhere with this since I’m already here but something in my pride rises up and hisses like a snake at the idea. You can lie to me but you can’t walk away thinking I bought it. I’ll let you come on my back but I’ll never let you believe that you had me fooled. I’m in this for the same thing as him, but my ego isn’t as crippled. I’m not here to talk and I have no interest in loving him and he just can’t wrap his head around it.
I figure I’ll just be quiet, at first. Let him tire himself out, the same way you do with stupid children and dogs with too much energy. But damn, this fucker has staying power in all the wrong ways cuz this has been going on for hours. I pour myself a drink and listen to him ramble. He doesn’t notice I’ve gone through half the bottle but I have and now the crippled lines he’s trying to spit are easier to bear because I’m overheated and I’m feeling a bit friendly and you know, he really is kinda nice to look at. Suddenly the game is fun and I make a joke of rearranging his own words and repeating them back to him, trying to keep a straight face. He melts. He knows I understand him. He knows I feel the same. He feels how connected we are. Everything I say seems familiar somehow, like we’ve known each other for years. He manages to miss the fact that I’m simply parroting him and for a moment I even feel a little twinge of guilt in my gut or maybe that’s the vodka and the moment passes and I’m back to not caring and that predatory instinct takes over, thinning my eyes and widening my smile.
He’s terrified of me now. He thought he had in all the hooks but he’s feeling out of his depth. It’s the keenest observation he’s had all night outside of my cleavage and he does his best to ignore it. Two brain cells are fucking in his head but he’s struggling to down out the noise with his cock and for once it’s not working. His eyes have gone all soft and mushy and he looks years younger than he is. The only thing he has the balls left to do is reach out and touch my hair, gently, like I’ll vanish like ash if he disturbs the moment. He really needn’t have worried – I’m on my game now. I lean forward and kiss him, quickly, pressing my face against his. His eyes close and he sucks in his breath hard like he’s never kissed a girl before. His hands are shaking. They’re still in my hair. I grab his wrists and move his hands onto my tits and he shudders and relaxes into me, crushes me, and I know he’s mine.
Funny how that exact same move has worked the exact same way since high school.
Afterward, I roll off the bed in a smooth movement and grab my clothes. He’s too busy huffing and staring at the ceiling to notice at first. Then he asks me what I’m doing, and I say I’m getting dressed. He asks me why. I look down at him and say – I think you’re done for awhile, so I’m going to get something to eat. Hey, he says, hey hey, no, come back to bed, what’s wrong? Did I hurt you? I unsuccessfully attempt to stifle a snort. They always think they’ve hurt you. Because their manliness could do nothing else, right? They spend all that effort crafting their bullshit, then fall for it themselves like dead weights. There’s a kind of ironic justice in that I enjoy.
Hey. I wasn’t in it to play you, not really. In fact, I was the honest one of the two of us. Don’t blame me because you fell in love with your own horror show. It’s not my fault that I’m better at delivering your lines than you are. Do you want something to eat or not?
I’ve got another night left here. It’ll be awkward until I’ve got a drink in me again, and then I’ll warm up and he’ll fall for the same tired shit I said tonight because it’s what he’s got himself believing that he wants. And when I put my clothes back on and wipe the smile off my face, that wounded look will return. Later on he’ll call me and try to understand why I “backed off” when I was never really there. He’ll learn nothing. He’ll tell stories about me for years. I feel sorry for his girlfriend at home, whatever her name was.
It’s really not my problem.
So do you want something or not?
—–
this account is entirely fictional.






