She had no clear idea how to do this, so she texted him to come meet her in the Subterranean, a dive bar on the main drag.
When he slipped into the booth seat beside her, it felt eellike. Sleek and nasty. Like mucous.
The server popped beer caps and let the bottles land, cold and foamy, on the table.
She had no guile left, no time or energy to dissemble, and said simply, “What is it you want?”
In lieu of an answer he smiled a crooked smile.
She drank from the bottle, looked away. At all the distant people, the lonely, abandoned detritus, the scammers and the stammerers and the wholly unblessed.
“You ain’t gonna talk, fella, why you here at all?”
His smile lived a life of its own on his river-delta face. It never wavered. Like her, he scanned the room, drinking in the people and their ambience, avid. His eyes were dark, almost black, yet they glittered.
“Girl, I’mma tell you a thing.”
Unsettled, she waited within the pause, knowing it was coming at last.
He chewed a hangnail, spit it out, coughed twice, went still as hemlock in snowfall, grinned again, and said to her, “Moment I saw you, baby girl, I knew you was mine. Didn’t care who you pledged yourself to. To whom you were betrothed”—at this he giggled, almost childlike—“but I also knew it ain’t never easy to convince another of this type of destiny. So I waited. And dreamed. And brought reality kicking and screaming closer to them dreams. You know me, though…”
“No. I don’t. You’re mistaken. You a stranger to me.”
“I ain’t saying it literally. But you know me. My predatory nature. My thirst. And you want that.”
“No. Fuck you. I ain’t nobody’s prey.”
“And that’s… laudable.” He tipped his empty bottle her way. “It is.”
The waiter brought two more beers, and someone paid the jukebox to play “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World.”
Her head swam the toxic currents of the bar’s stale air. No one smoked indoors, but it felt defiled and choked by mere collective thoughts, of loss and debt and grievance, of abandonment and domestic pain.
She knew courage would be called for, so she called for it. “If it cash you need, keep on dreaming. I ain’t got that. I’mma ask you to leave me alone now, though. I’m sayin’ enough.”
His grin was a levelheaded weapon on his face. It was larger than all of this.
“You think you can tell me what it is you sayin’. You think it’s something I’d consider. I might could almost love you for that, girl. That’s honest-to-god touching. If my heart was a size larger, it might break. But it ain’t. And it won’t. And I don’t break. Ever. Listen to me, little burr. I will do with you what my appetites dictate.”
She drew on reserves. “And what exactly do they dictate?”
He looked at her. Gazed with dazzling black irises into her depths. Moved his beer aside. Shifted so he was facing her head-on.
She’d never felt more naked.
“Girl, they want to skip through alpine meadows breathing glacial air, run down scree slopes, cryin with the life of it all, surf above the reef, rassle sharks, swing on lianas in the hot deep greenery. All that is true, my fever-browed friend, but right now, truth be told, all I want to do is scoop out your uterus with my teeth.”
Somehow she found reserves that kept her still and quiet and placed her fear on delay.
Whispering. “You are the devil.”
“Indefinite not definite article, and you’re hiking an adjacent trail.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
He gestured to the boy who’d brought their beers, and he came across, and the man paid him with a generous tip.
“I like this place,” he said. “But were leaving now.”
The boy nodded.
“And if I refuse?” she asked in earshot of the boy.
“Then I’ll indulge my urge in public.”
Inside her pocket, she hit 911 on her phone, and his grin only widened.
“Don’t matter. They’ll arrive too late and maybe wonder for a few seconds who the eviscerated woman torn open in the booth really was, but they’ll go home to semblances of family or maybe only precooked dinners and neglected cats and forget quite soon because they have to, or this world will squeeze the last few drops of joy out of them. This is hopelessness. You are hopeless. Please, for all our sakes, won’t you accept this?”
“No. Never.” She stood and began to walk away, her hair a tawdry halo, her body clean and muscled as a trout, her heart a mourning bell.
Behind her the infection, the ooze, the filth of rot. Rising.