by Kara Hart
He winks and steps out of the car, boots smashing against the dirt. In a way, he scares me, but at the same time, I come from a city of characters. Los Angeles is the place of freaks. I’ve seen people like him, so it’s no big deal. However, he almost seems like he’s being real, like he knows no other method of being a human, besides talking low and being bad. At least, that’s the impression I get.
As he lowers his head back into the car, so he can grab his bag, he touches my arm. Goose bumps rise across my body and I hopelessly look down again at his crotch. He sees me and laughs. “It’s an accident, buddy,” I say, rolling my eyes. “Anyway, have a nice life.”
“Hold on a minute,” he laughs. “I owe you twenty dollars and a dinner.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I groan. “I don’t need it. It’s fine.”
“Come on.” He smiles. For a guy like him, he has perfect white teeth and his bone structure is amazing.
Bone structure? Since when have I cared about something that trivial? I shake my head at him. “Look, I don’t know you and I really have to go,” I say, hurriedly.
“It’s just one dinner. I ain’t going to bite,” he says.
“Are you serious? You’re some stranger I picked up,” I say, with wide eyes. I don’t mean to be rude, but my heart is starting to beat faster, and I’m realizing that maybe I shouldn’t have picked up a stranger like him.
“Suit yourself then,” he says, slamming the door so hard the car starts to rock.
I roll the window down and look at him angrily. I can hear him laughing and it really ticks me off. He may be hot, or whatever, but you don’t treat a woman like that. “You know, you can be a little gentler, asshole!” I yell and drive away, feeling pretty good about standing up for myself.
I see him in my rearview mirror. He shakes his head and sits down on his bag before pulling out a large map. I pull off the main road and head where I need to go, and of course, I start to feel a little bad for the guy. Still, it’s not my fault he grew up a certain way and I didn’t. I can’t blame myself for that, can I?
“You did the right thing,” I tell myself. “You can’t take a stranger up on dinner, let alone some guy like him.”
When I pull into my driveway, I hold the keys in my hand and get out of the car. It looks nice enough. It has some slight wear, but it’s definitely doable. Denver, Colorado. I have high hopes for this place. I’ve heard it’s amazing. When I open the door, however, it’s a whole other world I’ve walked into.
There’s glass all across the floor. The kitchen is caked with dust, not to mention, one of the cabinets has been ripped onto the tile. “Fuck me,” I say. This day is turning out just great.
Soren
That bitch really let me have it. As I sit, glancing at the map, I have to laugh at the situation. Yeah, I’m stuck in the thick of it. A brand-new city, hardly any money left in the old bank account, and nothing to comfort me while I try and figure shit out. This day is turning out, well, fucking great.
All I asked for was one dinner. I wasn’t going to get weird with the woman. I mean, at least I tried. Well, I guess all the tattoos and grease on my arms scared her off. She can’t handle a man like me. Back home in Buffalo, I could pull two to five women a week, no problem. Pussy was fundamental in my life. Now, I’ve got to beg for it? Fuck that. If there’s one thing I don’t do, it’s beg.
She’ll come to me, eventually. No doubt about it.
Because of that carefree city girl, I have to walk another five miles out to get to my place. I’ve got no cell phone and no clue, but I make it down there with the help of my map. It only takes me a few hours.
The house I find myself standing in is old. It goes way back in my family. It’s my brother Gabe’s and he’d kill me if he knew I was here. Gabe never wanted anything to do with me. He knew I’d get mixed up in some bad shit, and I guess I was naïve to think I wouldn’t. Still, I bear no ill will toward the guy. After all, he’s the only damn brother I have.
When I walk inside, I actually start to feel emotional. I don’t normally get this way, but I’ve been through a lot in the past few weeks. I’ve lost everything I’ve ever owned. I had my shop taken away from me, all of my vehicles except the old truck, and I’ve had more weapons pointed in my face than Genghis Khan. Bad week? Yeah, a little fucking bit.
Funny thing is, I’m actually a pretty nice guy once you get to know me. That may sound a little self-indulgent to most, but it’s true. Before all this, I was sociable. I had tons of friends. I was the shop to take your vehicle to. I really had a home back in Buffalo.
It’s all a bunch of horseshit. On the outside, I look like a bad guy. I’m all tatted up. I’ve got looming eyes. My voice is too deep for these yuppie folks out here. I just scare everyone off. I feel like the fucking boogeyman. Hell, maybe that’s what I’m becoming.
All I know is that things just don’t feel right anymore. So yeah, it hurt a little to get rejected by the cute little brunette with the dark green eyes. City girl. And being in this house and seeing all the pictures of us when we were young hangin’ on the wall, it tears my heart to bits.
I check out the rooms and throw my backpack on the bed. It’s going to be a long summer and I need to lay out my plan. Before I do that, I need some grub. As long as I don’t get too cocky, they’ll never find me here. The Good Boys have too much on their plate in Buffalo. They’ve probably forgotten about me by now.
I search the closet for the safe that’s been hidden here for more than a decade now. I open the floorboard and pull the thing out. “3-6-7-3.” I click the numbers in place and I open it with a sly smile. “Damn thing still works,” I laugh.
I reach in and smile even bigger when I see just how much money is in there. I count it out. “Three thousand, eighty-three,” I whisper. Shit, that’s enough to last me a few months if I play my cards right.
I take three hundred of that and pocket it. The rest, I put back into the safe and hide it carefully. I walk back outside and call a tow truck. I should have enough to get my car into the city. We’ll see how much it’ll take to fix the rest of it. As for now, I simply call a cab and head back into the city.
Emma
Work doesn’t start for another few weeks, so I have a ton of time to figure this place out. All in all, it doesn’t seem too difficult. Compared to LA, this town is small.
My house is a pile of shit, of course, so Johannson Publishing has sent a team to assess the damages. “Squatters,” they tell me. “Though, we don’t get too many of those around here. Anyway, we’ll send some people in to clean it up today. We’ll repair the rest tomorrow.”
Great. Thanks for everything. I look up a coffee shop and it turns out, I’m fairly near a pretty good one. I can’t really be in my house right now, so I might as well sit and read one of Johannson’s finest, to get a feel of the editing process.
I walk inside and order my Americano. The woman tamps the grounds, the grinder roars, and the smell of coffee fills my nose delightfully. Everything is good. In a few days, my house will be as good as new, and I can start my new life.
I sit down, open up my book, and smile to myself. Life is good. Life is… wait a minute. “Seriously?” I mutter aloud. I look across the street and there’s an old-school diner with big, glass windows circling around it.
There he is. The unnamed man from the highway. Bigfoot. He glances up at me and rolls his eyes. “Oh, come on.” I laugh. “He’s rolling his eyes at me?” A woman who is sitting about three feet away from me looks over at me like I’m crazy.
I close my book and walk outside with my drink. To my surprise, he does the same. He looks good. I mean, better than before. He’s wearing a heather-grey undershirt, alongside his light jeans and work boots. Bigfoot might be a poor comparison. He cleans up pretty well, actually.
“You following me?” he asks, looking serious. He doesn’t smile once and that’s the first thing he does that really bothers me.
“I am not following you,”
I laugh. “I was actually wondering the same thing.”
“Is that what I look like to you? Someone who follows women around?” He looks away, turning red in the face. “Look, if you could just give me some peace, that’d be great.”
He’s holding a bunch of bags in his hand. Some are from the grocery store, others from a hardware store, and some of them I have no idea what they are. But he has a lot of bags in his hand. It’s a bit weird.
“Preparing for the end of the world?” I ask him, laughing a little still.
“Not exactly,” he says. His voice is deep and gruff. When he speaks, it sounds like he’s too serious to ever joke around. Sure, he laughed a little when we were talking in the car, but not much. I can’t help but wonder, who is this guy, really?
“So you just go out and buy, let me see, bottles of whiskey, batteries, canned food, and a ton of non-perishable items?” I ask him.
“Is it weird to stock up on things when you first move somewhere?” he asks, but he quickly turns away from me. “Look, I don’t need your shit, woman. I came here for some peace, not to get berated by someone like yourself.”
“Woman?” I get heated, though in hindsight, I’ve probably gone too far with the mountain man comparison. “Is that how you talk to people?”
“That’s how I talk to women who have no respect.” He keeps walking, grumbling to himself something low.
“And what kind of a person am I? You said, ‘someone like yourself,’” I ask him. “What kind of a woman am I? Huh?”
He turns around and drops his bags in the grass. He walks back up to me, moving as close as he can. I start to tremble at his immense size and I actually feel my body betray me. My thighs grow warm and I… well, I get wet. I gulp down hard and close my eyes.
“You’re a hot piece of ass,” he says. “And you know you have the world in between your fingers. You can be anyone you want, yet you choose to shit on the world. You choose to think of people like me as less than.”
I open my eyes and see the deep anger and hurt. I don’t know what to say. I start to stutter and stammer, but of course, that doesn’t help the situation. “I, uh—”
“Save it, strawberry,” he says, touching my waist with gentle confidence. “I’m out of your league, anyway.”
I’m stunned. I can hardly even say anything. I’m left to watch him as he grabs his bags and walks into the distance. He turns a corner and that’s it. Mountain Man is gone and the inner-tops of my thighs are soaking. My god. Is he serious?
Soren
I don’t like to get rough with a woman, unless she’s bending over and begging me to. That’s just the way I operate. So when I get angry with that hot little number, it really affects me. The whole thing has got me thinking. What kind of a massive crush does this woman have?
Well, to me, it’s pretty damn clear. She wants to ride the storm. Plenty of women have been there. I just didn’t think it would happen this fast, in this city. I have to give a little chuckle when I think about it, even if she gets on my nerves. When I see her again, I bet she asks me out.
“Let’s see here,” I mumble to myself. I grab the bags and place them on my kitchen counter. She’s right in a way. I look like I’m staking out the end. In a way, I kind of am. When you have a whole gang of criminals after you, you tend to want to lay low. I don’t need to take long walks into the city if I have all I need here.
So, I get to putting everything away. Three bottles of whiskey are hardly enough, but it’ll last me the week at least. Batteries, rubbing alcohol, first aid kit, hunting knife, plenty of food and meat, coffee, toothbrush, toothpaste, and more. Believe me, this shit is hard to carry around, but it offers an okay workout.
Speaking of working out, when everything is put into place, I walk into the garage. Inside is the old gym Gabe and I made a lifetime ago. I start to remember all of the old times. It’s funny how the smell of a garage, or tint from the wallpaper, can throw you into a full-blown trip down memory lane. Every feeling comes back to me in this moment and a smile comes on my face.
Well, those were good times. He hates me now, but I wonder if he thinks back on those moments like I do. I wonder if he misses growing up. I sure as hell do. When Mom died, we only had each other.
Dad was there, of course. Correction, Jim was there. But he wasn’t exactly thrilled about raising us alone. You can say that he was an absent parent, but he was there when you didn’t want him to be. When you missed your homework, you got the belt. When you talked back, you got the belt. Basically, when you did anything that made him get off his ass, you got the damn belt.
“I’m going to show you right from wrong,” he used to say.
Sure. I grew up knowing right from wrong. I grew up knowing that he was the wrong in the world, and me and my brother were the right. I promised myself from that moment on, I’d carry the torch of goodness.
Now look at me. I look bad. I look wrong. All wrong. That woman let me know as much. She thinks I’m the face of sin itself. It’s hard not to question yourself when someone treats you like that. It’s enough to make your head spin.
I sigh and grab the barbells. I lift them, doing four sets. Up, down, up down, up down, twelve times each. When I’m finished, I head straight for the bottle. I grab that whiskey and I down a glassful, enough to make me feel much looser than before.
I walk out onto my porch and take a deep breath to calm myself. It’s that woman. I can’t stop thinking about her. She thinks I’m evil. She thinks I’m lower than the lowest. What did I ever do to her to make her say such cruel shit? Worst of all, she looks perfect, like a fucking angel.
I slam my fist into the door, but it only gives me pain and a dent in the wood. I’ll have to fix that in the morning.
I stumble back inside the place and grab one of the pictures from the walls. It’s my father, Gabe, and me at one of our school carnivals. “Shit, man,” I sigh. It makes me feel warm inside to remember it, but I also just wish I could teleport back, or time travel.
‘Cause right now, I’m feeling like shit. Right now, it feels like my life is over.
I wake up from someone pushing against my shoulder. “Let me sleep,” I say. I start to feel the gnawing claw of reality scratch at my face. There’s wood on my cheek. I open my eyes and realize I somehow passed out on my porch. “Fuck,” I sigh, blinking my eyes erratically.
“Um,” a light voice awkwardly tries to say something. “Are you okay?”
I look up and almost fall over with surprise. It’s that woman. Goddammit. “Shit,” I groan. “What do you want? What’re you doing out here? Come to bug me again? Come to rub dirt in my face?”
“Uh no, actually. I live a couple hundred feet down,” she says. “Are you, okay?” she repeats the question.
“I’m fine,” I stretch my body and sit shamefully against my front door.
“What happened to your door?” she asks.
“Nothing that concerns you,” I say.
“Have you, um, been getting transient break-ins too? Because my house was trashed when I drove in,” she says.
I shake my head. “No. There aren’t too many homeless around these parts,” I say. “Not everyone is bad and evil, you know.”
“Look,” she sighs. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just wanted to help you out, but you look like you can take it from here.”
“Well, thanks,” I mutter.
“You know, you really shouldn’t pass out on your porch like that,” she says, driving the knife in deeper. “People are going to get the wrong impression.”
I stand up and wobble forward. She takes two steps back and laughs a little. I feel like a fucking clown. “What makes you think I care about what people think or say about me? This town is full of bullshit,” I tell her. “I grew up here. I should know.”
“I’m just saying… Look, I’m not judging you,” she says with an air of truth and honesty attached to her voice.
“Thanks,” I say, nodding. “Seriously.”
She presses her lips together in a faint smile and waves, as I walk back inside my place.
“What’s your name?” she says, just as I’m about to shut the door.
I turn and give a faint smile. “My name’s Soren.”
“Soren?” she laughs, but quickly covers her smile.
“Don’t start,” I warn her. “Today just isn’t my day.”
“No, I like it. Really, I do,” she says. “What does it mean?”
“My dad was drunk when he gave it to me. He probably read it in some book, so it’s meaningless,” I say. “But I read somewhere it means severe or God of War.”
“Well that’s a bit weird,” she says, laughing again.
“I said don’t start,” I mutter.
She rolls her eyes, but she stops laughing. “It’s nice to meet you, Soren. I’m Emma.” She smiles, looking as cute as a fucking button.
I nod and shut the door quietly and slump to the ground. She doesn’t know just how much is stacked against me right now. Her saying that she isn’t judging me is just about the only thing that’s giving me comfort right now.
I still think she’s a stuck-up city girl, but at least there’s one person trying to make things right.
Emma
Yeah, I feel bad for the guy. Seeing him passed out on his porch, drunk from whiskey, I felt like I had to say something. I promised myself I would stay away. I mean, he was kind of a dick to me, though I laid it on pretty thick. But I guess he’s not harming anyone and he lives in the neighborhood. I can’t hold too many grudges. It’s only my third day in town.
I head into the diner that I saw him in the other day. I sit down and order some food. Since they’re renovating my entire kitchen, I figure I have some time to eat and explore. Plus, after seeing Soren earlier, I felt like I needed something in my system.
“What’re you having?” an old waitress stands above me, holding a pen and notepad, waiting to hear my order.
