Weapon

by Schow, Ryan

  At the bar, no less than seven men, all of reputable social standing to be sure, approached her. When asked about a drink, she said, “I can buy my own drinks, thank you.” Which she couldn’t. Not without ID or credit cards. Still, she said this with a grin, almost like she found their boyish advances humorous. This, she knew, drove men of their stature insane. They didn’t know how to behave so they dropped the kinds of cheesy lines you hear at high-society bars of this caliber.

  “As much as I’m certain I would appreciate your company, I’m waiting for my husband.” This was her standard response to their advances. It wasn’t lost on her, or her admirers as they looked at her left hand, that she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.

  And then he breezed in and it was the same story all over again, except he was the bright center of everyone’s attention. Not her. She could read the cravings in the women’s eyes, how they left their husbands’ faces and their conversations to stare. He was that beautiful.

  He was that yummy.

  Margaret raised her hand ever so slightly until his eyes met hers and he stopped and drew a sharp, surprised breath, his face instantly flushed with desire. Smiling, regaining his composure, he joined her at the bar.

  “My heart leapt when I saw you,” he said. “My knees got weak and my heart actually leapt.” She smiled, gave him the cutest laugh ever and he said, “It is you, isn’t it?”

  “Indeed it is,” she replied. Then she leaned in with her new mouth and she gave him a long, slow kiss right on the lips. He tasted like candied bourbon, which she found very, very sexy.

  6

  They checked into a room at Marmara Park Avenue on East 32nd Street, which was a stone’s thrown from the flatiron district and smack dab in the middle of the up and coming nomad neighborhood. It was just before midnight, They were still tipsy. Christian tasted lightly of booze. She was definitely buzzed.

  They then spent the better part of the morning hours feeding off the joys of each others’ new and improved bodies. They talked and then they kissed and then they made love, and that’s how it went. He told her she was sexy and irresistible. She said she couldn’t get enough of him. And then they went at it again, this time hard, like teenagers. Then, lying there nude, spent and panting, they laughed and dreamt impossible dreams. In the morning, they made love a third time. It was the fairy tale she always wanted with a man who both knew her and loved her.

  “Where did you learn to make love like that?” she asked.

  “How-to videos,” he joked. He stretched out in bed, then turned on his side and simply stared at her. Behind him, the windows glowed with the start of a new day.

  “Seriously. You’ve never been like that before.”

  He leaned forward, trailed his mouth down her bare body, kissing her, biting her, licking her. “Darling, home is beckoning.”

  His face was near her belly button; she grabbed a handful of his hair and pulled his head back, forcing his eyes to meet hers. His reply was a sensuous growl.

  “You’re going to tell me where you learned to fuck like that,” she said. Then, in a honey-laced beggar’s voice, she said, “Please, Christian, I really want to know.”

  “Perhaps later,” he teased. Then he kissed her and she kissed him, and when it came time to get ready, she gave him big, puppy dog eyes knowing how it affected him. He’d never wanted her as much as he seemed to want her these last ten hours. And he’d never taken her and owned her as completely as he did last night and early this morning.

  “God, you’re sexy,” she said.

  The last thing he said before getting out of bed was, “Yes, darling. I know.”

  7

  All the way to the plane they held hands and kissed here and there and they smiled. Oh my God, did they smile! When the plane lifted off and hit cruising altitude, Christian turned in his seat and asked, “Do you want to be my wife again?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that—”

  “And?”

  “No, not just yet.”

  She knew he thought with everything happening between them, how they were different people and could finally love each other the way they had always wanted but knew they never would, such a question would be met with an obvious, if not unexpected, response.

  The disappointment on his face crushed her. Even now, even with her slate being so perfectly clean, she knew she would always be destined to hurt people, or at the very least, let them down.

  “I don’t understand,” he said, confused.

  “It’s not because that’s not what I want, it is, it’s just…how do we explain this kind of thing to Abby? A stranger moving in. Replacing her mom. I don’t want her to hate me, Christian.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “I want her to respect me, to get to know me, and then maybe we can, I don’t know, pick up where we’re leaving off.”

  “So this is it?” he said, his entire body tensing. “We’re just leaving off then?”

  “I know it’s not what you want to hear—”

  “Well there’s an understatement!” he said with garish laughter.

  “I’m sorry, Christian.”

  He took a minute to simmer down. His face was red and he looked like he was chewing on his lip. This is new, she thought. When he was mad, he immersed himself in his work, or he blew out of the house until he could cool down. On the plane, there was no hiding, no running. So he simply sat in his seat. Bristling. Not saying anything.

  She wondered, did he not understand everything she was doing now, she was doing for Abby, for their daughter? Can he not see repairing things with her was her life’s mission now?

  Finally, he said, “Well, there are a few things you need to know about Abby. It’s why I had to leave halfway through your treatment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Abby was killed while you were undergoing your treatment.”

  Electric Blue

  1

  Everything looked dead. And dry. And so damn hot it made Brayden feel impossibly alone. The trip across the desert on his way back to Vegas was becoming a familiar burden. By the time he rolled into Bakersfield his will to push through to Vegas was broken. He wolfed down a grilled cheese sandwich and a plate of fries, then checked into a hotel and slept until about midnight. He woke up refreshed and then checked out. For some reason, out in the parking lot in the dark, he just stood there looking at the hearse for a really long time.

  He wondered what the hell he was thinking buying that thing.

  It wasn’t him anymore. This, of course, made the remainder of the trip so much more tiresome. He suffered every bump in the road. Every discomfort was amplified by ten. When he finally arrived at the Wynn Hotel, he checked in early, slept for another seven hours, then went to the pool where he laid out in the sun until some stupid little girl asked her mom, “What happened to that boy’s body?”

  The pool area was crowded, but the little girl with her lime-green one piece and her little eight or nine year old kid belly, she just stood there in front of him, looking at the lines on his chest and stomach.

  At his scars.

  Brayden blinked his eyes behind dark sunglasses and stared at the girl. She was a tiny blonde thing. Super cute. And her mother? Oh, boy. Brayden’s gaze traveled right up those lovely, lovely legs, past the bubbled out ass, over the b-cups and to a pair of dazzling eyes that were all over him. But not in a voracious manner. It was like she was looking at him trying to see what her daughter saw. She should have been mortified, but women with their kids these days, it’s like they have no shame anymore.

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?” the mother asked. Like she was helping the cute little puke gain a sense of independence, even though what the child was saying would be considered rude in most social circles. Let alone most cultures.

  “What are all those white lines on your skin?” the girl asked, stepping forward. She was near his hand, right beside the chair he was lounging in. The girls on either side of him—two b
runettes in small bikinis in either their late teens or early twenties—tilted their heads ever so slightly toward him. What rightminded eavesdropper wouldn’t want to hear his response to such an innocent, yet brazen question?

  Brayden slipped off his glasses, looked at the mother first, giving her a glint of the look Aniela said was “devastating” to women, and said, “Bullies beat me up as a kid. They whipped me with their belt buckles, then they took out their dicks and pissed on me.”

  The woman’s eyes went wide, her eyebrows shooting north. Until recently he worked tirelessly to hide his defining tragedy from everyone. Now he was telling strangers and little girls about it like it was no big deal when for the better part of his life it was a very big deal.

  “What did you think I would say?” he asked the woman in response to her shitty handling of the situation. “That all these scars came from a happy story?” Not waiting for an answer, he glanced down at the little girl and said, “Sometimes kids can be so mean.”

  And then the cute little blonde girl went into this diatribe about how she had this friend named Sally who hit her too much but said they were friends, even though it didn’t feel like they were friends because the way the girl was always getting smacked by Sally really, really hurt.

  Now the mother was learning a thing or two about bullying and it was hitting too close to home. And Brayden? He was busy eye-humping the mother, saying, “The best thing that can happen for a kid like this is that she becomes the popular one at school.”

  “And why’s that?” the woman asked. She had a curious pout, like she wanted to talk to him, but maybe her husband or boyfriend was watching and she didn’t want to look eager, or predatory.

  “Because then they get to choose.”

  “Choose what?” she asked.

  “You have an amazing body,” he said, cocking his head. “Are you the nanny or something? My nannies were never as hot as the nanny’s of today.” She had that not-quite emaciated look of Angelina Jolie, minus the big ass sausage lips, the fake baby-feeders, and all the nonsensical tattoos.

  I.e., she was hot AF.

  She scoffed at the question. “The nanny? Are you serious?” Now she sounded snooty, like she couldn’t imagine being anyone’s nanny, let alone her own. He knew she would bristle at that comment. Women like her always did.

  “You look more like a college student and less like a mother, no offense.”

  “Is that supposed to be some sort of backhanded compliment?” she said. She was making that in-between face, the one that said she was wondering if he was making fun of her or if he was, in fact, complimenting her.

  “Not a backhanded compliment. Just a compliment. I guess. But you don’t need assurances, do you? You know you’re beautiful. You take good care of yourself, I can tell.”

  This seemed to fluster her. She said, “You said popular kids get to choose, what do you mean?”

  The blonde girl, she wouldn’t stop staring at his chest. She laid her hand on his forearm and he wanted to inch out from under her adolescent touch. He didn’t want to be rude, though, or bring extra attention to it, so he kept his arm where it was and let the girl alone. The thing about the mom was, he could see her wanting to turn into him, maybe sit on the edge of his recliner and chat. She looked over her shoulder again, presumably at some deeply tanned guy across the pool who was eyeballing her. He was Italian looking with a solid build and the kind of thick, ink colored hair guys in their forties dreamt about. He wasn’t the best looking dude in the world, but he wasn’t afraid of the gym either.

  “What I meant was, when you’re popular, you get to choose to be the bully or not to be the bully. But when you’re not popular, like I wasn’t popular, you don’t have the choice. You just sort of swallow whatever fate gets kicked your direction.”

  The little blonde girl was pulling lightly on his arm hairs, and staring at his chest. Right about now he was getting squirmy. And the bikini girls next to him? They had the kinds of smiles on their faces that looked restrained, and super sexy.

  “You look like a jock,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine you were bullied.”

  In spite of his massive discomfort with the touchy girl, he looked dead into the mother’s eyes and—with a delicious grin—said, “I found my stride, love.”

  The blonde girl touched her finger to his largest scar, her little blue eyes fixated, then she traced her finger down the length of it, her little blue eyes zeroed in on it. His heart dropped to its lowest gear, kicked hard in his chest and pumped out too much blood too quickly.

  He almost shoved her away from him.

  “This isn’t a petting zoo,” he said to the girl. He tried to smile, but his face was doing a terrible job at being convincing. Even Becky, the gorgeous ginger alcoholic and recreational drug user aspiring to be a divorcee and a bartender all at the same time, didn’t let her beautiful fingers do to him what this super invasive child was doing.

  Across the pool, the husband or the boyfriend, he got out of his lounge chair and started toward them. Brayden saw this, felt concern welling inside him.

  The mother was like, “Janelle, no.” She grabbed the girl by the arm, hauled her out of Brayden’s sacred space and said, “You can’t just, oh dear God, you can’t touch strangers like that. I’m so sorry.”

  Janelle said, “I like them, the soft white lines,” to which Brayden slid his black sunglasses back on and said, “Chicks dig scars, even from the beginning.”

  His stomach was rolling with embarrassment, but Titan and Romeo taught him how to stay frosty in even the lousiest situations. “It’s all about the preservation of dignity,” Romeo had said a time or two before. It was hard to imagine him ever being embarrassed. The guy was legendary.

  The mother was now frowning. Looking more mid-thirties than late-twenties and leveling him with a sharp look. Was it the comment about chicks digging scars?

  The husband or boyfriend quickened his pace, his sloppy feet padding along the pool’s decking, stepping around chairs and towels and kids getting in and out of the pool.

  Brayden mumbled, “Here comes the alpha male,” loud enough for the girls beside him to hear.

  The stern look on this guy’s face made Brayden think he was going to do something rash, or act all über protective. Great. Instead, the guy checked on his kid, or the mom’s kid, or whatever, then flashed Brayden a hard look. Brayden smiled, blew him a kiss. A fuck you for everyone to see.

  The guy shook it off, started talking hard to the mom. Like it was her fault.

  What a douche.

  “What’s his problem?” the girl next to him said. She was a long haired brunette with bronze skin and a small, fast looking body in an orange two-piece. It wasn’t cold, but her nipples were hard, and this was her best feature. On a scale of one to ten, she was a steady six, with the potential to be a seven or an eight, maybe, depending on her wit and intellect.

  “I’m thinking it has something to do with all that testosterone in his system. I’m thinking it’s roid rage mixed with the insecurity of having little shrunken baby nuts.”

  She laughed, but so did the girl on the other side of him, a short haired brunette who was hotter, but in a more virginal way. She was an eight for sure.

  So Brayden introduced himself to the six who was maybe a seven, then the second who was an eight, and then he introduced them both to each other and said, “I don’t know about you two, but I’m thinking we should get lunch. My treat.”

  The girls looked at each other and then they were like, “Yeah, alright,” and they started packing up their things.

  It was good to be back in Vegas.

  2

  He wasn’t in Vegas for the pick-up lifestyle or quick meaningless sex with strangers. In spite of having two potential candidates, the last thing he wanted to do was get involved with another woman, much less two girls. The thing about enduring tragedy, or loss, was what you really wanted was not indulgence but escape. A bulletproof way out of the horrors and
disappointments in your head.

  Lunch was enjoyable. Easy. No one was a genetic anything. At the table the three of them were sitting at, neither girl was immortal, and neither could roast a person to death using their mind. Oh, and as a plus, no one was trying to kill any of them, so that was good.

  Minnie from Texas, the HB6 who he upgraded to an HB7 (she was a UNLV grad student, and a total brainiac), wanted to have sex with him, but Candace from Wisconsin was a Christian and too good to be any real fun, so sex was probably out of the question. She went from a solid HB8 to a weak HB7.

  Maybe he would have sex with Minnie.

  But probably not.

  After lunch and a semi-stimulating conversation about whatever, the three of them exchanged numbers, but didn’t make any definite plans.

  The verdict was still out on Minnie.

  He wouldn’t call Candace because she loved God enough not to indulge in sexual debauchery, but Minnie…hmmm. Perhaps.

  It was like that in Vegas, everyone passing one-way through everyone else’s life. Getting what they needed. Not asking for more because in Vegas, whatever you wanted, if one person didn’t have it, then someone else just around the corner had it and more.

  With the searing heat of the Nevada sun burned brightly on his skin, and a belly full of food, he had that sort of lazy, sleepy thing going on. He retired to his suite where he did a hundred push ups and two hundred sit ups to wake up, but he was still so unbelievably tired. From room service, he ordered a bowl of buttered popcorn and watched The Breakfast Club on cable TV. He fell asleep halfway through the movie then woke up at the end of it feeling refreshed.

  He flipped off the TV, then laid there waking up. His mind drifted off to Abby, then Netty, and then his mind went to Georgia. He picked up his phone and called Georgia. That the fire-starting death dealer was emotionally the safest bet of the three was terrifying. Damn, he needed some new friends.