Enigma: The Rise of an Urban Legend

by Ryan Schow

  “Sounds like you like her.”

  “I do.”

  “Are you two dating then?” I ask.

  “She doesn’t live here.”

  “So you had a beach fling?” I ask with an amused, knowing look.

  He grins and says, “At first, I thought so, but then…you know when certain people just get under your skin, but in a good way? Well she got to me. Or maybe that’s normal. I’m not really a beach fling sort of guy.”

  “So if I wanted to hook up with you, you wouldn’t be a beach fling sort of guy?” I probed, punching him playfully on the arm.

  “Raven’s supposed to come down, so no, I couldn’t be that kind of guy right now. Besides, you live in New York, and…wherever else you live in California.” When I don’t respond, he says, “So how did you become a writer?”

  “I had things that needed saying. I’ve led an interesting life, to say the least, and I thought I could channel some of my girl wisdom into words and see what happened. Turns out I’m pretty crafty with a pen. Or a keyboard, as it were.”

  “Not to be the devil’s advocate or anything, but you’re a little young to be sounding so experienced in life, don’t you think?”

  For that one second of reflection, I think about who I am, the depth of my experience, all my deeds and misdeeds, all the people I’ve hurt and loved and changed. My mouth breaks into an unconscious grin. Then, snapping out of it, I look at him and say, “I’m older than you think, Sebastian Fray.”

  “How old are you?” he asks. “And how did you know my last—”

  “It’s not polite to ask a lady her age. You know that.”

  A young couple walking the beach has been headed our way for awhile and now they’re here, walking past us, hand in hand and at ease with each other. The salty breeze tussles her hair and presses their beach clothes against their beach bodies. Beside them, trying to keep up, is a pint sized, fluffy looking dog whose feet are moving way too fast for its little body.

  The blonde girl turns around and scoops up the animal and starts baby-talking it to death, asking it fourteen times if they’re walking too fast. Aside from my judgments, it was pretty cute.

  She looks up and smiles, then gets a good look at us and says, “Hi.”

  “Hey,” Sebastian and I say at the same time.

  “If you don’t mind me saying, you two are the best looking couple I think I’ve ever seen.” She looks at her boyfriend and says, “Aren’t they gorgeous?” He smiles, unable to tear his eyes off me, but not in a creepy way. He’s thinking the same thing.

  “You two look like a natural fit,” he says. “How long have you been together?”

  Sebastian’s about to tell them we’re just friends, when I say, “It’ll be two years in a few months. But it’s weird because somedays it feels like we’ve been together forever, and other days I feel like we’ve just met.”

  The girl does that “Awe…” thing where she loves the romance we have, and Sebastian just smiles, feeling conflicted inside, but lighter, less nervous around me.

  “What’s your secret?” the girl asks, petting the dog who looks exhausted, happy to be curled in his master’s arms.

  I look at him, and he looks at me and in our eyes there’s something unspoken, an intense attraction, a moment of unguarded want that’s only slightly overshadowed by our ongoing ruse.

  I take his hand in mine, interlock our fingers and say, “He makes me dinner when I least expect it, and he rubs my back and shoulders after a long day at the office.” She’s making that face again. “Plus we have a lot of sex.”

  Now the man is looking at his girlfriend with that look, like maybe she’s not putting out enough, or maybe she is and he still wants more.

  They say good-bye then head on their way leaving me to Sebastian. He looks at me, lets go of my hand and says, “Well that was unexpected.”

  “Better than boring, right?” I say with laughter in my voice. Looking at him, I can feel our connection, how we’re getting along, the same as last time. I tuck my hair behind my ear, hold his eyes.

  “That actually sounds pretty good,” he says, “what you told them.”

  “It does, right?”

  “You remind me of her,” he finally tells me. “Raven. The girl I met.”

  “You mean how you feel off-balanced, yet attracted to me? How you can’t put your finger on the one thing that stands out most, and you know it’s not just my looks, which are exceptional?”

  Breathless, he says, “Yeah.”

  “I get that a lot.”

  “I bet.”

  Taking a deep breath, stilling myself, I say, “As much as I love to tell a good story, I wasn’t always a writer.”

  “What did you do before that? Because I can’t imagine you being anything other than a high school student.”

  “I was a lab assistant at a genetics facility working under the most accomplished geneticist in the world.”

  Perking up, the surprise written all over his face, he says, “Wow, really?!”

  By this time, the air’s grown damp and a bit chilly, the moisture seeping into my bones. With my skin pebbled in goosebumps and my nipples pinched tight against my tank top, I cross my arms with a shiver and say, “It’s getting a bit cold. If you want, while you’re waiting for Raven, perhaps we could get a bite to eat tonight. Unless you have other plans.”

  “Are you asking me out?” he says.

  “No. Just need someone at my side while I eat so I don’t look like a loner,” I tease. That’s when I shamelessly go for the sure thing. “Are you a Tikiphile?” Now he brightens up like I knew he would, and I’m like, “I’m hearing good things about Don the Beachcomber.” The location of our first and only date, back when I was Raven.

  “I close up shop at six-thirty.”

  “How about we meet then?”

  He smiles and nods his head, then says, “That’d be great.”

  “But no funny business,” I say, for good measure. “I’m anything if not chaste.”

  He laughs and says, “Fine, no funny business. I’ll only go there to watch you eat and serve as arm candy.”

  Penguin Nuts

  1

  Brayden wouldn’t sleep with Aniela, even though she wasn’t asking. He could be having sex with a whole slew of Vegas hunnies, but he was still of the mindset that sex without love equaled emptiness. He’d come up against this truth after that HB7 Titan set him up with.

  The double-flushing morning dumper.

  Having sex, as he’d come to believe—despite Romeo’s and Titan’s views—was the pinnacle of any relationship where two people were in love. He wanted to be in love. The closest he’d come was with Abby, but that could never be.

  So he didn’t try. Well, he did, just not hard enough. Or perhaps he tried with the wrong people. Thoughts of Julie sprung to mind, thoughts he quickly pushed away.

  If he would have pressed Aniela, ran his Vegas game on her, he was certain he would’ve ruined everything between them. So now he was like, forget it.

  Time to make a U-turn, stomp on the gas and maybe blaze some fresh trails. That’s why he was with Aniela. Whatever was happening between them, it was different. Unpredictable.

  Almost like Abby, but different.

  It was past ten on a Saturday night and the two of them were heading to Tao, this sexy nightclub inside the Venetian on the strip. He heard from Romeo that Tao was the kind of place where you lock down a future ex-wife.

  He said, “That’s where you find chicks to get pregnant.”

  Lately Romeo was taking a stab at running the long game. Titan said marriage for guys like him was a waste of time, but Titan was still plowing through twenty year olds at a relentless pace, so it was fair to say he was currently biased.

  The pace Titan was keeping, if money was an issue, Brayden would have purchased stock in Trojan condoms. Even Aniela was like, “Titan, seriously, if your dick smells like three different girls inside a twenty-four hour period, you need to
slow down.”

  He wasn’t listening though. He was in the groove.

  So the late Saturday night drive to the Venetian was basically Brayden telling Aniela his role with the FBI and how it wasn’t so much a job as much as it was “community service for cyber crimes committed.” He expected her to scoff at his situation, but instead she was like, “Jesus, for a child, you got a little bit of gangster in you.”

  “It’s how I roll,” he joked.

  “That’s hot.”

  The way her eyes shimmered in the darkness and the passing Vegas lights, there was something delicious and seductive about her, something distinctly off-limits. More than not, she was the mistake he wanted to make. If he was going to break his heart again, he wanted to break it against her. He looked away, told himself to wise up.

  “What?” she asked, her eyes liquid and observant.

  “I’m practically in love with the way you look,” he said, almost like he was drugged, or drunk with lust.

  She reached over and ran her fingertips along the shaved back of his head and neck, not hard or carnal, more like…like they were in love and he was her everything. If he thought about it, his step-mother was just as hot as Aniela, and only a few years older.

  He wanted to be creeped out, but he wasn’t.

  God, Aniela…

  Eventually she asked about hacking and things like the group Anonymous and the authenticity of the dark net. He could’ve talked for hours about that, but every few minutes he reminded himself to breathe, and maybe to let Aniela get a word in edgewise.

  When she said, “You’re really into this stuff,” he said, “You have no idea.” They arrived at the Venetian and in his mind he was like, “It’s freaking on.”

  But it wasn’t.

  He was going to the kind of club where he was trained to meet, charm and kiss-close (or fuck-close) strangers depending on who you ask. He wasn’t there to get laid, though. The way he was feeling, he kept bouncing back between Enigma and Brayden.

  Player or lover? He couldn’t be sure.

  He almost asked Aniela why she hadn’t tried to have sex with him, but he said nothing. Instead, he asked, “Why are we here, Aniela?”

  “To be out.”

  “And do what, exactly?”

  “Just have fun, dance, soak up the scenery.”

  The hotel was every bit as ostentatious and as beautiful as anything else in Vegas. Its charm wasn’t exactly wearing off on Brayden, but it was failing to hold the same lure it once did. He wasn’t there to mingle, to dance, to be seen. He was just there with Aniela who wouldn’t tell him what was going on between them. Was he getting used to the Vegas scene? Or did he just want more from his life than this and the random sex that came with it?

  They got into the club with tickets Aniela said she purchased a week ago. The busty Polish goddess exuded so much sexiness guys like him could hardly stand looking at her without devolving into unending stalker’s thoughts. There was something about her he absolutely adored. How real she was. How flawed she was beneath such a gorgeous, curvy exterior. They were both a wet mess. Totally bruised.

  For a second, as they strolled into the club hand in hand, the age difference between them failed to move him. It failed to move them both. She told him the night before, when they were sitting out by the pool, that it was easier when they didn’t know how wide the age gap between them was. As he followed her into the club—his eyes on her ass, on her bare back that was so defined he thought of it as a swimmer’s back—he couldn’t help losing himself in her. In the scene. They were about to sit down when a girl beside him said, “Brayden?”

  He looked over and saw Sabrina Baldridge. Aniela pulled to a stop. Mouth open.

  “Oh, hey,” Brayden said, casually.

  She gave him the Hollywood hug, complete with the vacuity and the side-to-side air kisses. Who could forget the bitchiness factor the genetically-modified girl exuded when she first got to Astor Academy? Not him. Then she ended up being nice to him, but only for a second, because then her brother was killed and all hell broke loose.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, her eyes going from him to Aniela.

  “Vegas is my playground,” he said. Then: “Aniela, this is Sabrina Baldridge, a friend of mine from school.”

  Aniela tensed up the second she recognized the actress, then she got a hold of herself and said, “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

  There was a sadness in Sabrina’s eyes that, to Brayden, bordered on lifelessness. Inside, her soul, she was a girl destroyed. Her brother was dead, her father awaiting trial for murder, her mother dead, killed in some kind of home invasion or something. The way she was looking at him, she looked too crushed to beg God for some salvation.

  Even though she hugged him earlier, he stepped forward and pulled her into a real hug. She let him swallow her. With his face in her hair, and her body pressed into his for…something, some sort of connection perhaps…he said, “I’m so sorry for all you’re going through.”

  She didn’t speak. But she held him in a hug that felt desperate and afraid.

  A man cleared his voice, so they broke away from each other. When he looked up, he found himself face to face with Lennox Carlisle. He didn’t listen to the guy’s music, but he was L.A.’s latest “it guy.” The headline maker with a miles-long trail of crying, shaking twelve year old girls everywhere he went.

  “Sabrina,” he said, glancing over at Brayden and Aniela, “are you okay?”

  Her eyes were two circular corpses.

  “I’m good.”

  Lennox took her hand into his, then looked at Brayden and said, “Hey.”

  “I’m Brayden and this is Aniela,” Brayden said, reaching out to shake the guy’s hand.

  Instead of shaking hands, Lennox made a fist and they fist bumped. Lennox simply smiled and bobbed his head like he was more cool than everyone.

  Maybe he was.

  Then he turned to Aniela and said, “How do you two know each other?” At first he thought Lennox was asking Aniela how she and Sabrina knew each other, but then he looked back at Brayden, waiting for an answer.

  “School.”

  “Ah,” he said. And for the moment, that’s all he said. Brayden wondered if the hamsters stopped running on the treadmill in his head. Then, magically, he spoke.

  “I’m going to be over there,” he said, pointing to a seat where other people were waiting for him. To Brayden and Aniela (but mostly Aniela), he said, “It was nice meeting you both.”

  “I should go join him,” Sabrina said.

  “If you ever need anything,” he said, trailing off.

  She started to speak, then stopped and her eyes grew big and moist before she was able to stop whatever was about to happen to them.

  “Let me have your phone,” he said. She handed it to him. He entered his number into her contacts file and said, “Seriously, call me whenever you need to. For whatever reason, day or night. Anytime, okay?”

  She slowly nodded, her eyes glistening but not running just yet.

  “Thank you,” she finally said, her voice wavering. She lowered her head and rejoined her friends, not saying good-bye to Aniela. As she was walking away, Brayden could not recall having ever seen someone as devastated as Sabrina Baldridge.

  “What the hell was that?” Aniela asked.

  “The world’s worst tragedy. What that girl has survived…I couldn’t do it. Honestly, I would’ve killed myself.”

  2

  What was it about older women? Brayden ran through the names in his head: Becky, Aniela, his first sexual experience with the married woman whose name he never even asked. What the heck was her name? She could be a Vanessa, or an Angelina. She could be a Jane.

  Yeah, Jane Doe.

  Thinking of the girls he’d been with, those closer to his own age, he stiffened. Honestly, there was something about the maturity of an older woman that appealed to him. There was a comfort in them. A patience they exuded.

 
“Do I strike you as the kind of guy who has mommy issues?” he asked over his shoulder at Aniela. The loud music forced him to raise his voice.

  “No, why?”

  “No reason,” he replied.

  Then he reasoned, what’s wrong with older women? Nothing. In fact, there were so many things he loved about older women. Their charisma, their ability to tell you exactly how they felt and exactly what they wanted, their latent sexual promiscuity, their lackluster desire for commitment.

  “Brayden?”

  “Speak,” he said, his thoughts broken.

  “Do you know who that was?” Aniela finally asked, breathless yet loud enough to be heard over the noise and a bit too giddy for someone her age.

  He wondered when she’d mention it.

  He knew it was coming.

  “I do,” he said, taking her hand. He pulled her deeper into the club, a little faster than a casual walk, toward a table miraculously opening up.

  “That was Lennox freaking Carlisle and Sabrina Baldridge,” she said, hurrying to catch up, to be heard. “Lennox Carlisle!”

  She bumped into two girls who were just two tight skirts, a pair of unsightly implants and big blonde hair; Aniela apologized and both girls smiled and that’s when he was sliding into the booth ahead of another couple gunning gracefully for the same table.

  Aniela slid in beside him and Brayden politely waved the couple over. They were a little older than Brayden, but younger than Aniela and attractive. Not in an overdone manner, but not like they just threw on whatever and decided to pop into the club.

  “You don’t mind?” the guy asked. He was all eyes on Aniela and Brayden. Not a perv, but aware of his looks and Aniela’s comfort stack of boobs.

  Brayden almost said, “They’re full D cups and yes, they’re real. She’s Polish.”

  But he didn’t.

  He simply smiled and stared at the guy’s girlfriend’s tits the same way the guy was staring at Aniela’s. This girl’s boobs were smaller, cute. No bra. Perky and unashamed. He didn’t want to catalogue her body parts the way he did because he was doing his best to not objectify women, but when he rode his gaze up her neck, past her chin, to her eyes, the look on her face said she was enjoying him enjoying the sumptuous details of her.