Scarleton Series I : Before the Cult (14 page)

“Hey,” I softly
replied. She had to read my lips. It showed in her eyes and in how
her smile faltered at how disappointing that had been.

Her smile
gradually came back on, forced and hollow. “Kim”

I shook her
hand, limp and fragile to touch. “Sandy.”

“How long have
you been waiting here?”

“Um…two minutes
at best.” I was uncertain, all felt foreign and forlorn. Even if
her hands were driven by a veritable need to help the situation was
hopeless. I tried to convey the opposite of what I felt for the
sake of deceiving Macreason the hawk (maybe myself more than
anything).

“I moved from
the bar upstairs because the service was slow. Hope it is not the
same with this one,” she told me, as I gave her the disquieting
cold and empty stare. Inadequacy of my social skills demotivated
me, the over-sensitiveness making it even more harder to say
anything.

Useful
information,
I thought, an unpredictable and seemingly random
thought.

I grinned, my
eyes gliding up her cascading hair to her green eyes. “Can I get
you something?”

She smiled and
sized me with her eyes, rejection stinging from her glance(not at
all unexpected, I never measured up anyway). “Um…no I got it,” She
said shifting her focus to the bar, a nudge and a fuck-you of a
kind.

“She is
actually thinking that you wanna screw her tonight,” Macfearson
whispered into my ears, sending a chill down my spine. “I thought
she would fall for the black guy big cock thing. Maybe give you a
chance?”

“In this case,
Sandy, you are just not tall enough, I guess,” Macxermillio
said.

They were
right, at least I believed.

I blurted. “I
will give you a fifty if you spend thirty minutes with me.”

Startled she
shifted he attention back, clearly the wrong idea was on her
mind.

I reconstructed
my word, “I just wanna talk at that table over there…that’s all I
want. You just seem like a nice person.”

Her face was
smeared with bewilderment and suspicion. She must have thought it
was weird and strange, but for a half-drunk girl she didn’t think
of it as weird as she might have if she were sober. I craved to
talk with her, have a conversation that is naturally intimate and
close to heart. I had been lonely for a long time.

“Thank God I
got myself a boob-saver tonight!” said Kim.

“Boob-saver?” I
raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah you know,
I now have fifty bucks for my mouth instead of showing a guy my
bobs for a fifty” she shrugged with a pout.

I stared down
at her boobs, quite tantalizing they were. “They’re good I see no
reason why a guy wouldn’t do so.”

“You think?
Wanna have a look?”

“No thanks,” I
said at first but thinking it might upset her I afterwards agreed
reluctantly. Life is not a film and we should not try making it
one, this situation was beginning to be more like one. Not exciting
for me nonetheless. As far as I was concerned this did not feel
worth the tears I spared in the therapy session.

What am I
supposed to get from this creature of great and maybe underserved
bliss?

She giggled,
gazed at me contemplatively ,or so it seemed to me. “Why did you
say no at first?”

I sighed. “I
have general respect for women I would say.”

“Ah, nice guy,
I see. Says a lot.” She nodded tentatively, eyes on the floor.

“Like
what?”

“Why you’re
lonely and desperate.” She sounded bemused.

Desperate and
lonely but not for the reasons you confer.

“Ah. I
see.”

“Wanna get
laid?”

“Is there also
a price on that?”

She twittered.
“It depends.”

“On what?”

“How much you
are willing to pay.”

“So there is a
price,” I paused. “I don’t do this kind of a thing.”

“I will pretend
like I have never heard that one.”

“That is modest
of you. Why do you think men say that?”

“They care what
I think of them,” she shrugged.

“Fifty for your
boobs. Another fifty for a blow job. Another one for penetration
and another fifty for anal?”

“Two hundred
and fifty!”

“What’s the
other fifty for?”

“For the
time.”

“Okay.” I
nodded.

“So your place
or the bathroom or my place?”

I frowned.
“No…um I just wanna…wanna talk.”

“You don’t
sound so sure?” she smirked coyly.

“You are hard
to resist I will not lie.” I flattered her.

She held my
hand and brushed my shoulder from across the table, her lush
breasts my eyes’ prize. “I will make your night, honey heart,” she
whispered seductively. Her voice was truly suitable for phone sex.
I was salivating, not because of the orthodox sexual trappings.

Macfearson
nudged me. “Fuck her like a whore!” All sarcastic.

Macxermillio
whispered, “Is this truly what you need, or what will make you any
better? Is this what the whole trip was about?”

“If the world
wants to fuck, I say fuck it,” Macfearson said.

“Fearson, how
can this be helpful?” Macxermillio said.

I gulped and
leaned back.

“Fuck me!” she
said it like a pornstar would. Every man dreamed of fucking one
once in a lifetime at least.

I looked around
to check if anyone was looking or if anyone on the table nearby
could hear.

“I won’t lie…I
really want to,” I said. Rage in my pants and a storm in my mind.
Not of the orthodox appetite.

She smiled. She
was so
beautiful
, beauty being the combination of hot and
sexy.

“First let’s
talk.” I insisted.

Bewildered, I
found myself asking. “How do you do what do you do?”

She looked down
at my drink, still untouched.” I just give myself over, it is no
big deal at all. The worst thing would be trying to be in a
relationship for me. I hate those.”

“Aren’t
relationships a place of magic?”

“No. Don ‘t
wanna be owned by someone anyway.”

“Isn’t it
owning each other?”

“It’s very
limiting and oppressive.”

“Are we ever
free from everything?”

“Some things we
choose to be held down by.” She paused. “What I’m doing makes quite
a good contribution to society.”

I felt nothing
but disgust for her at that moment, it was much more instinctive
like the way one flinches when an object is thrown at them by an
enemy. The disgust was caused by my hopelessness in changing her
disbelief in the one force of life that makes life worth enduring.
Even with this hopeless racket of a life. Something about
relationships construct a life worth living, it makes it
bearable.

Macfearson
ambled over to her side and leaned behind her , drew his sword and
pressed it against her neck. He smiled, his chin tilted backward to
make himself look even more gruesome. He tugged her head back by
the hair. “She is just a maggot eating away at life itself how can
life be worth living when such a disgrace is walking the earth.
Humans have become shallow… buried under a river of superficiality
and disregard for the things that really matter.”

I would have
loved to see it… to see her eyes gorged out. Her head under the
heel of my foot while her throat is chocked by an overflow of
crimson juice. The vessels spraying blood in my face.

“To cleanse or
to cease,” I whispered in a dream-like voice, consumed by my
fantasy.

“What went so
wrong that you had to pay to talk with someone?” She asked as soon
as she realized that I had not been listening to much of what she
was saying, I had tuned out. I was preoccupied alright.

“I am just
tired of people in the world being superficial. Wearing masks
around their faces. Asking you questions they don’t want to know
answers to and saying things out of courtesy rather than flat out
commitment or interest.

“I am paying
you to be authentic. I am paying you to remove the mask and stop
the act. I am paying you to ask questions you really wanna know
answers to. To truly speak from your heart rather than cheap
courtesy. Honestly I don’t give a fuck, neither do you that is why
you suck cock from any hole on your body where it could fit. I
would like to fuck you but it shames me… paints me as a loser. For
once I want to get things because of what they are and their sake
rather than what I have to offer.

“Don’t get me
wrong, I am not mad. I am thrilled,” I ginned a grin as sweet as a
sour lemon. My voice was devoid of emotion but the pattern in which
they came made an unmistakable point.

“Fuck! I did
not know that the talk-whore business was this heavy,” she smiled,
something worth a thing beginning to take form in her face.

There is power
in sex, maybe the kind that it makes it worth dying or living for.
Maybe that is why the whole population of
lifelings
is still
going strong. Like an incurable virus they spread. These were weird
creatures indeed I didn’t know what drives them or understand their
ways. That place…that room seemed so disorganized and confused. Yet
those people seemed to have developed a set of norms that allowed
them to function in that environment and perhaps blind themselves
from the truth, our truth. To them there was no chaos but clear
patterns, I did not feel human at all. Sometimes I thought my eyes
were a curse or I am an angel sent from above who has a severe case
of memory loss and I had got used to the idea that I am human, so
much that I tried to be.

“Just imagine
your hand up her thigh. Screaming out her name as you fuck her,”
Macfearson’s voice grumbled with lust for Kim.

Nothing else
seemed truer than the pleasure that would give me. It might have
been my gateway to salvation. Suddenly I felt inconsolable. Why?
Every time I thrust her it would have been a reminder to her that
all men are monsters or pigs or whatever she had grown up to
believe about men. I wanted to change that, convince her otherwise
but as much as I did I wanted to fuck her and spit in her face…
slap her and call her a whore at the top of my lungs. Which of
these two truths was I as a man and an individual? She might
actually have been so skilled at what she does … it might just have
saved me. At the same time I was deeply disgusted.

“Why are you
here?” I asked. Macxermillio wiped a tear off his cheek.

She shifted in
her chair, tilted her chin forward and grinned. “I am here to have
fun, enjoy myself and meet a couple of friends.”

“You really
enjoy being here, drinking and doing whatever it is people come
here for?”

“Yeah, it is
fun. Meet new people and have great conversations.”

“Meeting new
people? How do you that one?”

“You know, you
just talk or whatever. Sometimes your friends introduce you or some
shit like that. Sometimes it is a must do situation equal to being
trapped in an elevator or some shit like that. Why wouldn’t you do
it?”

“Maybe I am
learning?”

I was blank
there. How do you know what is appropriate to say? How do you
contribute to a conversation the right way that gets people chilled
rather than stare and shake their heads? How do you avoid the
awkwardness and the constant feeling of being looked at like an
alien or freak?

There were
things she instinctively knew, things she could teach me or explain
to me but just expected me to
get.
She couldn’t have though,
not honestly, because she must have sensed the
it
.

How do you stay
when you can see their rejection blurting through their masks? How
do you endure that? How do you find genuineness? For what reason
have the
lifelings
stopped being genuine or avoided it? What
was the point to it all?

“You don’t look
like you belong here,” she said.

I winced.

“No, no, no.
I’m not saying this because you’re black, it has nothing to do with
race. You just seem very clueless and pent up.”

I nodded. “I
see. I get it. I think you’re bridge is locking onto my side.”

She
laughed.

It must have
been an explosion…or something resembling it at a psychological
level because I went deaf for a while. Kim babbled on about things
and stuff, as the boulders of fate veered with determination.
Oblivious to my awe, not surprising since the nature of
lifelings
is one of blindness.

“So why?” Kim
asked.

“Why what?” I
returned with such simplicity it seemed I was listening all long, a
tone with a tint of shrewdness to it.

“You have been
really unnerved to do what you doing to me now.”

“You
think?”

“Yeah.”

I sighed, more
out of habit than real emotion. ”Let’s play a game,” I paused
searching my mind for ways I can make it sound like a real game
rather than an evaluation or an interview before the job. A skill I
never had but one that formed itself quite quickly and comfortably.
“We each get to ask each other five questions, With each question
we have to answer or avoid to by downing a glass of beer.” When I
saw her look down her lap, I added, “And yes it has to be
beer.”

She pulled her
head up, chin forward. “You will have to pay more for that.” She
shrugged. A gave her a still stare making it look like I was
considering her proposal. It felt like the proper thing to do. I
did not want to come across as too keen.

“Game on,” I
grunted and she welcomed it with a snort.

I went and
bought four pints of beer, carefully calculated. She will drink
three and I will drink one if I play my cards right.