"Fine," he finally gave in. "Did you see the latest headlines?"
I shook my head, but he had a newspaper sitting on the table, ready to present to the jury as Exhibit A. He flipped it over, sticking it under my nose.
My expression darkened as I read the seventy-two-point bold headline. "So there's a war going on in the Middle East," I said, roughly pushing it aside. "That's nothing new. They're always either at war, or on the brink of war, out there. So what?"
"So people are dying, man!" Tommy said. "Shouldn't you do something to fix it? Rewrite things so that they aren't fighting?"
"And how, exactly, am I supposed to do that?" I fired back. "What do you suggest that I write?"
He shrugged. "I dunno, can't you just, like, say that they don't dislike each other now?"
"It's not that simple," I sighed. "That doesn't solve the underlying problems out there. It'll only last for a couple days, and then they'll just start fighting again. I've tried it, Tommy. I can't solve the really big things."
For a minute, he glared hotly back at me, lips pursed with the words of a challenge. But finally, he relaxed, letting some of the tension ease out of his neck and shoulders.
"I guess you know best," he admitted. "But it just seems wrong, somehow, that you spend your days drifting along in a sort of hedonistic haze instead of doing something really big with your powers."
"Those sound like the words of a man who needs more booze!" I tried to joke, hoping to put a smile on his face. The ploy didn't work, so I cast about for another distraction. "Or how about some girls?"
"Not if you're just going to use your magical voodoo to lure them over here," Tommy said, but I could tell that the objection was half-hearted. His eyes flicked past me, over to a cluster of tall, leggy blondes who, between the three of them, barely had enough fabric to cover one person's body.
"No magic, promise," I said, holding up two fingers in the Boy Scout's salute.
"You weren't a scout," he pointed out.
"Only because I thought the uniforms looked stupid." I stood up, leaning over the railing that wrapped around the raised VIP booth I'd purchased at the club. "Hey, ladies! Yes, you, the sexy ones!"
One of the blondes, wearing a tiny little purple wrap, turned at the sound of my voice rising over the thumping bass of the dubstep music. She looked up at me with a frown on her face, sizing me up – and then the frown blossomed into a smile as I met her expectations. I might have ditched the ability to read minds, but her thoughts might as well have been flashing in neon letters over her head.
Is he tall? Check.
Is he attractive? Devastatingly so, check.
Is he rich? He's waving us over to a private booth while holding a bottle of Dom Perignon in his other hand, so I'm going to go ahead and assume that the answer is yes. Checkity check.
A minute later, the blonde and her two friends, one in pink and the other in a tiny little top covered in sparkly silver sequins, climbed up to join us in our booth. "Hi there," giggled Purple Wrap, her eyes sweeping over me as if to make sure her initial assessment of my value hadn't been incorrect. "I'm Lexie, and this is Tracie and Suzie."
"Hi," piped up Tommy. Suzie, the one in the tiny sequin-covered outfit, had squeezed in next to him. Her mostly-exposed chest was right at the height of his eyes, and they couldn't seem to quite manage to rise beyond her collarbone.
"You two have this big booth all to yourselves?" Lexie asked, probably trying to scope out any potential competition.
I gave her my best, most rakish grin as I slipped an arm around her tiny little waspish waist. "Not now that you're here, sexy. But that leather's probably going to stick to your bare thighs. Why don't you perch on my lap, instead?"
A few minutes later, Lexie and Tracie were both settled on my thighs, one girl on each, their long and slender torsos pressed against my chest as they both cooed and nibbled at my neck and ears. I raised my champagne bottle in a toast to Tommy, on the other side of the booth, who had his own hands full of sequined Suzie. "Feeling better, buddy?"
"This doesn't fully make up for what we were discussing before," he got out, although the words were muffled considerably by Suzie's chest.
I laughed, leaning back and letting the two girls go to town. Ten minutes later, however, I needed to dislodge them.
"The bathroom calls, I'm afraid," I told them as I fought my way up from the pile of long, slender, bony limbs. "Excuse me for just a minute."
Lexie and Tracie both put on pouts, sticking out their overly plumped lower lips, but it didn't sway me. I'd tried, once, to use my writing abilities to get rid of the urine building up in my bladder. It worked perfectly – until forty minutes later, when I nearly passed out in pain on my couch, my dick shooting out a geyser of piss that splattered on my twelve-foot ceiling. Even my superpower wasn't enough to solve all anatomy problems, it seemed.
Still, it wouldn't take me long. I'd release this load of transformed Dom Perignon into the toilet, pick up a fresh bottle on my way back, and then challenge Lexie and Tracie to a few contests of sexual skill. In the end, I knew we'd all win. Cutting my way across the dance floor of the club as I headed for the bathroom, I clicked my heels together in a little jump of joy, loving how great my life felt.
My eyes ran over the rest of the crowd, and I savored the little surge of pride I felt as I compared their lackluster situations to my own. Did any of them have the slightest idea that a god walked among them? I could charm any of them, give them the best night of their lives – or the worst, if the fancy so struck me!
I paused for a second at an odd couple near the edge of the bar, sizing them up. The girl stood barely four and a half feet tall, in contrast to the guy towering over her at well over six feet. She looked like a tiny child beside him!
"You two should totally hook up," I murmured to them as I wrote the words inside my head.
The light of lust flared in both of their eyes, and their conversation cut off mid-sentence. I laughed as they threw their arms around each other, the man bending over nearly double to bring his lips down close enough for the girl to greedily latch on. As he straightened up, she wrapped her short little legs around him, clinging to him like a monkey climbing a palm tree.
I laughed, drunk on champagne and laughter. "You two, make out!" I cried, stabbing out my fingers at two prissy-looking girls with pinched lips.
They threw their arms around each other as their tongues mingled, and I clapped my hands in laughter. I took another few steps towards the bathroom, but oh, this was so much fun! One more, one more!
My eyes fell on a rather plain-looking girl with flat brown hair emerging from the women's bathroom. She definitely didn't look like she wanted to be here much – she wore a rather baggy sweater, and I frowned. Who the hell wore a heavy sweater to a club? This was the place to show off some skin!
"Let's see some tits, sugar!" I called out to her, writing the words inside my head. Suddenly filled with a thrill of excitement and lust, this girl grabbed her shirt and hauled it up, giving the sexy stranger an unobstructed look at her chest melons-
"Fuck off, you prick," the girl snapped at me, not slowing as she stalked past.
Like a fucking cartoon, it took a moment before I realized what just happened. I did a literal double take, spinning around to stare at her retreating back.
What the fuck?
"The plain-looking girl in the ugly sweater felt horrible for snapping at a stranger, and turned around to apologize," I muttered, hastily scratching out the words inside of my skull.
Nothing. She vanished off into the crowd, leaving me behind with my mouth hanging open.
Holy shit, it wasn't possible.
My powers didn't work on her! What the fucking hell was going on?
My bladder shouted at me that it needed my attention, now, but I barely heard its cries. I just stood there, one hand still up to push the bathroom door open, staring after that girl and struggling to figure out what had happened.
I
'd never had my powers fail. They always worked, although the effects were sometimes later reversed or resulted in unexpected consequences. But they always worked.
Until now.
What was going on?
Chapter Three
PAXTON
*
God, this night was turning out to be the absolute worst.
I fought my way back through the crowd towards the rickety little table that we'd managed to finally claim for ourselves, gritting my teeth with each thump of the too-loud music. You couldn't even hear the words or catch any of the melody – it was basically just repetitive bass thumping, a tribal rhythm pumped out so that horny young adults could grind their asses against each other before going home to have meaningless sex!
And if I hadn't been convinced before that the guys in this club were total assholes, I now had the perfect anecdote to prove my point.
Finally, I managed to get back to the table – but instead of seeing any familiar faces standing around it, I found myself instead looking at strangers. It seemed that, while I'd excused myself to go use the facilities, we'd lost our table.
Perfect. Just perfect.
"Paxton!"
I turned at the sound of my name, and breathed out a small sigh of relief as I spotted Anna-Claire standing at the bar, waving her hand at me. Thank goodness. I hadn't been abandoned completely.
"I wanted to get a fresh drink," Anna-Claire said as I made my way over to her. There were a lot of people squeezed in around the bar, and I had to wiggle my shoulder a bit into the guy standing next to Anna-Claire before he moved over. He turned and gave me a dirty look at being dislodged, but I just glared right back. Probably another asshole, just like that guy by the bathrooms.
"Yeah, well, I want to get home," I sighed, once I'd squeezed myself into the tight space beside Anna-Claire. "Seriously, why did I agree to come out here again? This place is the absolute worst."
"Because your best friend is having a work party here, and you agreed to come along with her for moral support?" Anna-Claire's dimples flashed in her cheeks as she smiled sweetly at me. She knew that I'd cave, of course. "And you're a good friend?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm already here." I reached out and picked up her glass, frowning down into it. "What's this?"
"Whiskey," she answered, as I took a sip – and nearly gagged on the acrid, burning taste.
"Well, it's awful, just like everything else here." I put it back down firmly on the bar's counter. "How can you drink that sort of stuff? It's like swilling rubbing alcohol!"
"It's not so bad, once you get used to it," Anna-Claire said, her voice sounding far too reasonable, as if I was somehow the crazy one. "And a lot of the guys at the office drink it, so it's nice to be able to talk about it with them."
I turned my frown back to her. "Don't you remember the lessons from elementary school about peer pressure? Just say no?"
My eyes dipped for a moment, taking in Anna-Claire's tight pantsuit. She looked more like she belonged in a board meeting somewhere, not out at a club. The fabric looked expensive to my untrained eye, and the suit fit her well – but she still seemed out of place. She'd at least taken off the jacket and left it in her car, revealing well-toned shoulders in the short-sleeved cotton blouse beneath, but it still looked too professional. Especially when I compared it to the skimpy little tank tops and too-tight, too-tiny miniskirts or spandex shorts on the other girls in the club around us.
My eyes rose past Anna-Claire's blouse, up to her face. She'd cut her hair into a rather stern pageboy style, but it still managed to glint a tawny gold color in the flashing strobe lights of the club, hinting at highlights and lowlights that I knew had cost her a pretty penny at the salon.
"Stop it," Anna-Claire said softly to me, interrupting my thoughts.
"Stop what?"
She rolled her eyes. "You're comparing yourself to me again. You need to stop doing that."
"I'm not comparing myself to you," I lied, even as my treacherous mind tallied up the score between us.
Most of the points were in Anna-Claire's favor. She stood four inches taller than me, and weighed about thirty pounds fewer. She complained about the long hours she put in at her high-powered job, but she also got invited out to company happy hours, like at this club, and she had the money to lease a new Mercedes every three years. She had the nicer apartment, the better fashion sense, and she knew how to conduct herself in uncomfortable social situations, like this one.
"Yes, you are," she said firmly. "Now, do you want to tell me what's bugging you?"
"Where do I start?" I gestured around at the interior of the club. "This whole place is awful! The drinks are too expensive, the music's too loud, and I just want to be at home right now. And some asshole creeper accosted me on the way back from the bathroom! Where are your coworkers, anyway?"
Anna-Claire frowned and rose up on her tiptoes in her respectable one-inch pumps, casting her eyes out over the crowd. I couldn't do that, I thought resentfully to myself. Too short. My view was a sea of thinner female chests and brawny male ones.
"Over there on the dance floor," she finally said, sinking back down. "Although from the way that they've been tossing back drinks, they probably won't even notice if I take off now."
"Do it," I urged her. "Come on, Anna-Claire, you know that you hate this place as much as I do! Don't you want to go home, maybe take a nice hot bath, read a romance novel and have a couple glasses of wine, instead of staying here?"
"They serve wine here, you know," she tried, but I wasn't having any of it.
"That's not the point, and you know it. Why are we sticking around?"
I thought for a second that I might have convinced her – but then Anna-Claire's jaw tightened, and I winced. That was the same expression she wore when she decided that she was adopting a new resolution in her life, or when she was insistent upon where we'd go out for dinner. It was the kind of expression that told me that she wasn't going to be swayed – and worse, she'd now try and convince me to see her side.
"Paxton, how long has it been since you've had a date?" she asked.
Ooh, right in the gut. "A couple of months," I lied. "And I'm focusing on myself right now, anyway."
"A couple?" she echoed. "How many is a couple?"
"Oh, you know. Two, or three..." She kept staring at me, and my mouth kept rolling. "...or four, or six, or eleven."
"Eleven?"
"So it's been a while. So what?" I pointed my finger up at her, trying to turn this around. "How long has it been for you?"
"Two months, but I've been asked out since then," she answered immediately. "I gave up dating for six months so that I could focus more on my career."
"Well, that's what I'm doing, too."
She rolled her eyes at me. "What career, Paxton? You work for your uncle at his used bookstore. There's not much of a ladder there to climb, since the only other employees are the part-time stock boys."
"The store needs a lot of attention," I said weakly. Yes, it had been a long time since my last date, much less anything physical happening – but I knew that I wasn't going to find any potential romantic partners here, in this club full of skinny bitches and muscle-bound tools. All the people here were the same, not what I wanted.
Anna-Claire poked me in the middle of my sweater-covered chest with a finger. "No, you need some attention! If you don't get some kind of action, Paxton, your lady bits are going to dry up and fall off."
Eergh. Not the prettiest mental picture. "I'm not going to meet a guy here," I restated, trying to circle back around to my core premise. "Because all the guys here are assholes and creeps! Just a minute ago, when I was coming out of the bathroom, this guy pointed at me and told me that he wanted to see my tits! That is not the kind of guy that I want to think about going home with."
"Well, maybe not him," Anna-Claire winced. "But come on, Paxton, don't you want to just cut loose and have some fun? You're always so tightly wound, so busy thinking about stuff. Thi
s is your chance to relax, turn your brain off for a bit, and have fun! And drinks are on my company, so you should enjoy a few!"
For a second, I wavered. Anna-Claire Lewyn was nothing if not convincing, and she knew it. The same persuasive skills that carried her debate team to the national stage in high school now worked against me, urging me to stay. I could always enjoy a free drink, at least – the used book business didn't leave me swimming in free cash.
"Give in," she purred, sensing that I was about to fold. "Just a few more minutes. At least talk to one more guy before you leave. I'll order you a drink, and you can let that pent-up, repressed imagination of yours loose and imagine doing some of the things from your romance novels with a real-life, actually breathing guy."
Oh, what the hell. I hated everything about this place – but my best friend did have the very annoying habit of knowing what was right for me, sometimes when I didn't even realize it for myself.
"Fine," I finally let out. "One drink, and one guy. But that's it. Then, I'm going home – alone, mind you – to go take a hot bath and read some of the stack of books that's waiting for me."
Anna-Claire let out a little cheer, clapping her hands together. "Oh good – maybe you won't die a spinster, after all! Now, what can I get you to drink?" she continued smoothly as I choked at her comment.
I coughed, trying to clear my airway, and she placed an order for me. A minute later, she passed a tall glass of something brightly colored and fruity smelling over to me.
I took a cautious sip. Surprisingly, not awful.
"Now, to find you a guy," Anna-Claire said. "Ooh, how about-"
I held up a hand to forestall her. "Actually, I think that I'll make my own choice of man," I cut her off. "Why don't you go check in with your coworkers out on the dance floor? That's why you're out here in the first place, after all. Not to get me talking to some random stranger."
Anna-Claire bit her lip for a second, perhaps considering objecting, but she couldn't refute my logic. "Fine," she gave in, finishing off her glass of disgusting whiskey. "But I want you to really try, Paxton! Don't just dip out like you usually do."
The Sure Thing Page 2