“I’m shy! Sue me!”
“You’re friends! Friends give each other their numbers!”
“Don’t be mad at me.”
“I’m not. It’s just frustrating.”
“I probably would’ve asked her for it if I didn’t have a crush on her. I worried that if I asked her for it, she’d think I was gay and hitting on her.”
“Well if the shoe fits, wear it.”
“Thanks, Tag,” she said, offended.
“I’m sorry. Being shy just makes you that much more amiable.” They got inside the car. “You said you’ve been to her house?”
“Once. It’s been a while, but I think I remember how to get there. Should we?”
“Yes. I really want to see her.” Tag wondered if that would bother Amber. Things had changed since yesterday. She alleviated his concern by smiling her eyes. “You don’t have her number but you went to her house?”
“She was having a get-together and all of the office girls were invited.”
“Trent was there, I assume.”
“No. Like I said, I’ve never seen him. Well, vaguely when he drops Mae off at work, but there’s a dark tint on the truck windows. And the party was a girls-only party.” She looked at Tag and said, “Go ahead, let’s here your smart-ass remark.”
“Sounds like your kind of party? There’s a party at Mae’s house and everyone’s coming? Multiple times?”
She giggled. “It’s hard to be offended by you. You’re too much of a sweetheart.” He thanked her. “She had a couple of them, get-togethers, all a few weeks apart. She was into that Creative Memories crap. You know, scrap-booking? She became a rep and had parties to sell that happy-go-lucky bullshit. She hosted them on Saturday evenings. I think she chose that time because Trent was never home then. It didn’t last long though, the Creative Memories stint. Trent made her quit. I went to her first party and spent a hundred and thirty bucks. I didn’t use a damn bit of it.”
“You couldn’t say no to her, could you?” He bit his lip to keep from smiling.
“Like you could have. I didn’t go to her other get-togethers because it’s an awfully expensive way to get to know Mae better, you know? Besides, not much alone time with her. A bunch of stupid women giggling and talking about which dentist is cutest.” She gagged. “Mae isn’t like that. She’s more like me.” Tag thought she was beaming.
“You think she likes girls, too?” Tag asked.
“No clue.”
“You don’t have gay-dar?”
“Tag, I swear to God…” She laughed. “And you wonder why I wouldn’t come out with it yesterday.” She shook her head at him. “Gay-dar only works when the person is at least slightly flamboyant, and that’s men only. With women it’s different. And not every gay person looks or acts gay. How about me? You didn’t think I was gay when you met me, did you?”
“I’m not gay so I don’t have gay-dar. Of course I thought you were straight.”
“Yeah, well,” she muttered, “after last night, I’m starting to wonder myself.”
“Am I turning you straight?”
She wasn’t surprised to see a cheese-eating grin. “You have your moments. College is for experimenting, right? I needed to experiment last night. That’s what it was.”
Tag wasn’t grinning anymore. He sighed and gazed out the side window. She wondered if that really hurt his feelings and decided that he wasn’t a good enough actor to feign dejection.
“Don’t tell me you have feelings for me already,” she said thickly. “Do you grow feelings for all your one-night stands?”
“Yes. For all of them. I have so many, you know?”
“How many?”
He shook his head dismissively.
“Come on, let’s hear it. You’re hot; a bartender in a college town. How many, fifty? A hundred one-night stands?”
He said nothing as he watched the shoulder of the road blur by.
“More?”
“None.”
“Ha!”
“After hearing what you just said, maybe one.”
“Me?”
He nodded.
“Bullshit. No way. It didn’t take much for you to have sex with me. So all the other girls get shot down? No way. I’m not even that pretty.”
“I have to say, Amber, you’re really making me second guess things. I guess it’s for the best.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought it was a special evening, as corny as that sounds. I’ve become callous to being flirted with and loathe the idea of casual sex. It has nothing to do with how I was raised, has nothing to do with morality or virtue, it’s just not in my wiring to sleep with someone I don’t care about. Once you start fucking people who hold no meaning to you, it lessens the experience when you have sex with someone who does. Eat nothing but bread for ninety-nine meals out of a hundred, and on the hundredth eat a filet mignon. It will taste otherworldly. But if you eat that same filet mignon all the time, how special can it be? Same with working hard and taking a much-deserved vacation. Those days you’re on vacation are divine. But if you’re unemployed, every day is a vacation and it gets old fast.”
“Yes, people become jaded.”
“Exactly. Dulled by overindulgence. The best things in life should remain special, which means enjoying them in moderation, or seldom even. Back to what I was saying, about casual sex. I’ve never cared about someone I just met. In fact I’ve only developed feelings for three girls; two if you don’t count Mae, who until recently was nothing more than a result of a keyboard and vivid imagination. Last night was an anomaly for me. Never before and probably never again will it happen. You just ripped apart whatever special meaning it had for me by treating it like we were two drunk horny college kids looking to release some endorphins.”
“I did not.” She considered it for a moment. “I did, didn’t I? You’re right. I had no idea. It was special for me, too. More than special, it was my first time with a guy. I guess I just assumed that it was a typical night for you. A defense mechanism, I suppose. I’m sorry for devaluing it.”
“That’s all right. You’ve redeemed yourself.” He touched her thigh and said, “I don’t know what it was, last night. It’s uncharted territory. I’m not easily impressed or drawn in, immune to seduction, but last night… I wanted you so badly.”
“I have a direct line to your base desires, don’t I?” She playfully made a seductive gesture at Tag, including running her tongue across her upper lip. She giggled before he could respond, said, “I believe I do, only it’s not my feminine wiles that do it, but my sense of humor.”
“It’s everything.”
“This is difficult for me to admit to myself, but I wanted you last night, too. I mean, I was glad when you said you would come home with me. And when you said you’d sleep in bed with me. I wanted you to sleep in my bed, because I thought you’d try to seduce me and I told myself I’d turn you down, but deep down I knew I wouldn’t. But I had way too much to drink and fell asleep before I had the chance to give you an opportunity.”
Amber turned onto a cul-de-sac. She pointed to the house with no cars in the driveway and said that was it. She parked on the street. It was an upper middle-class neighborhood. Every house was two stories and modern. Dull colored angular houses, dramatic landscaping, three car garages weren’t the standard but the minimum. A hefty Home Owners Association fee was more than probable. Mae’s house was gray with blue trim—daring by the neighborhood’s standards—well manicured yard and hedge.
Tag rapped on the door.
“Just a minute,” said a muffled female voice.
It was quiet as hell out. Why are upscale neighborhoods always so quiet? Aside from the meager birdsong, there was nothing to hear. And aside from Amber’s Honda, there were no cars visible in any direction—cars limited to garages, and of those cars most would be of the imported luxury variety. How easily imaginable it was that they were the only two people on earth (if you discounted the m
uffled response to Tag’s knock a moment ago).
A minute had come and gone. Tag knocked more assertively.
“Just a minute!”
Amber and Tag met eyes, shared the same somber expression, jumped to the same grim conclusions as to why she might be delayed, owing to the ugliness of domestic violence. The door finally opened. Mae looked at him before fixing on her.
“What brings you by?” Mae directed at Amber.
“I just wanted to see you. Is that all right?”
“I…” She stared dubiously at Tag. “I don’t know. Who is this?”
“I’m Tag,” he said tentatively, winced internally in anticipation of her response.
She glowered at him, a real fuck you glowering, then at Amber. “Could I have a word with you, Amber? Alone?”
The two went inside. The door closed on Tag’s face. He took a seat on the patio’s decorative wrought-iron bench and leaned his head back against the stucco wall, drew a deep breath, exhaled through his nose. Deathly quiet indeed. He couldn’t hear the girls, but he could see them as clear as day, in his mind. He summoned Mae’s recent image, pored over it in all its splendor. It was as though he’d seen someone most dear to his heart for the first time in years. Decades. And she was content to go a couple more decades.
The girls sat angled toward one another on the living room couch.
“What’s going on here?” Mae said accusatorially. “How do you know him and why did you bring him here?”
“Is it such a bad thing?” she said softly.
Amber looked small on the couch, gathered warily into herself. Mae had never witnessed her acquaintance so demure and ostensibly vulnerable; a woman who was inherently confident and extroverted, in stark contrast to how she carried herself now. She avoided Mae’s probing and judgmental eyes. Maybe it was because one of Mae’s eyes was bruised and poorly concealed with foundation; makeup that was likely applied between Tag’s first knock and Mae’s opening of the door.
“Yes, it is such a bad thing. Tell me, Amber, what’s going on?”
“I met Tag yesterday at work. He came to see you. We wanted to see you, that’s all. It’s innocent enough, isn’t it? I’m sorry that you’re upset.”
Mae exhaled loudly, took extra care getting off the couch—Amber noticed she winced in doing so, compliments of Trent—and went to the large front window, peered through the open Venetian blinds at the guy sitting on the bench. He was leaning forward, chin resting on folded hands. He looked like a poster child for some pharmaceutical advertisement, Prozac perhaps—the before picture.
“I’m not mad at you,” Mae said, her eyes never leaving Tag. “It’s just, well, you know. If Trent finds out…”
“Yeah, I know, alright. I know more than I’d like to. Mae, it’s not right. You need to do something. You can’t live like this.”
“Don’t give me advice,” she said crossly and turned to face Amber, “about something you know little about.”
“I know enough. Can Tag come in? He should be part of this conversation.”
Mae scoffed, “What is this, an intervention?” She huffed loudly. “If Trent has a hidden camera or microphone or something, you know what will happen to me? And Tag? And you?”
“Then let’s take a drive in my car and talk. The three of us. Please, Mae?”
As angry as Mae was, she found it difficult to refuse someone so sweetly sorrowful. “I’m not allow—” She started over. “Trent dislikes when I leave.”
“Please?” Amber’s voice was small and exceedingly desperate.
The front door opened. Tag stood. The girls came out hand in hand, a gesture of solidarity that was surely initiated by Amber. Mae closed and locked the door behind her, muttered something that might have been, “I hope I don’t come to regret this decision.” They maintained their silence till they got inside the car. To facilitate eye contact with Mae, Tag chose the seat behind Amber in the cramped rear quarters of the Civic hatchback. He felt the need to duck forward to avoid the ceiling, the price one sometimes pays for exceeding the six-foot-tall mark.
From the front passenger seat Mae threw a nasty glare over her shoulder at Tag. “Exactly which part of my email led you to believe that I wanted to see you? Huh?”
She gave him a couple seconds to answer, which in Tag’s apprehension was squandered. “Answer me!”
“I’m sorry. Really I am. But I had to. I know you don’t believe that I know you, that I know as much as I do about you, that we aren’t strangers, but it’s true. I had to see you in person. It wasn’t debatable, wasn’t an option. I had to see you.”
Mae faced Amber. “Why did you tell him about Trent? I didn’t want him to know his name.”
Amber said she didn’t, and promised that she didn’t.
Mae returned her scowl at Tag. “I read your message. You mentioned Trent. How’d you find out, if not from Amber?”
The Honda turned onto a busier street and headed west to nowhere-in-particular.
Tag took a deep breath, waxed courage. “How’d I know his name is Trent Blackwood? Probably the same way that I know his dad died in an oil-rig accident when Trent was two-years-old. The same way I know his mom is a pill-popping alcoholic. That your uncle’s name is Matthew and is a doctor and you haven’t been on speaking terms since he called Trent a piece of shit. The same way I know what happened to you when you were ten. Reunited with Rebecca and David, thank God. The same way that I know that your parents—and God I pray I’m wrong about this—were murdered by the SacTown Slayer.”
Mae was slack-jawed, wide-eyed, a perfect tableaux of utter befuddlement mingled with heart-wrenching despair. Her blue irises fringed with amber coronas blazed wildly like suns, as if their brightness was fueled by the depth of her emotion.
“How?” she breathed. “Impossible. How do you know this? Who are you? Really, who are you?” Before Tag could answer, an idea manifested within her and it didn’t sit well whatsoever. “You’re the police. A detective.”
“No, I’m a bartender. I’m Tag Baylor.”
“God,” she mumbled, “you even have the same initials as him.” She fixed suspiciously at him. “If you aren’t the police, then how do you know what you know?”
He shrugged. “We’ve met before? No clue.”
She judged his candor. If he was a liar, he was a damned good one. “No, I don’t we’ve met before. And if we did I certainly never told you my most personal history. You’ve researched me. Had to.”
Amber drove along, staying out of the conversation.
“I swear I didn’t. Mae, everything I know of you is from what I’ve written in my two novels. It’s all fiction, or at least I thought it was—except the SacTown Slayer, I suppose. The SacTown Slayer must’ve been retrieved from memory, just as you obviously were. Somehow fiction became non-fiction. Can’t you understand why I cannot just forget that our paths have crossed sometime in the past?”
Another long stare from Mae. “What do you know about the people who kidnapped me?”
Amber looked over at Mae with pitiful eyes and all but whispered, “You were kidnapped?”
“They snatched you up at the mall on Christmas eve,” Tag said. “They beat you. Often. You called it Red Trouble. They—”
“Impossible!” Her eyes welled up. Rain on a cloudless day. “Nobody knows about that! Nobody!” Another idea occurred to her. “Unless… do you know Breuer?”
“Yeah. I even know about Brewer.”
“He told you this? When? I thought he wasn’t real.”
“Huh? Told me? Brewer?”
They stared stupidly at one another. “You just said… you said you knew Breuer.”
“Yeah, he got hit by a car and died.”
“Oh, you mean my dog. How’d you know that? You know things you shouldn’t be knowing, Tag.” She faced forward and shuddered.
“I know I do. And what do you mean by Brewer telling me? I don’t understand.”
“Different Breuer. Never mind,”
she said thinly.
“An imaginary friend?”
“What the hell do you know about imaginary friends, Tag?”
“Don’t be mad, I just know that you’ve had them. Of course you would: you were the victim of severe child abuse—any kid would’ve done the same to escape that fucked up reality.”
“So you don’t know about Breuer?”
“Just the dog. Is he the imaginary friend you had when your parents began giving you lithium?”
She was becoming less and less surprised by his impossible knowledge. “Yeah. He wasn’t real. I… have some issues.”
“Mae, after what you went through, it’s completely understandable. I hope you don’t think we’d judge you for having imaginary friends. It’s a miracle that you’re as normal as you are. You went through hell, and if I may be blunt, you’re still in hell.”
“Yeah, well…” She wiped either eye with her wrist. “What’s happening to me?” she said inwardly.
Amber put her hand on Mae’s. “We care about you. Very much. Something needs to change, sweetie. It has to happen or one day Trent will take it too far and, well, he’ll take it too far and it won’t just be absences from work.”
“Trent killed your parents, didn’t he?” Tag asked.
She gasped and glared back at Tag. “Fuck you!” She faced Amber, “Take me home and don’t ever bring this asshole near me again.” Amber nodded, more than intimidated by Mae’s tone, and pulled into a gas station to turn around.
“Mae—” Tag began.
“Nyet! Shut it! I don’t want to hear another word from your lying mouth!”
“I—”
“Shut your mouth!”
“I take it back. He didn’t do that.”
“That’s right! Where do you get off accusing him of that? He’s not perfect but he’s no murderer! And everybody knows it was the SacTown piece of shit who killed them! Dickhead!”
“Honey,” Amber said cautiously, “calm down, please. We care about you, that’s all. Tag was mistaken, okay? He has your best interest at heart, just like I do.”
Mae closed her misty eyes, put her head against the side window and said, “Just take me home, please. I want to be home.” At least the temper had gone.
“Okay. Home it is.” She pulled onto the street homeward.
“The fiddleback spider,” Tag said, “you may have only had it for a couple months, but you first had the idea when you were watching Pirates of the Caribbean. You thought Trent’s kiss was venomous, but in a good way. Like a Brown Recluse spider, but more like a Pink Recluse. A pink fiddleback spider.”