Her. Chapter Two

Chapter 2
“Eat it boys, triple word score bonus,” she says in her discombobulated state. Discombobulated…what a funny word. I like it, discombobulated. She reaches her hand down and pounds on the ihome till the blaring, fast paced song stops. She emerges from under the mountain of white sheets and sits herself up on the bed. She stretches her arms up over her head and the popping noises from her chest, back, shoulders, and fingers echo against the bedroom walls in a glorious symphony that could cause cats to yawl, dogs to howl, and chiropractors to open up shop. It is 9:30 at night. The darkness of the room comforts her and seductively beckons her back to bed in his sexy, deep voice. No my love, she must get set to work.
She flicks on the lamp and walks to her closet, leaving behind her comfy bed surrounded by a moat of articles of clothing She sheds the remaining clothes she is wearing which isn’t much. She did not talk in sleep, she never sleep walks, but she does sleep-shed-her-clothes and wake up in nothing but a sports bar and underwear. She changes into a pair of black jeans and a black tank top. She observes herself changing in the full length mirror in her closet. She touches the scars on her stomach and chest. Her fingers enjoy running over the damaged skin, the touch bringing back memories of how the skin was assaulted, violated, and yet, the skin still is here, dealing with it. The scars on her arms are the least noticeable of them, and they do not arouse her as much as the others.
Once changed, she looks out the bed room window, the only window of the apartment. The street is fairly empty, except for the occasional low key drug deal. She grabs her gun from under the pillow, makes sure it is loaded, and tucks the gun in the back on her jeans. She looks for an acceptable jacket in the closet and picks a brown leather jacket amongst the collection. She unplugs her cell phone, shoves it in the front pocket of her jeans, zips up her jacket, and turns off the bedroom lamp. She kisses the darkness goodbye and promises her lover she will return soon.
She locks up the apartment and leaves. She encounters the landlady in the hallway leading to the stairs. She is a middle aged woman who has owned the building for years. She lives a few doors down from the female and has become accustomed to asking the female for rent when the female went out for her nightly business.
“You have rent for me soon?” she asks. She is everything polite but fearful. The landlady feels an overwhelming sense of fear and sadness when she looks at the young female. The female is good on rent though and the older woman’s asking is merely a force of habit.
“I’ll have rent for you first thing tomorrow,” says the female as she walks past the landlady. She could have paid the woman right there and then, but she wants to finish the job first before she dives into her briefcase fund stashed under her bed.
She does not slow or stop in her steps from the woman’s question or her own answer. The landlady nods and quickly returns to her own room. The female is not being rude. She knows the landlady fears her and the female is actually being quite considerate by being brief. Not to say she does not enjoy frightening people but as stated before, she has a job to get done.
She walks down the multiple flights of stairs. She dislikes elevators and has only used the building’s elevator once before. She walks out of the building, down the steps, and down the sidewalk. Her walking stride is fast but not too fast to warrant any unwanted attention. She has a couple of blocks to cover in the crisp, crappy, smelly air of the neighborhood. Despite the smell, there is something mystical about the street at night. The dim lights penetrating the dirty windows of the buildings glow just enough to provide minimal light and attract bugs. It is a world within a world. The walk down the sidewalk is part of reality but at the same time, the female feels like she is in a movie or TV show or a book, a mere representation of reality. But that would be crazy.
On her walk, she sees him returning from work. He is on the other side of the street, but the angelic light that beams onto his godly frame is anything but unnoticeable. He is just as good looking as he was this afternoon, but the smell of the bakery encircles him. Traces of flour are on his shirt and pants and his hair is messy from a day of work. She fantasizes about ripping those clothes off him…frosting and sprinkles…we’ll just stop there—perverts.
She slows her pace a little so she can smell his sweetness a little bit more. Four lanes of aggressive city traffic cannot suppress the smell of him or the imagined smells she is fantasizing about. A low, primitive growl escapes from the pit of her stomach and she gently taps the bulk of flesh to remind it that they neither have the time nor balls to do anything at the moment. The stomach retaliates a little but surrenders to the tapping of her palms.
She does not notice he has lowered his pace so he could get a little more of her as well. As they pass each other across the street, both look over their shoulders at each other and continue to walk away without another glance. At least, they both believe the other has not taken another glance. In truth, both have already taken another glance at each other, admiring the other’s freshly baked goods. God, I’m hungry. Maybe I should order a pizza or some Chinese or maybe order some Jimmy John’s…yeah, the delivery guy for Jimmy John’s is sort of good looking. Maybe it is the smells of good food that can stick to a man that drive certain women crazy. The thoughts and pleasures of orgasmicly good food on top of a good looking man—that’s a full meal if I say so myself, which I do since I’m the narrator and you have no choice but to listen to my random thoughts and cravings and—no! Don’t put me down! Look, she’s back at the café. Let’s see what she is going to do at the café.
After more walking, she arrives at the café from earlier this afternoon. The counter girl from before is closing the place up. The female judges she has at least twenty more minutes, and she continues her walk. She finally arrives at her destination, a crummy apartment building that makes her building look like the Ritz or something less than a hell hole. The perfect place to house the scum of the earth, she supposes. She wonders just how many other slime balls live in the building and if she could possible bullshit it as overtime to the Brit is she took care of them too. Nope, the Englishman wouldn’t buy it, and he would scold her and make her drink terrible tea and eat small non-sandwich sandwiches.
She hides on the side of the building till 10:30pm. The job exits the building and begins to walk in the direction she has just returned from. She follows him, making sure to keep her distance so he would not notice her—like she needs to truly follow him. She knows where he is heading and she could see and smell the stench trail the animal makes as he moves forward and forward down the sidewalks.
Once she has established his intended destination (out of sick need for perfection) she stops following him and proceeds on a short cut the idiot isn’t aware of. Cutting into alleys and buildings, she arrives at the café before the job does. She covertly waits behind the café, hidden behind a dumpster. The sweet, sickly smell of vomit and coffee grounds bolts up her nostrils and she ponders if there is a café in existence that sells vomit flavored coffee drinks—oh, wait most already do. Ouch.
She waits and waits and finally the back door swings open. The counter girl throws a bag of garbage into the dumpster, complaining to herself about the filthiness of the back alley and how cruel her life is that she has to work on a Saturday night and how this is cutting into her drinking and acting like a dumb bitch night with her equally stupid and annoying friends. The female continues to watch the dumb, young thing. She is not the only predator watching the fresh meat.
It’s time. The female reaches behind herself for her gun. The cool metal tickles her finger. Before the counter girl could return into the building, the job jumps her and forces her to the ground. Her body slams into the filthy, concrete ground. For a skinny thing, she sure makes a loud thud. The girl does not have time to scream or react. A knife is placed to the back of her neck. He orders her to close her eyes or he’ll kill her. She obeys and he flips her over onto her back. He’s bluffing, of course, why quickly kill off something you spend good time tracking? He blindfolds her, gags her with a washcloth, and ties her hands together with duct tape. His methods haven’t changed.
“Lame,” thinks the female. “This is your first kill after being let out and you stick with what got you caught in the first place?”
The female waits till the job is completely distracted by his prey and then quietly moves up from behind the dumpster. Weeks of observation all for this one moment. She aims her gun at the back of his head, her arms steady from experience, a good nap, and video games. She thinks about pulling the trigger. Weeks of observation just to blow some animal’s head off. No, she isn’t letting this end so soon.
The atmosphere of the back alley changes. Sure, everything looks the same but a sinister coldness can be felt, crawling up your spine and then resting inside your head just as the coldness is doing to the job right now. He limbs are heavy, his body cold, and he holds his head in pain. His knife drops to the gun, the female’s reflection smiling back to her from the knife’s shiny blade. You can call yourself good or pure or innocent but the truth is that everyone gets pleasure from having power over another.
The man tries to cry out in pain, but he can’t, his body is too tired. What is causing him so much pain? What memories are flooding his mind at this very moment? Is he feeling something that all of his victims had to endure while he enjoyed being a sick, son of a bitch? Fear. He is afraid. Every emotion that haunted and still haunts his victims gush through his mind, filling in every crevice of his brain, nesting and laying eggs that would hatch and devour is brain. That last part would depend on how much patience the female possessed in her core. Nope, she doesn’t have that much patience.
The female’s right eye twitches slightly, a little blowback. There is a lot of hate, fear, and anger in the air. She senses everything that the animal is feeling. She can envision all his victims, their pains, and the power his felt raping them. The power is additive and for a brief second, she understands how such a worthless, animal could want such power…for a brief second and then the aftertaste hits her very core and moves up her throat. She detaches herself from the negativity of the alley and returns her focus to the job.
“Not so fun, is it?” she asks. The job spins his ugly body around just in time to have a bullet pierce him center in the forehead. The man remains suspended for a second before falling backwards from the force of the shot. He falls on top of the crying girl and his lifeless body rolls off her after her wiggling and thrusting underneath him.
Blood and bits of skull and brain matter are splattered on the ground and the closest wall of the alley, but the alley is still relatively clean apart from the pool of blood forming under the decease. The female is untouched, distancing herself far enough away from her kill. Like hell she is getting her clothes dirty. Do you know how hard blood is to get out of clothing?
The female walks over to the crying and blind counter girl. The female knows she has only about a minute or so before some New Yorker has the courage to investigate where the gun shot came from and that she had two minutes before anyone would call the police.
“I’m going to ungag you,” she says to the girl, her voice calm and assertive. “If you make any noise, I have no problem killing you. Do you understand?” The girl nods her head.
“After I ungag you, I want to count to ten and then start screaming for help. If you do not count to ten, I have no problem killing you. Do you understand?” the female asks her. The girl again nods her head. The female removes the gag and runs out of the back alley. Damn, look at her go.
The female is a good distance from the alley before she hears the girl scream out for help. The female is even better distance away when she hears the sirens. She then calls for a cab ride home. In the cab, she smiles to herself so much that the cab driver asks her about her obvious joy.
“Sir,” she says, “I got lucky tonight.” The cab driver laughs and drops her off in front of her apartment building. She pulls out some bills from her bra, pays the man, and watches the cab drive off. She is safe in her choice about taking the cab home. She had been far enough from the scene not to draw any questions. The back alley behind the café had no security cameras, and she had been right to assume the job would blindfold his intended victim, like he had done so before. “Survival of fittest,” she hums to herself, “is what separates the good criminals from the dead ones.”
She walks back to her bedroom to celebrate with a cold beer from the fridge and orders some take out. She watches a horrible SyFy original movie marathon for the rest of the night before falling asleep again in the early morning. She knows that when she wakes up, there would be a couple thousand dollars more in her bank account. There’s a pleasant thought to fall asleep to.
Her dream is about Warren and humors the fantasy of her actually being able to be with him without fear or worry about a job or hurting him. She is only close to a few people and even then, she still accidently hurts them from time to time. She has always dreamed of Warren, ever since first laying eyes on him. This is understandable; he is one tasty piece of eye candy. She remembers when she first “met” him.
He was walking home work as she was first moving in. She could not help but stare at the boy as he walked up to the steps of his apartment building. He wasn’t wearing his apron but she could still smell the sweets of the bakery on his body. Flour was spilled on his fitted black jeans that showed he was lean but fit.
Come to think of it, he always had flour spilled on his jeans from work. It was as if he wanted to give the girl an excuse to look at him as she did. Warren, don’t be so silly, we would look at you no matter what you were wearing or had spilled on you. Hell, you really didn’t even need to wear clothes. But this has nothing to do with their first meeting.
As he stepped on the first step, he ran his fingers through his hair, pushing back a few strands that had fallen on his face. He immediately turned around, as if intentionally catching her off guard. She panicked and hid her red face behind the one box she was moving in with. She stumbled around and entered her building without looking back. If she had looked back, she would have seen him smiling at her but a smile not of laughter or amusement but of general interest in the new girl moving in across the street.
She did not think the boy was interested in her. Why should he have been? She was not skinny nor fat, but the terrible average weight that a girl had to suffer with in society. Her hair was messy and hadn’t been washed in a couple of days. Her face was nothing special. She wore glasses, hated contacts. A recently popped zit left a temporary red spot on the side of her chin. And the icing on the cake, she was dressed in a pair of smelly, torn sweats. They were comfortable though, and one could hide a many great and illegal things in them.
She did not give Warren enough credit to separate him from the stupid masses of men. She did not give Warren the mental capacity that allowed him to see that she was moving in and was tired and maybe just was not having a good day. Warren, of course, was separate from the masses of stupid men, assumed she was tired and having a bad day, and liked her glasses. He thought they were unique and framed her face well. It was late afternoon and the sun was hidden behind a big gray cloud, so Warren couldn’t see the red spot on her chin that she was so preoccupied with but if he had, he wouldn’t have cared.
Warren waited on the front steps of his apartment, eyeing the apartment building across the street as if he could beckon the female to come back outside just with his thoughts. After the horrible reality that he in fact did not have mind powers, Warren entered his building and finally entered his apartment. The curiosity of the new move-in across the street still surrounded him. He was fascinated by her. Her hair, her face, her unusual manner all deserved and gained his attention. He imaged just what her name could be. He contemplated various female names as he leaned against the cold concrete wall of his apartment. Nope, none of the names that popped into his perfectly formed head could possibly have been her name.
“Great,” he says to himself, almost sensing that the girl would painfully be the object of his affection for the next few years.
Little does our handsome, young man know that the girl had been watching him from her apartment window, astonished that he had stayed on the steps for so long after she had ran into the building. This was the only time she had taken the elevator of her building.
Her infatuation with Warren would remain for years, as would his. Their infatuation with each other would silently intensify till sooner or later, someone would have to talk, break the ice, and die a horrible cold death or magically change into a penguin, which ever. All she wanted was to hear him talk. She imagined the sound of his voice. God, what could such a model of male human perfection sound like? And of course, he has imagined the very the same about her. Awe, stupid love.