Page 47 of Cry Baby
None of them liked me.
I didn’t build my position on being liked. I built it on being the person they called when shit hit the fan, and they knew that this asshole would fix their fuck up.
Outside the building, the air felt colder than it needed to be, and I gritted my teeth at the frigid temperatures.
I paused just long enough to pull my phone out of my slacks and check it.
No emergencies.
No urgent calls.
Just the normal noise of other people’s lives continuing without me.
Good.
I slipped it back into my pocket and started walking again to my red Honda, Bettie, in the back of the lot. My Durango was my usual ride, but Allen lived too far outside the city to justify using it. That left driving the piece of shit, which shocked me every time she turned it on.
The car ride home was quiet, as opposed to the usual grinding sound of Bettie’s purr.
Kinky girl growled more than I did.
“Keep moving. That’s my good girl.”
My car sputtered for a minute before continuing the usual routine. I never called any actual female anything but fish, but social media was enough to see they must like that shit. The fact that Bettie kept puttering along was testimony to that.
Traffic lights.
Stop signs.
Endless cars.
Dumb twats who shouldn’t be fucking driving.
All while I had to act like a damn plebeian without my Christmas lights.
“Move, you fucking bagel!”
So many idiots owned a license. If I ever got promoted high enough, I would make it my mission to revoke them all.
“Not for nothing, my dude, but if you’re gonna text while driving, at least do it right and get out of the speedway!”
Idiots. All of America was stupid for sure, and while I didn’t travel, I assumed it was a safe bet to say the whole world, full of homo sapiens, was all full of fuck ups.
It was all muscle memory doing its job of driving while my mind drifted somewhere else entirely, not to anything specific, just the way it always did after a long day.
Promotion days were never celebrations.
They were transitions.
You didn’t become something new. You just inherited more weight and pretended it didn’tchange how you moved.
By the time I pulled into the driveway, the sky had already started dimming.
House lights were on inside, and I couldn’t stop the dead muscle inside my chest from skipping at the thought of what was inside.
Allen had always changed something in me.
Not softening me, exactly. I wasn’t a fucking chick. I was still the asshole I was born and bred to be, just…different with him. It was like a door I didn’t realize I’d been holding shut all day came ajar when little pieces of him bounced around my brain.
