Don't Order Dog_ 1(18)

“You know, it’s interesting,” she began, her voice calm and warm. “When you first walked up to me, I realized you and the man who wrote those letters have a few things in common. The most obvious is that you’re both tall, dark and – as you’re clearly aware – handsome. In fact, for a minute, I thought you just might be… well, never mind.” Jeri paused for a moment as the young man’s face lit with a smile. The poor bastard still thinks he has a chance she thought somberly. “The other thing you two have in common was that neither one of you knows a damn thing about me. But then, that’s where the similarities seem to end.”

“What about the fact that we both obviously like you?” the young man asked playfully.

“You don’t like me,” Jeri snapped. “You want me. Big difference. To like me would be to write me letters and tell me stories that make me curious and make me laugh. That shows creativity and interest. You, on the other hand, with your twenty-something lust, just want me, which means you’ll sit here for fifteen minutes and smile your handsome smile and run your hands through your perfect, stylish hair and sneak a few peeks at my books to determine whether I’m smart or not. And if everything falls into place, you’ll take me home to some filthy little apartment decorated with a beer-reeking futon and fumble me through ten minutes of mediocre sex.” She paused for a moment, taking a quick breath of air as the young man slumped deeper into his barstool. “And for what? All that effort for the purpose of you going back to the frat house and telling your buddies that you… how would you say it? Tapped that ass?”

“Wait a minute, I–”

“No, don’t apologize,” Jeri interrupted, raising her hand. “Don’t you see? I’m not asking you to like me. I’m just not interested in you wanting me. Do you understand what I mean? Of course you do. You’re a smart guy. I might’ve just wasted the last fifteen minutes of your favorite pick-up strategy, but cheer up! There’s plenty of naïve young ass in this bar that hasn’t learned the difference between like and want yet, so get out there and start tapping!”

The young man stared back at Jeri with wide, unblinking eyes, like an actor suddenly stricken with stage fright. His smile had fallen into his half-gaping mouth, and for the first time Jeri realized his childish shyness looked genuinely real. She picked up a towel and began hastily wiping down the counter. She was already beginning to hate herself.

“Look, I’m sorry, I–”

“You said the man that wrote those letters and I don’t know anything about you,” the young man interrupted. “But that’s not really true, is it?”

Jeri smiled wearily as her towel made small circular patterns across the old dark oak. “No, it’s not. You know something about me now that he doesn’t.”

“What’s that?”

She stopped wiping and carefully folded the towel before tossing it onto the rack beneath the counter. As she did, she glanced absently through the window at the blurred streaks of headlights that cut along the cold inky blackness of old Route 66.

“That I can be a real bitch.”

Jeri didn’t give him a chance to respond, but immediately walked towards the other end of the bar. There was nothing more to add to the conversation, nothing she would want to hear. She poured a few more drinks to the waning crowd, then leaned against the back counter and waited for the night to slowly fold to a close. A young couple stood to leave, the man playfully helping the woman with her jacket and scarf before taking her glove-sheathed hand. Jeri studied them, smiling and kissing as they slid through the door, the vapor of their hot breath rising like smoke before evaporating into the frozen air. She crossed her arms and sighed quietly, the volume of a conversation beginning to rise once more in her head.

It would suck to die alone.





11.




Spotless.

Its surface radiated, glinting in the light of the room. Clean as the first time out of the box. Pure as a virgin’s conscious. A tiny, glimmering sculpture of 420 grade martensitic stainless steel.

He wiped down the utensil again. As always, the act rekindled a memory of his father, peering down at some tool in his workshop from behind the black lenses of his ever-present Ray-Bans, a cigarette hanging loosely from his mouth, his voice deep and confident. He would calmly repeat his favorite lesson over and over, like some goddamned religious mantra, until the words had burned into his childhood conscious. Those same words echoed in his head now as he wiped the tiny instrument and inspected, wiped and inspected, wiped and inspected.