Though she didn't want to let him into the frozen chunk of ice that was her heart, into the tangled maze of thoughts that constituted her mind, ever so gradually he insinuated his way in there. He gently but insistently chipped away until the hard exterior she cultivated crumbled just a little, just enough to make way for him to enter.
In a life that had lost its chief male figure at a young age and then had all subsequent weak, indifferent, cruel, perverse or just downright fucked up male influences floating through it or running roughshod over it, there finally emerged a man to restore some semblance of faith in the opposite sex. She had little but disdain for the majority of the fairer sex too. Her tribulations over the years had taught her that they, too, could be as depraved, vindictive, and loathsome as the men, but she wasn't seeking any redemption in women.
“What the hell is a nice girl like you doing working in a cesspool like this?” were the very first words he’d ever spoken to her, as she drifted through the smoke filled interior of the club. She was a roving drinks waitress for once, albeit clad in an outfit only slightly less revealing than the girls onstage.
“That’s the lamest cliché I’ve ever heard. Besides, nice girls don’t work here. What gives you the impression I’m a nice girl? I’m not, buddy.”
“Keep telling yourself that often enough and you’ll start to believe it. It’s a form of indoctrination that others have made you buy into. I’m not buying into it.”
“Well, you better buy something in the form of a drink or I’ll have security toss your ass,” Angela snapped back. “I don’t have time for this bullshit.”
“Sure. Whiskey. Neat. Follow that with a beer chaser.”
“Boilermaker?”
“Whatever floats your boat, Angel.”
Angel? Nobody had ever called her angel since her father—her real father, not the parade of degenerates who’d masqueraded as her father.
After a couple of drinks he’d departed, simply slipping out, and was gone, but he was back the next night and the following night as well.
He didn’t appear to be there to watch the girls run through their motions on stage, nor did he seem to be there to get himself intoxicated for he rarely had more than a handful of drinks. Angela started to think he’d taken it upon himself to annoy her while she was attempting to work.
“Jesus Christ on a barstool. You again? Are you making it your life’s purpose to stalk me? Trying to get me fired?”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Angel. I’ve been coming to this seedy little dump for a lot longer than you’ve been shaking your ass here and peddling drinks to drunks, so no need to make it all about you.”
“Really? Then why do you come here? Do you make a point of picking someone out every so often just to make their life difficult? Is that how you get your kicks? Lucky me drew the short straw this time around? Asshole.”
“I think in the three nights I’ve been here, you’ve called me every single name under the sun except my real one. It isn’t actually buddy, asshole, creep, stalker, lame ass or any of your other creative greetings. It’s Dallas. Just plain old Dallas.”
“I’m Angela,” she replied, almost as quickly asking herself why the hell she’d just blurted it out like that. To everybody else in the club she was known as Amber. To anybody else in her life along the way she’d been known as anything but the name given to her by her birth parents.
So why now would she just spill her true name to this strange guy who was becoming a familiar pain in the ass?
That was the turning point, the catalyst, that tiny little inadvertent slip that allowed Dallas to ever so slowly begin to work his charm on her, and while a lesser man would have simply given up the pursuit, Dallas did not.
She couldn't exactly say for certain that she loved Dallas in any true sense, but the feelings blossoming within her ever since his presence manifested in her life were strong, incredibly strong. With them she began to crawl back from the brink of self-destruction. Gradually, she was able to separate herself from the seedy cesspool she'd dwelled in and start to explore a world outside it.
Then, like all things in Angela's life up until now, the streak of good fortune was painfully transitory. It had to end, and it did end. Violently.
Dallas may have fundamentally been a good man at his core with all the requisite values, but he wasn't a saint. He was entangled in an assortment of things in operation well outside the boundaries of the law, having some associates of a most dubious nature. He'd swept into Angela's life, and while he seemed to have every intention of removing her from the quicksand of unpalatable things in her existence, he had difficulty in removing himself from the very same.
He had to make a living for himself, so he did what he'd always done, the only things he really knew. He acted as a strong arm man, and he dabbled in illicit pharmaceutical sales to ensure he had a liquid cash flow. While it might have appeared hypocritical of him to be attempting to steer her away from a life he couldn't disengage himself from, perhaps in some twisted way he was accepting his own failings. He was vicariously attaining some level of success through her break away from the scene, and he knew he couldn't quite do the same.
In the end it didn't matter at all.
She didn't even get around to any contemplations of trying to pull Dallas out of the mire he'd bogged himself down into, born into a life of crime with a recidivist father, an absent mother, and petty criminal older siblings.
Before she could even start getting her own head straight and steer Dallas onto the straight and narrow, a shady deal went south.
Dallas head-butted a barrage of plated hollowtips.
His corpse was left with a completely unrecognisable visage. He had to be identified via means of distinguishable tattoos, as there was barely enough of his teeth left in his obliterated mouth to have dental records provide anything useful.
Angela was nineteen when she met Dallas, and she was twenty-two when a storm of expanding bullets played pin the tail on the donkey with his face and mushroomed inside his head to make brain soufflé. Effectively, that tragedy should have destroyed Angela, pushing her over the brink into a depression where she should have wanted to deep throat a gun barrel herself and blast an exit in her cranium.
But it didn't.
Dallas brought out the inner strength she'd always possessed, yet couldn't connect with until his arrival. She clung to that, used it, and grew from it. Ultimately, she became stronger still, more resilient, and more adaptable than she had ever been.
However, the death seared that terrible fear of commitment upon her psyche like a permanent scar.
Let anyone close and they will just go away. Or be taken away.
Becoming involved with Dallas ultimately pulled her out of the world of sleaze and into relatively normal society, but his death left her riddled with issues and the need to deal with them. Hence the impetuous decision to hook up with the young singles tour to Derosso, a last ditch effort for the desperate and dateless. Or a herculean attempt to battle commitment phobia.
It was through a co-worker, an acquaintance at the bar she was now employed where she was now only a regular bartender, not dancing on stage or any of the tables.
She didn’t consider any of them to be friends, regardless how well she got along with them.
Let anyone close and they will just go away. Or be taken away.
This woman was Elena Wright, the first staff member to take her under her wing on her first day on the job, the closest to anything in the way of a friend that Angela would abide or tolerate. It was she who coined the phrase 'desperate and dateless,' mostly a good-natured jibe at herself.
“You ever wonder why people just waste their lives in bars, Angie? Drinking all night, waking up with a sore head and a pile of regrets the next day? Lord knows, I’ve been there. Won’t catch me on that side of the bar any more. I’ll tell you, it’s not the place to snare the man of your dreams.”
“Great place to find the man of your nightmares tho
ugh. Trust me, I’ve been there,” Angela said. “People waste their lives in a meaningless pursuit of something they aren’t going to find. Everyone is desperate for one thing or another. Most of them are just sick, desperate freaks. That’s my personal opinion.”
“Hey, who are you calling a freak?” Elena laughed. “I’m desperate, make no bones about that. I’m the original desperate and dateless. I’m no freak though. Maybe that’s the problem.”
“You sure as hell won’t find your dream man in a bar, no matter what side of it you’re on,” Angela said resolutely, beating down memories of Dallas inside her mind. “You’ll only find misery.”
“Aren’t you a ray of sunshine?”
“More like a death ray of reality.”
Though pretty and effervescent, Elena couldn't get a date or hold down a relationship to save her life, and not for any lack of trying. Unlike Angela, she was actively seeking to find a decent man. Of course, it was the old cliché in this city that all the good ones were either taken or gay, and the only males drifting into her sphere were undesirables, the type that needed to be prodded with a pool cue at the end of the night to get them moving on.
One way or another, Elena had come across this brochure for an Italian singles tour seemingly custom made for her and was making big plans to be part of it. She booked plane flights, accommodations, and meticulously mapped everything out. Then she went and met a man at the library and fell in love.
Elena wasn't exactly Queen of the Dumb, but when it came to making a brains trust, she wouldn't be the first candidate Angela could think of that would be heading the list. She wasn't even certain Elena knew what a library was.
This completely rendered the singles tour useless to her. The plane tickets were already purchased, bookings of all sorts made.
Angela Rollins inherited the whole deal. At first, she was dead against the whole concept.
“No fucking way, Elena. I don't like any of the people in my own country, what the hell am I going to do in an entirely different country with a fuckload of people I can't even understand? No fucking way. Not in a million years.”
Elena was gently persuasive and mildly coercive, slipping slowly but surely under Angela's skin. The money she spent was basically wasted if Angela didn't take her up on it.
“Come on Angie, you’re the one always telling me that a bar is the last place anybody is going to discover somebody worthwhile. How do you know this isn’t going to be exactly what you need? You’ll never know unless you go.”
“Elena, you sound like a bad television advertisement. You’re not selling me on the idea.”
“Forget looking for love, then. How about a holiday? It’s already set up, it can only do you some good—Italian sunshine, food, and well…whatever else they have over there. Hanging around and stagnating in this bar is going to turn you into a bitter spinster wondering what the hell became of your life. Why don’t you open yourself up to some fun, just for once? And, hey, this could be a lot of fun. Could be just the thing you need to clear your head. Get away from here, get a whole new perspective on things. If you fall in love, consider that a bonus feature.”
Every day, the same deal, Elena chipping away at her until Angela finally relented and accepted the gift. She only accepted because of how much cash Elena would be funneling down the drain for naught.
“All right, all right, Elena, if only to shut you up about talking about this day in, day out. Happy now? I’ll go. But I’m not going to fall in love. And I am holding you wholly responsible if things go to hell in a handbasket over there.”
However, the more she thought about it, the more she began to see it as something else, something good.
It was an opportunity to confront her fears and defeat them.
What better way to do it than throw herself into a foreign country on a tour for young single people like her and see what transpires? No point in doing things by halves.
* * *
Angela was abruptly yanked from her reverie, or more appropriately her bleak wander down Bad Memory Lane, by the portly slumberer in the seat bumping her fleshy frame against Angela's shoulder, courtesy of the none-too-careful bus driver’s erratic maneuvers on the road en route to the hotel. She dozed on with her voluminous mouth now hanging open. The open vampire novel on her lap slipped a little down her elephantine thighs, but clung tenaciously there rather than drop onto the bus floor.
Pushing her sunglasses up on top of her head, Angela eased herself closer to the window away from the bulk of her seat sharer. She wouldn't have pegged the middle-aged oversized woman as a horror aficionado, but she had long ago learned not to judge a book by its cover.
Angela tended to steer clear of horror herself, in terms of film or novels or anything. She'd had a horror story of a life as it was without enmeshing it in werewolves, vampires, monsters and the like. She wondered if the heavy sleeper was part of the singles tour, snorting at the unlikely chance of that being the case. The brochure stated young singles, and there was probably some type of age cut off that would restrict this bloodsucker fiction fanatic from being included on it. Maybe she was just an ordinary tourist en route to the premium hotel of Derosso.
Angela cast her eyes around the filled bus. With an idea about just who else on this bus might be involved in the tour, she covertly studied her fellow passengers. There were all sorts, a number of them who fit the criteria and might have been the people she would be spending her time with in Derosso.
Some pretty slim pickings.
There was a pair of young people, probably in their early twenties, down near the front of the bus. From their jocular banter, it was apparent they were rather familiar with each other. Either they had previous knowledge of each other or maybe they'd been seated together on the plane and managed to strike up a rapport from that point on. If that was the case, then the young singles tour was already off to a successful start, pairing up souls prior to even getting underway.
There were a few other young women who could have been there for the same reason as Angela, as well as several men around the same age. Most of these males were clean-cut, short haired, ordinary looking fellows. One or two of them were well-built and good looking, though most of them were pretty nondescript and easily forgettable.
A young man at the back of the bus was more in line with Angela’s tastes. He was clad in a black leather jacket and wore dark sunglasses like her, his hair long and black and tied back. He rested his head on the plane of his window regardless of the occasional bumps and bounces brought about by Captain Careless, their wonderful bus driver. Angela presumed this man was sleeping or trying to do so.
Another individual, on the right hand side of the bus about three seats back, ignited a little more of her interest. This man looked as though he could have been composed of granite. His face was all hard lines, his eyes intense and penetrating with a stare that verged on the unnerving.
He, too, had his dark hair in a ponytail, albeit a small one that only just managed to curl down over the collar of his black silk shirt. A five o’clock shadow darkened his sharp jawline, and he had an Eastern Bloc look about him, one Angela had become familiar with in her tribulations, notably through her inclusion in a family of Romanian descent. It was one of the very few families Angela had momentarily enjoyed being part of, until the eldest brother returned home after a lengthy jail stint.
Dressed entirely in black with pants to match his shirt, pointed gleaming leather boots, and black gloves, he appeared out of place in the hot bus. Like the man in the leather jacket, this stoic and formidable character appeared oblivious to the warmth.
Angela shrugged it off and continued her perusal of the bus passengers, not particularly seeing too much else to drum up a major sense of enthusiasm about this whole thing. There were a couple of families with a handful of children in tow, several elderly souls, and some swarthy local-looking individuals. None of those people were bound to be part of a young singles tour.
Slim pickings
indeed.
The hopeful love match expedition. The desperate and dateless. Lonely hearts club.
So, baby steps. Damn baby steps. One issue at a time. Really, if this was to be considered a baby step, it was one hell of a big one. A huge baby step. Fucking enormous.
In a foreign country if things went ass up, she was going to have to rely on other people, learn to trust them to some extent.
Way to throw yourself in at the deep end, Angie, she chided herself.
Distracted and perturbed by the whole thing, Angela didn't even realise that the bus was at long last pulling up to a stop outside the hotel.
Chapter 3
Jamie
Amanda M. Lyons
Jamie looked out the window of the airplane, taking in his first flight with a surprising amount of calm and stability. He wasn’t normally the kind of guy you’d expect to feel at home in the air, but that’s just how he felt. He’d always assumed he’d be bouncing off of the walls or balled up in an aisle seat trying not to touch the other passengers and sleeping his anxiety away.
Of course, his ordinary fear of heights and situational claustrophobia were the furthest things from his mind at the moment. In a strange way, he was making his escape, running from the life he’d always known in order to build something new, something less confining and damaged.
Jamie sighed, thinking back to all of the times his friends tried to push him toward taking risks, trying something new, or being spontaneous.
“You never do anything spontaneous! You’ve got to get out there and live a little, man! Don’t you want to take a chance and see what happens?” It was easy enough for Oliver. He’d grown up cocky and sure of himself. He was also the ideal of every gay man Jamie ever met and one of the one night stands that always seemed to want to make him fit some sort of mold they pictured when they met him.
“Sure I do. The trouble is, every time I ever tried before I always wound up needing to scurry back to my safety net and recover.”
Feral Hearts Page 2