Donovan wore all black today and was slowly making his way through a “fun size” bag of peanut M&Ms. I watched him quietly pick a candy out, then suck gently on it, rolling it about between his tongue and the roof of his mouth until the candy skin had weakened and lost color, then he’d happily bite down through the warm, softened chocolate and chew the tender peanut within before swallowing and starting all over again. Before the M&Ms, there’d been a KitKat bar which he’d broken each
segment from, tenderly nibbled the chocolate sides from, worked the
chocolate bottom and top off with his front teeth and tongue, before lifting each wafer free and vanishing it in a few quick bites. I’d seen him work through candy and cookies and other sweets before. He almost always savored every morsel he was given, making the treat last as long as possible, using his tongue and fingers and lips to prolong the experience, exploring every piece, taking everything apart a bit at a time to enjoy each moment seperately. Nothing was wasted. He always licked his fingers clean at the end. It was intriguing to watch him delicately work a bit of chocolate or free every chip from a cookie before attacking the leftover pile of them.
It made one curious as to what he might be like in bed.
“Leftover from Halloween,” he explained, sucking a fresh blue M&M.
“What’s your favorite?”
“My favorite what? Candy?” He shrugged. “I don’t care for candy like I
did when I was little. I once found a folded chocolate candy bar. I can’t really explain what it was like, except it had been poured in a very thin sheet which had wavered as it had fallen, forming a zillion miniscule tubes and folds like collapsed ruffles. It just broke apart and melted in my mouth. There was hardly anything to it. So delicate, the flavor still rich. I can’t remember what it was called, and I’ve never been able to find it since. It’s the chocolate bar that got away.
I think it was British.”
“You’re quite the conisseur.”
His eyebrows lifted momentarily. “Whatever. I like my fine foods. I hardly ever find anything as fancy as that.”
“Do you pick your dinners apart, too?”
He bit down on the melted chocolate and smiled. “Sometimes I take the M&M and lick an equator around it, then put it halfway between my front teeth and gently tap it until the skin breaks, then I use my fingernails to flake off the bits of candy like a hard-boiled eggshell and eat them one at a time. Then I bite the chocolate to the nut and remove the top half with my teeth. Then I extract the peanut with my teeth and eat it. Finally, I eat the remaining chocolate cup.”
“Why?”
“I dunno. It’s just something I started doing when I was a little kid.”
“You like to prolong pleasureable experiences?”
I had his attention. His smile turned a touch shy, a touch crafty. “Yes. I do. I like to go all out for them. I like to experience them to their fullest. The whole nine yards...atmosphere, costuming if necessary, music, lighting...the works.”
“I was referring to food.”
“You lie,” he laughed. “You were referring to any particularly
pleasureable experiences. In the morning, I like to wake up, then drift
in and out of sexual fantasies for the next two hours or so before actually getting out of bed. I love to just stand in hot running water when I shower. I sit through all the credits at the end of good movies. I eat my garnish. I take whatever small pleasures life gives me and I run with them like a marlin on a jig. They’re few and far between. Why I shouldn’t I enjoy them to the max?”
“There was a girl who got away...”
Now he was suddenly somber. The corners of his mouth fell and his expression turned more innocent, more pained. “I don’t know that. There was a girl I grew to like...very much...in a kind of a strange way...in a very short period of time. And I think she liked me, too...but I’m really not so sure of it. She didn’t really get away because she was never in my grasp.” I could tell he was thinking about her as he distractedly began to pick at an old scab on his right arm. Some physicians believed that scab picking was a cry for attention. An attempt to seem vulnerable and therefore in need of guidance or companionship. I saw Donovan trying to remove something ugly from his life, even if it was just an old memory. He was unconsciously in too
much of a hurry to allow some aspects of his life to just heal. “I guess
I’m supposed to launch right into that story? You’ve heard it so many
times now...and even I’ve heard how the story’s evolved as my emotions have altered.
“Donna wanted to move after the last of her family members died off. We’d been together for a few years, and honestly, I was trying to find a way to get away from her. When we’d first started dating, she’d been fun to hang out with. I’d noticed she kept having these strange memory lapses, though, and I was growing less tolerant of her forgetfulness. I found out she used to smoke pot, and I was proud of her for giving it up. Turns out she’d tried to go cold turkey after she started hangin’
with me and learned I didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs. She went cold
turkey on her friends then, too. She hung out only with me. I was like a
health nut compared to her, and she thought maybe I’d be her shining example to start trying to live a better life.
“Of course her friends wanted to know why she wasn’t hanging out with any of them anymore, and those who met me seemed to like me okay, though I really had very minimal contact with any of them. Donna didn’t want them around the house, espcially whenever I was there. Stupidly, I tried to encourage her to see her friends and go out with them every once in a while, because I had no desire to monopolize her time or tell her who she could and couldn’t be friends with.
“Well, she slowly started going out with them again, and while she
initially refused to partake of any herb, she slowly started sampling
again, until there was no way to hide it and I was tremendously let down. She had also been a thief at the plant I’d been guarding, walking outta there with entire cases of cleaning products, toilet paper, paper towels, and office supplies. I was glad I hadn’t known that while I’d still been a guard. I told her I would’ve had to rat her out.
“She was afraid I’d rat on her stash or her friends, but I told her...well, I didn’t want to tell her, but I had to admit that almost everyone I’d ever known did drugs of some kind or were alcoholics at least. I was so disappointed. I tried to convince her she was better off without the stuff, and she even agreed...but she was gradually building back up again, smoking only when I wasn’t around or when she went out with her friends. I lost a lot of respect for her. She was older than me, and I’d hoped she’d be more mature. I needed to be with somebody more mature after the whole Gloria fiasco.
“I only ever saw her really messed-up once. A Halloween night. She gets
really fuckin’ obnoxious when she’s smoking. Everything’s so damn funny,
and she’ll argue a point to death even if she’s dead wrong--which is something dumbass Gloria used to do just because she actually enjoyed arguing. It really pisses me off. You have no idea how many times I’ve wanted to just punch her lights out or leave her on the side of the road somewhere until she’d sobered up again. After a few years we started arguing about her pot smoking and she told me none of her other
boyfriends had ever had a problem wiith it or said she was obnoxious. I asked her if they’d all been pot smokers, too. She said yeah. We were at a bar this one Halloween and she missed the damn costume contest because everytime I’d go get her and tell her to come into the next room where it was, she’d tell me she needed to finish her beer first, and then I’d be back ten minutes later and she’d still be standing there alone in the middle of the dance floor with her stupid beer. She was waiting for the band to come out and didn’t want to miss them. The band was scheduled to come out at ten o’clock that night. The costume contest was at eight. I was up on the stage watching for her when they announced it was the
anniversary of some old vampire movie and the first person up on stage with a vampire costume on would get a free DVD player. She was dressed as a Goddamn vampire! It’s not even like it’s an unusual costume or anything, but they kept asking a vampire to go to the stage to claim their prize and nobody was going up there to get it! It’s like it was waiting for her! They announced it like five times because there were a
few people there with fangs and capes and stuff and none of them were heading for the stage, and they even went into the bar area where she was to announce it...and no one ever claimed the prize. When I asked her later why she hadn’t come in for the DVD player, she said, ‘Oh, I didn’t want to miss my band.’ We tried to play billiards later and she kept hitting balls onto the floor and climbing up onto the pool table. She could barely stand up straight. She was so fucking out of it. I tried to get her to come onto the stage and dance with me by pretending I was some kind of Fred Astaire or something there to sweep her off her feet, and when I suddenly showed up beside her, acting all romantic with all
these big, overly dramatic gestures, she just blinked and turned away to
order another beer. It was so embarrassing. And her ex-boyfriend was
there that night, too. He got caught trying to sell some weed and was kicked out of the bar, then he kept trying to get people outside to go in and give messages to Donna for him. He wanted her to go out in the parking lot and stay with him because he wasn’t ready to leave yet, and he couldn’t come back in. Donna didn’t go out with him, thank God. He wasn’t there when we finally left the place.
“So I found out she was selfish and intolerant of me. At first she’d give in to nearly anything I wanted to do with her...but then she quickly began trying to control things. Just little things, like where we’d go eat that night or what movies we’d see. What did I want to go do on my day off? It didn’t matter. We’d only do whatever she felt like doing. And she could never remember anything we’d planned in advance. I’d talk to her for a week about an event or activity or something, and the day we were supposed to go, she’d have driven to the store to go shopping, or she’d make a long-distance phone call, or be all excited
about some new idea she’d just had. Her talent was disappointing me. She was extremely good at it. I started just giving up on trying to plan anything fun anymore. If we missed something I’d been talking to her about she’d get mad at me for not reminding her about it, even if I had that very same day. And she never read books, and she had no taste in art... She started admitting that a lot of the things she had done with me at first she’d only done to try and impress me. We really just didn’t
have much in common, but she still wanted me around.
“So I started telling her I needed some space. She made me keep all my belongings from the apartment boxed up in a room she never used. If I tried to put a picture of the two of us up someplace, it would always disappear. Art I made for her wound up in boxes, or the attic, or even in the trash. I felt like I wasn’t welcome there, or that she was embarrased of me, but she kept denying it and telling me she loved me and wanted me to stay. I didn’t even love her... I never felt that rush, that wonderful heady feeling of dizzyness and floating like I’d felt
with Gloria. Donna was a lot nicer to me than Gloria-”
I had to blurt, “She was?”
“Well, she didn’t scream at me over stupid things all the time, she was
only really argumentive when she smoked pot, she wasn’t paranoid about everything I did when she wasn’t around, and she...well...actually...that’s about it. But, overall, it was a lot quieter with her and we actually did go more places and do more things together...even if they were often the wrong things and not what we’d
planned.” He paused and exhaled audibly, seemingly frustrated. “I
know...she’s not the girl I want to spend the rest of my life with. By far. I never felt any love with her. I never fell in love. I don’t love her now...but I still kinda care about what happens to her. Usually. I mean, there are times I wish she’d just go out the door and never return at all. There are still times...now...again...when I’m starting to wish I was dead just so I could get out of this stupid, annoying lifestyle where the girl is in charge and she’s a retard...okay, that wasn’t nice. Fuck it. Sometimes she really is a retard, and I have a cousin who’s
retarded who I think has more common sense than she does.”
He was getting pretty worked up, unable to remain still in his chair, unable to look at me while he talked. His troubles tormented him. They were nearly physical to him. He was unable to escape some irritating discomfort that lingered always in the corner of his mind. His voice had risen and his words were coming clipped and breathy. He was exerting himself over phantoms. Donovan was starting to feel the beginning trickle of adrenaline that could potentially trigger his very volatile temper at any time. “So, you moved with her?”
His eyes flicked my way. Light colored, they appeared dark beneath his downturned brows. “Uh, yeah. I moved with her. I thought about life alone again, life with no furniture and nobody at all to talk to...no place to go for any good reason at all. And even though I’d even gone looking at a few cheap, run-down small houses for sale, I’d had no way to buy any of them, no money to put down...and even if I’d lived in any of them, they would still have just been empty. So, I moved with her. She wasn’t rich like people had said she was. She’d wasted an inheritance on partying and drugs.” Closing his eyes, he shook his head
almost angrily. “Goddamn, if someone had ever died and left me money and
a house and land... Jesus. I’d have been set for life. I never would have blown it all. God, she’s so fucking stupid. Lives for today. Has no concept of preparing for any kind of a real future. Waste.
“We moved. Together. It was a horrible, horrible experience, one completely unplanned fuck-up after another. She’d gone down south to find work and been offered jobs...in bars. Offered jobs by people she never got business cards or anything from while she was just having fun bar-hopping. We were forced to move because she sold the house out from
under us and we had to leave some stuff behind because everything came down to the very last second and she had no idea what she was doing. I was at wit’s end trying to get her to understand we had a deadline, and she’d leave to get more boxes to pack things in, then come back late at night without boxes because she’d gone to hang out with an old friend or something. I had to throw so much of my stuff away...artwork and
magazines I kept for reference for my art. Half-completed projects. All of my clothes. I had enough clothes for a week of travel. Everything else I’ve bought down here at Goodwill and the Salvation Army. She just wasn’t worth all that...but I think I might’ve died had I stayed behind alone.
“The funny thing was, that psycho girl with the fiance had tried to get me to move down south with her, and so had Gloria. She’d been stationed down there and always wanted to return. So I ended up leaving finally with Donna. I never wanted to go south. I always wanted to go up north into New England where I actually felt like I belonged and my father had told me opportunity was, in the big cities, New York...
“It took us three months to find a place to live and jobs. I got this
shitty job I have now in this comic book shop, and she works at a mall
half an hour away. She owns the house because she spent the last few thousand dollars she had to get it, and I own nothing as usual...which scares me. I’m tired of not having anything in my name. I need to be in control of things. I’m sick to death of moving and getting kicked out of places. I desperately want a place of my own...”
“Donovan, why can’t you take charge of you own life?”
“Money, mostly. I’m always getting promised promotions and pay raises and shit everywhere I go, and then something always happens and I don’t
get shit.”
“Why don’t you try and get a second job?”
“Yeah, that would calm my nerves all right. Besides, Andrea at the comic
book shop makes me work weird hours all the time. It’s easier for me to just keep looking for a whole new better job. Anyway, I’ve had to start lying to Donna about how much money I have at any given time lately. If she knows I have more than I say I do, she needs it for something. She owes me over a thousand dollars right now... I’m not holding my breath over it.”
“Why do you lend her money?”
“She supported me for three months when I was sick before I got that stupid job at the clothing store. She paid for everything. She pays for my meals sometimes. She buys me things when she goes out and happens to have money and happens to think of me.”
“What a winner.”
He cut his eyes toward me at that sarcastic remark. “Me or her?” When I
remained silent, he sighed. “She owns the house. She pays half the bills, though sometimes she cuts paying them on time awful damn close. The cost of living where we are now is astonishing. There’s no way I could afford to get a place on my own. I’ve started doing art shows when I can afford to, and I’m selling some stuff, but not much and not very often. People keep trying to take me under their wings and ‘help’ me,
but there are always strings attached. I’m not interested in getting ahead through bullshit means. People keep telling me I need to learn how to lie. I need to be more aggressive. I need to do the hard sell. I can’t lie to people to help myself. I’ve lied before--that’s true --but I always try to keep it to a minimum and it’s mainly just been to keep myself out of serious trouble.”
“You lie to Donna.”
“I live a lie with Donna. I say I love her every now and then, but there’s no love there. Not from my end anyway, and she doesn’t treat me like she actually loves me, but she does say it maybe once a month or so.”
“Wonderful relationship. You’re almost a gigolo. You play a part to keep your home.”
“To stay in her home,” he returned, and there was a hard edge beginning to creep back into his voice. “I don’t have a home. I’ve never had one. I just have a bunch of places where I’ve been forced to sleep when there was nowhere else to go.”
“You could always be homeless again.”
“That would do wonders for my self-image and general hygiene.”
“You’d rather be a gigolo?”
He sneered and chuckled. “Me a gigolo...that sounds so hard to believe.
Me. I sleep with this dumb chick on occasion and let her run my life into the ground just for a comfortable bed to lay in instead of the front seat of my car. Yeah, that about sums it all up.”
“If you’re not happy, only you can change things.”
“Hey--great idea. Let’s check my options. I could be homeless again. I
could apply for low-income housing and live amongst the trash I can’t stand-”
“Not everyone in low-income housing is trashy, Donovan.”
“Well, they don’t invite the neighbors for barbecues or water their lawns regularly or carpool to work or anything, either.” Before I could
try another tactic, he reminded me, “I don’t own any fucking furniture, okay? I don’t even have the bookcases any more or even a fraction of the books. Damn...I could sell some of the antique ones, the hard-to-find out of print ones...but I don’t have them anymore. I have nothing but a bunch of art supplies I have to scrape mold off of and tape together when I can’t afford fresh stuff. Low-income housing, right. I’d be spending most of my money on roach bombs again, with T-shirts
thumbtacked over the windows because I don’t own any drapes or anything. And I’d be so alone...”
I asked him, “But aren’t you alone right now?”
His eyes turned heavenward and they were unnaturally bright with unshed
wetness. “God! Yes! I am so fucking alone right now! I have nobody to talk to! No one understands me! I have nothing...I have nobody...”
“Just Donna.”
“I can’t talk to her about anything. She’s interested in porn and pot and music and that’s about it. She’s older than me, so most of the stuff she listens to is this boring, decades-old rock. I like listening to some of the same stuff over and over, too, but my God! There’s a whole world of music out there to listen to! There’s so much new stuff being made up all the time! I am so fucking sick to death of George
Thoroughgood and the Beach Boys, Bryan Adams and Pat Benatar!”
“But, is your sex life good?”
“Hell, no! Try sleeping with a God-damn pot-head sometime! She gets herself off, then passes out before I’m ready! She wants to watch me play with myself all the time, but doesn’t want to participate! I’ll flirt with her for hours, and then she just falls asleep with a loud fart! I might as well get no sex at all! I don’t even enjoy it with her...and I don’t...” He trailed off and his jaw tightened for a moment.
“You don’t what, Donovan?”
He said quietly, slowly, “I don’t even masturbate anymore. I used to do it fairly regularly. I kinda had to ‘cause Donna would get me all ready to go, then let me down as usual. She likes sex well enough...but then she’s always napping or high or something. She only ever did the same five basic things over and over again anyway. I mean, I like just your basic fucking--don’t get me wrong. Endless missionary position is better than nothing...but I’d kinda like to try some other things, too. She’s always looking at porn on the Internet, but then she never wants to try anything she sees. She seems to just like looking at other people doing
it. She’ll get all cranky if a month or so goes by and we haven’t done it, but it’s not for lack of anything on my part...well, it is lately. I don’t wanna be with her anymore. At all. I tried to break up with her earlier this year after...well, after Stephanie told me goodbye. I couldn’t stand to be around her any longer. Not after what I’d discovered was out there. Still out there... Oh, God.” He sank his face
into his hands.
I let him remain that way for a moment or two before asking him, “Do you get more emotional discussing Donna or discussing Stephanie?”
His eyes appeared over the tips of his fingers. He looked tired. “Fuck if I know. I feel differently about each of them.”
“Did you love Stephanie?”
The hands dropped slowly and he hunched over himself, staring down at the floor. I heard him exhale, then swallow.
“Do you love Stephanie?”
He hunched further, withdrawing, wringing his hands and then I saw him
glance up at me swiftly, briefly, before he began to nod almost imperceptably. I waited patiently, feeling a strange near-illness twisting in my gut as I watched him, saw fresh pain boil forth and manifest in his large, expressive eyes. His voice, when he spoke, was almost a whisper. “Yessss.” He nodded again, closing his eyes and rocking over himself on the edge of the chair. “God, I’m such a fucking idiot. I am so God-damn fucking stupid...” His brows met and his eyes became even more liquidy as he raised himself partway and stared
straight ahead at nothing at all. Donovan swallowed again. “I can’t help
it.” I could barely hear him. “I have tried so hard to put her out of my
mind, to tell myself she’s no good, she only used me, she never wanted anything to do with me at all...but I can’t fucking help it. Yes.” He winced and turned his face skyward again. “Yes.” His weak voice cracked.
“A week ago-”
“I lied,” he growled, holding himself as he rocked some more. “I lie sometimes...about what I’m feeling...because I think sometimes I’m
hoping I’ll believe it.”
“But...this isn’t a lie? Now?”
The jaw clenched as he turned his face toward me. His features were splotchy as he struggled to reamain calm and composed. Donovan swallowed, took a deep breath, then admitted softly, “No. I’m not lying. I can’t lie about it any longer. I love Stephanie. God, she’s...she’s just everything I’ve ever wanted in a friend if not a girlfriend...lover. She’s almost just like me.” He smiled quickly, but
his emotions were overpowering him. “I can talk to Stephanie and she thinks I’m funny, but she doesn’t...she didn’t expect me to be funny every day all the time. A lot of people treat you that way when you’re funny. They actually get pissed at you if you’re having a bad day. It’s like you’re not allowed to turn the funny off or they’re ready to throw rotten tomatoes at you. If you’re down, you might as well be dead.
Stephanie’s funny as hell... She wasn’t quite as quick as me. Sometimes she was quicker, actually. Sometimes things I said just went straight over her head and I think she just thought I was weird...but we’re so much alike personality-wise. It’s weird because she claims her upbringing was normal...but she’s so lonely inside, too. I could feel it. She has trouble finding people she can really talk to and relate to. Her husband doesn’t really understand her...”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. Fuck. Ah.”
“So he found out about you and-”
“That was kind of the weird thing about it because we talked for a long time before we figured out we both liked each other, and then we kept warning each other that we’d never cheat on the people we’re with, that it all had to just be for fun...but I guess he didn’t believe her.”
“Did you believe her? That she didn’t want to cheat on him?”
He relaxed, moving gradually into his customary slouch as he talked about this girl he barely knew, but his face was bright and animated. His eyes were happy--and that was something I’d only ever seen there once before, when he’d first met Gloria. “I think I want to believe her, but I wasn’t all that sure. She’d make these comments that kept scaring the hell outta me, about how things we talked about were things she hadn’t really gotten into since she’d first started flirting with
Reynold. She’d ask me where I’d been back when she’d agreed to marry him. That was before I knew I was falling for her. That was when I was still pretty certain she was just play-flirting like the mean girls used
to do to me back in school. I hadn’t known she might’ve meant any of it,
but it would still scare me. We talked on the computer quite a bit. Actually, once she got going, she’d be on there every day, then sometimes more than once a day, and Donna started teasing me and calling her my girlfriend.”
“Donna knew about it?”
“Yeah. I’d tell her everything. She’d make faces when I’d tell her things we’d been talking about. Sexual things. She thought it was odd, but then, so did I. Until I found out she was at least semi-serious. I was getting tired of what I thought was this mean play-flirting and I asked her if we could talk about other things and she sort of let me know that sex was pretty much what she most enjoyed discussing with me. So I was disappointed, but I figured okay, whatever. It was fun...it was just getting tedious. I was talking about stuff I shoulda been talking
about with Donna...if Donna had ever given a damn. And it made me kinda sad that I was talking about this stuff with a stranger instead of Donna...or any female I might’ve been having a relationship with at the time. At first I told her Donna and I were happy together, but it was a lie, so I admitted it to her. To Stephanie. I guess I never should have...but things might’ve still lead up to us discovering that we liked each other anyway.”
“How did that happen?”
“I finally turned the tables on her. I was hoping if I flirted back just as blatantly, she’d get scared and run off. I’d done that in the past with those mean girls...and it always disgusted them and made them find some new way to pick on me. But Steph seemed a little surprised, but also delighted that I seemed to want to be more than just friends with her. I was shocked at the time. That’s when I figured out she really must like me...to some degree anyway. But, I was still trying to be
cautious with her because I didn’t want to hurt her, but I also didn’t really want to lead her on-”
“Not really?”
“No. I couldn’t cheat on Donna. I’ve been cheated on and it was terrible. I may not be in love with her, and she may piss me off royally sometimes, but I have no reason to actually viciously hurt her even if only just emotionally.”
“Then, how do you plan to leave her eventually?”
“Ah, he-heh,” he said uneasily. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I had no desire to hurt Stephanie, though, either. I didn’t want to admit it, I didn’t want it to be true , but I started falling in love with her sometime after that...after I realized she might actually like me in some way-”
“You’re protecting her with your wording,” I accused.
“I’m a diplomat,” he countered smoothly. “Says so in my personality
profile. My strength lies in being a word-warrior. Of course I’m protecting her. I have to leave her a way out. She has to be able to slam me if she ever needs to in order to save her own hide. I can’t say for certain that she fell in love with me. She never said so. It’s all just speculation...and it frees me to think she was never anything but a flirt...and it kills me when I wonder how she really, truly felt about me.”
“You need to stop sacrificing yourself for these females who just use you.”
“I decide who I’m gonna make sacrifices for. Even if she hates my guts, she’s worthy of it. Stephanie was...she was the only really good thing that ever came into my life. The only time I was ever really, truly happy...aside from Gloria. But, Gloria was only using me. That kinda tarnishes the old golden glow around those early memories I have of her.”
“You’re too young, too inexperienced, and too emotionally immature to be-” I stopped because he was offering me a finger.
“I have no patience with you,” he said coldly, trying to take over. “I’ve been wasting my time talking to you since I was eight years old and what the hell have you ever done for me?”
I inhaled sharply and drew my upper lip between my front teeth for a moment. “Why don’t we talk about...how you and Stephanie met?”
He tapped a finger on the armrest of his chair, but was otherwise emotionless, calculating. I was amazed at how defensive he’d become over a girl he’d never so much as accidentally brushed up against before. He’d been so open and vulnerable in the beginning, pleading unconsciously to God to grant him peace, and now he was a very
formidable predator seated before me, weighing my every move and word,
determined to be in complete control lest something negative about this
Stephanie, this married girl who’d teased him, slipped by him.
I tried, a little more softly than I meant to, “Would it have ever gone any further? Between you two?”
His eyes never wavered. “No. Never. We agreed that if we ever happened to both be available, then yes, we’d both like to try a few things with each other-” He startled slightly as some memory came to him unexpectedly. His voice grew softer, but the warning edge remained. “But not so long as we were both with other people. Or even...” His left cheek twitched slightly.
I realized abruptly that I was sitting ramrod straight as if I might suddenly have to spring from my chair. Donovan continued to stare me down like a border collie with a petulent ewe, but there was distraction in his vision, uncertainty behind his eyes. No matter how many times he thought he had the whole Stephanie thing figured out, something new would throw his whole argument off, a memory would point out the flaw in his reasoning no matter which direction he started heading off in with it. I couldn’t show him fear. He was almost unnaturally non-aggressive
anyway. There were so many times in Donovan’s life where asserting himself would have solved so much, and he’d wimped out on himelf over and over again. His mother had struck him whenever he’d shown an ounce of unruliness as a child, literally smacking him back into line all the
time, and his Pavlovian reaction remained, never allowing him to act out
with any sort of wild vehemence even when the situation would have allowed it.
Then again, he had finally snapped and struck the woman, twice. He could be pushed too far. He could tolerate far more abuse than the average guy because he was basically just so used to it, but that didn’t mean he cared for it or that he would never eventually stand up and finally defend himself. His temper had been cooler overall lately. It had been years since he’d ever drooled and roared like an animal and destroyed
things in the throes of violent rage...but he’d been paying attention to
death again more than usual lately...would the arrow be facing him when he drew back this time? Or Donna? Or even me?
“We met at the library,” he said quietly, but with surprising, almost
detached calm. “I asked her where this art display was set up, and she knew, so she showed me. I didn’t know her then. I didn’t think much of anything about her. I thought she was older than me. She was okay looking. And then I ended up buying a small print that she’d done. She’s a very good artist herself. Not quite superstar quality, but all she needs is a little more honing, a little more maturing of her style. And then I found out she was going to be at an art show I was doing later, too, so I emailed her. Asked her if she’d be there for sure and have
more of her work available for sale. I guess she looked up my screen name to learn more about me. She asked me if I’d bring a copy of a piece I have on my website. We met at the art show and I was nervous because I didn’t really know anybody or what was going on, so I kept cracking these bad jokes, and she was sort of there, too...I was sort of hanging around this nice couple who had spoken like three words to me, and she
knew them, so she was hanging out with us, too. And I started trying to
entertain everybody. And no big deal. And the next day we were supposed to go pick up our art and she kind of cornered me, which I thought was
strange. She sort of hemmed me in in this one area between these displays, and the only way I could escape her was if I rudely brushed past her, so to make her go away I reached into my portfolio and took out the small print she had wanted and she got all bashful and told me she was going to buy it--I didn’t have to just hand her one. I said it was okay, and then she gave me a print of hers that sort of went along
with the one I’d bought, but she kept standing there, crowding me, standing way too close. I didn’t know if she was creepy or weird or she liked me or what, but I finally told her I had to be somewhere else or something and she kind of said, ‘Oh’, and then we both got out of there. I told Donna about it when I saw her later. I’d decided Steph was just kinda creepy and left it at that. It was after that when she started
emailing me, then sending me instant messages and emails like every day.
I started contacting her pretty regularly too, I admit, ‘cause she had
more knowledge about the local art scene than me, but for the bulk of the contacts, she definitely did most of the initiating.”
“You encouraged her.”
“Sure. I thought it was harmless. I realized that maybe she was more awkward than creepy and I found out I was right. Like me, she didn’t seem to really know how to get to know people. We found out we had a lot in common, that we’re both quite a bit alike. So we started talking almost all the time. It was refreshing. At first, it got annoying when I couldn’t get much done on the computer, but then, as she intrigued me, I started anticipating her arrival. I looked forward to hearing from her. She said she didn’t mind if I bugged her. I told her she could email me about anything any time. And we did. It started getting more personal. It started getting pretty intimate. Turns out she does illustrations for a bondage/fetish magazine under another name. Turns out I really liked her illustrations. Her ideas area actually better than her actual artwork, if that makes any sense. She has an interesting imagination. Most of her work is in the fantasy/horror category, but her wicked sense of humor always seeps through.
“Maybe you should have just kidnapped her and run off where no one could find you.”
He grinned beatifically. “I told her I wanted to get away from Donna...” the glow faltered. “She told me I could kidnap her...”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean-”
He shrugged dismissively. “She didn’t mean it, either.”
WEIRD RHODY is a short story collection featuring five strange tales all set in Rhode Island and written by five Rhode Island authors. The anthology is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, the Ocean State's famed author of pulp horror.
WEIRD RHODY is a short story collection featuring five strange tales all set in Rhode Island and written by five Rhode Island authors. The anthology is a tribute to H.P. Lovecraft, the Ocean State's famed author of pulp horror.
