"It was a dark and stormy night. Haha!" I say it with a deliriously grizzly tone and a dying flicker of a once wild fire in my eyes. I see it's reflection in the quiet gas burning in the fireplace. What the fuck have I done? My beard rubs up against my shoulder as I close my eyes, and it feels just like the kitty or the pup that I don't have. It's soft. She tells me so. "It's a soft teddy beard," she says. "Quit cuddling with it. You look crazy."
"I am crazy." What the fuck have I done?
It was a dark and stormy night. Except it wasn't so so dark with the bright waning moon and the city lights, and the storm hadn't come yet. The clouds in the sky were still innocent, and the wind wasn't rushing, but breezing by if it was breezing at all.
Dark was the mind and stormy was the empty soul. Working on a Sunday will do that to a man. It leaves one worn and beaten and craving any kind of living. So when she said she had acid, well, of course I said, "Why not?" and she came over right after seven struck. I met her on Northwest Passage by the guest parking because she didn't know which apartment was mine, but the Mariner's Village was an old friend to her. She used to live here, back a ways before I'd moved in. Her old stomping grounds, she called it. She had on a color-faded flannel and short denim shorts like she always did. Come to think of it, I don't think she ever wore pants. Ever. Which is strange, I think, but it went well with her wild blonde hair. She was older than I, by a few years maybe, but no more than a handful. She was short and slim-figured though, and she had wide blue doe eyes so she looked young; my age or younger even.
We'd had a few sexual run-ins half a year back, in the cold winter, when people just want someone to hold at night. I hold all right, but she was smart and quick, and she read a lot, and after not too long she'd read me through, and she knew who I was. She knew what I was. A boy with a lush sexual appetite and a dreadful short attention span. An adolescent. A wandering eye. A slut. She still called me this often. Not in a bad way, mind you. It was in a friend-who-knows-you-too-well kind of way.
"I thought you said your friend was coming," I said. There was a hint of yearning that was unintentional, but she no doubt caught it.
"She wanted to hot tub, but she didn't want to do acid so she bailed," she said, and then she smiled. "Don't worry. She wouldn't have sex with you anyways.
There's an affront on my face, but not my mind. Not really. "Well," I said, "That's a bit presumptuous don't you think?"
"Hmm... no." She was still smiling. It's what she does. "Just realistic."
"Oh, I do hate it when reality gets in the way of my sex life," I hoe-hummed. "It happens much too often."
Just one of my roommates was home with his girlfriend, and they were on the old Irish kilt-patterned couch, and there were quick intros and a spliff.
"I don't know how good it is," she said after. "The acid, that is."
"Did you keep it on ice?" I asked.
"No... It's just been wrapped up in my room for a few weeks."
I shot her a look with my lips pouted to one side.
"I know," she said understanding.
"Well, I have work tomorrow so maybe that's a good thing."
"Yeah, me too. Shall we do this then?"
"I think so. It's getting late. For acid anyways."
She laughed me off. "Please. We've got plenty of time." And it was down the hatch, one tab a-piece. I swallowed it. And then THIS happened.
