The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [47]
Melony caught herself. She could not believe the height of witless idiocy she had just displayed to herself.
She had never considered the notion that Andrew Erlandson could be anything but disturbingly mysterious and alien to her; contrary to any expectations, she found him intensely enjoyable, personable, intelligent, and shy, and not to mention, increasingly handsome. She began to sense that he quite possibly had no knowledge of what he was and sensing this in turn lead to a new and foreboding impression that she might be wrong about him, that he may be human after all.
And what an upset that would be! She would quit this queer career for sure if that were the case, go back to painting. Maybe she should have been painting all along....
These were the things which now made her careless, that Andrew’s company actually was making her forget what she was there for. This was indeed a headache, for Andrew himself was what she was there for.
Andrew was waiting for an answer, his puzzled expression growing all the more intense while she was growing all the more distressed.
She needed an instant escape route, a trap door tunnel to the fun they shared moments before. Perhaps she should give it up, come clean, reveal everything. Perhaps she should knee-smack the table, should spill her drink again.
Squid Friction erupted into a boisterous bastardization of Highway To Hell just then.
Melony bolted from her seat.
For what it’s worth, thank God....
And she took Andrew by the hand, once again leading him to the dance floor.
And they danced.
11.
Scratch At the Crow Job
The lovely couple rose from their center table. The young man assisted the girl, with her coat and downed the remainder of his drink simultaneously. The girl grabbed her purse.
They were leaving.
The shabby grey shape waited patiently as they found their way to the exit. His heart then began to race. His fingers shook. He brought them to his face along with round-rimmed spectacles and pushed his spectacles into place.
It was just...about...time.
He abandoned his table, taking with him a red plastic cocktail straw from a nearby empty glass. He began to take his first steps toward the exit the moment the lovely couple disappeared into the outside air. Swiftly now...even more swiftly....
When he reached the outer walkway, pushing restlessly past a handful of others exiting and a handful of others entering, he spotted the lovely couple as they strolled arm-in-arm across the parking lot, down the sidewalk, beneath the bright lamplight of the solemn street.
He kept his pace steady and slow, careful to turn the other way or sidestep into the shadows should one or both of them take a glance behind and his way. As they crossed the adjoining intersection, he waited for a moment’s time before he did the same.
Halfway across and from between the faded yellow crosswalk lines, he paused to gaze back himself, back to The Crow Job, back to the gaping black mouth of The Crow Job’s rearside alley. He thought recent memories.
For a moment.
Then he continued onward, chewing the tip of his cocktail straw nervously and discarding it to the street curb.
At first, he thought the lovely couple were returning to their grey Mercedes, the Mercedes the young man had borrowed earlier from his church choir leader on the half-lie that his date with the pastor’s daughter would be an innocent dinner-and-movie one. The shabby grey shape was prepared to follow, prepared to go in turn for his own shabby-shaped vehicle across the street, until the lovely couple strode past the Mercedes and continued further over the crabgrass cracks of severed sidewalk, down the street and further away from the happening nightclub.
He stood still the next moment, resting against the riddled graffiti of a garbage dumpster, placing his fingers, now trembling and anxious, into his trench coat pockets. Two raggedy young men approached him from behind, mooching for a cigarette or three. He replied coldly that he didn’t smoke. They offered him unseen other things that they insisted