by Logan Castle
I stood up straight and offered the straw to Kelsey. She was looking at me, grabbed the straw and just stood there for a second with it. “I couldn’t help but notice you’re here by yourself tonight. Not a night when most people are alone. And by the way you’re drinking and powdering your nose, seems like you’re on a mission.”
There was no question behind her words. She didn’t even wait for me to respond. She just put her head back down and took two more sharp inhales. When she stood up, she peered at me but still didn’t say anything, as if she were waiting for me to respond.
I, meanwhile, gnawed at the skin on the inside of my mouth. It was a nervous habit, one I did far too frequently. She must have noticed my discomfort because she reached out and brushed her hand down my arm. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be nosy. My friends say I need to work on that. And, you know, coke makes most people turn into blabbermouths.”
I had a good laugh at that. “Yeah, me too. And no worries, you’re not nosy,” I lied.
“Are you okay?” she ventured to ask.
“I will be. Just in a bit of a rough patch today. But hey, that’s what New Year’s is all about, right? A fresh start?” God. How fucking stupid did I sound?!
“That’s the spirit! So, no New Year’s kiss for you then?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
“So sad,” she said as she pretended to pout.
“Guess that’s just the way it goes,” I answered, imagining her lips and her mouth wrapped around my…
She tilted her head and her brown eyes were penetrating. “Well, don’t feel so bad. I didn’t get one either.”
A second went by, two, three… I felt my cheeks burning. And yet, she didn’t break her gaze for a moment. She just continued to look at me. Through me. Without even saying a word, she reached up towards my face. Startled, I almost stepped back but stopped myself.
This was what you wanted, I scolded myself. A diversion. Of course, that had been what I was telling myself but now, when the moment was upon me, it sounded like I was simply saying it to convince myself
She caressed her hand on my face and reached behind to cup my head. Grasping a handful of my hair, she yanked me forward with sudden and unexpected strength. My eyes widened as she drew my face to hers. I watched her lips quivering before her eyes began to close. My heart started to race when her lips rushed to meet mine.
No! I don’t want to do this! I have to prove to Plum, prove to myself that I’m better than this!
As I began to move my arms up to hold Kelsey at bay, I instantly felt a tingling sensation come from my arms as though there was something crawling on them. Before I could pan my eyes to the area, my vision blurred dramatically. Everything around me suddenly illuminated into a bright white light, drowning out the sweet vision of Kelsey’s puckered lips and consumed me whole.
* * *
The bright light vanished as quickly as it appeared. Now, there was only darkness. I twisted my head in every direction but could make out nothing. My heart felt like it could jump out of my chest and I started to panic. Where was I? Why was everything so dark?
Off in the distance, I heard a sound. I strained to listen but I couldn’t determine where it was coming from or what it was. The sound seemed to vanish intermittently and then come back louder and louder still. I started to realize as the volume increased that it was laughter – sweet and delicate laughter – and certainly not a man’s. It was too pronounced to belong to a child. It was a woman’s laughter. A huge sense of relief washed over me. This couldn’t be hell if such a sweet sound existed! As I tried to call out to the source of the laughter, my voice failed me and caught in my throat. The sound of the laughter faded again. Panic loomed in the distance, threatening me. I pleaded for the sweet sound to return.
And then I heard it again, only this time it was as if it were right in front of me. Then a voice and my heart nearly leapt through my chest. I knew that voice. It was her! It was Plum! But how could she be here? Desperately, I tried to find my way to her through the darkness but there was nothing. I could hear her but I couldn’t see her. No matter how hard I tried to swim through the blackness, I couldn’t locate her. She was so close, I could feel it.
Then, as if on cue, she appeared in front of me. Golden blond hair and those bottomless, blue eyes. Her lips were turned up into a smile, her adorably imperfect nose was up in the air and she was in the middle of a laugh. Her skin, milky white and fair. I wanted to reach out and touch her. I watched as she seemed to look right at me and laughed again.
Plum! I’m here! I wanted to cry out so she would notice me but she kept looking past me, as if she couldn’t see me at all. Was she looking at someone else? I glanced behind myself but there was no one. Then I looked to my left and my right. Nothing and no one. I turned back to face her. All I could see was her sweet face laughing, so full of joy.
Suddenly, her face vanished along with her laughter. I was alone again with only the cold, harsh darkness to keep me company. My one comfort in this place had suddenly gone. I wanted to scream but the air caught in my lungs. What was this cruel game being played on me?! This MUST be hell.
“Plum! Help me! I don’t want to be trapped here! Not without you!” My sanity teetered on the edge for a split second that seemed like millennia. Air rushed up into my lungs, released as an eternal scream into the black void.
And then she reappeared, but not just her face; her entire body this time. And she wasn’t laughing anymore. She was on her back, suspended in the air and completely naked. Her eyes were open, almost rolling back into her head. Her mouth was also open and the sound of moaning came from her lips – the sounds of pleasure. Her bountiful breasts swayed back and forth and her long, smooth legs were up in the air.
I felt my mouth dropping open with shock. Before me, another form began to take shape. As it came into focus, my horror multiplied one hundred-fold. It was a man. He was on top of her, swaying back and forth, going in and out of her. There was no mistaking what was happening. This man and Plum, my Plum, were engaged in a hot session of lovemaking. I couldn’t identify the man… All I could see was Plum’s face. Her smile – that pleasure-filled smile that should have been for me alone.
I pushed back the panic and horror, trying to rationalize what I was witnessing. Could the man be me? I asked myself. Am I watching us together? That thought brought me back to the threshold of sanity for just a split second…and then Plum’s lips opened. And what came out sent me hurtling right back into the deepest abyss.
“Happy New Year, baby,” she moaned.
My eyes filled with tears. A scream that was aching with such pain and misery like I’d never known or felt before came out of my mouth. My stomach turned, my breath accelerated, and my vision blurred. I couldn’t hold it in. I tasted vomit in the back of my throat and there was no containing it.
Plum disappeared, this time for good, and so did the stranger that was fucking her. I found myself back inside the bathroom stall. It was too late though. It all happened so suddenly that I had no chance of containing the vomit that was already lodged in my throat. It spewed forth…all over Kelsey. I barely managed to move my head to the side and avoid missing her face. What came out was probably mostly alcohol but that didn’t matter. There was no time for her to even react and I watched in horror as the vomit splashed all over her right shoulder.
“Ahhhhh!” she screamed out at the same time she began pushing me away.
I barely registered her scream or even her at all. My mind was still trapped by the vision of Plum. I wasn’t thinking of anything, save Plum’s smile. Her sweet laughter. The look of pleasure in her eyes. All of that was for some stranger on the one day that Plum and I should have been together. My vision blurred again and my feet became unsteady. I felt myself falling, suddenly so weightless before the back of my head hit something hard.
“Somebody help me!” I heard Kelsey screaming. Seconds later, I heard banging on the door and
the sounds of multiple footsteps. My eyes began to close as darkness crept in, a merciful, sweet darkness. As it moved around me, my attention was drawn to the tugging that I had previously felt on my forearms. Just before losing consciousness, my eyes regained focus for only a moment and I looked down at both of them. What I saw convinced me that I must have lost all sanity. The tattoos on my forearms were moving; both sets of clock hands and their respective gears were spinning wildly out of control.
My eyes rolled into the back of my head as I faded into oblivion.
Chapter 3
As the time on my center console’s screen changed to 7:31 PM, I cursed and mumbled “I’m late!” Priding myself on being a punctual person meant I couldn’t stand being late. I left my house with more than enough time to reach my destination, but what made this so beyond frustrating was that I had run straight into traffic.
Fucking traffic! Living in Los Angeles, I’m not sure why I had expected otherwise.
After a good ten minutes in the infernal stop-and-go, it finally dissipated. Once I could see relatively clear sailing in front of me, I slammed my foot on the gas and the loud roar of my truck’s engine sounded over the howling winds blowing in through the window. It was a warm night but at the speed I was going, you’d never have known it. The chilly wind froze my exposed forearms.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief when I saw a sign indicating my exit was quickly approaching. Luckily for me, my destination was practically right off the freeway. Once I exited, I hastily took a right turn and then another before I found myself facing a sprawling shopping center. Having never been to this particular restaurant before, I looked frantically around to see if I could spot the name of it, and to give me a better idea of where I should park. After several minutes and two infuriating and aimless drives around the massive parking lot, I found what I was looking for: “Giuseppe’s Italian Bistro.”
I parked, took a couple of calming breaths, shut the door, and walked quickly towards the restaurant. I was anxious and although I did my best to conceal my anxiety, I knew it had to be obvious on my face.
As I reached the door leading into the restaurant, I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and checked the time again:
7:43.
Dammit!
I opened the door and entered. In front of me was a podium and standing behind it were two waitresses. One was on the phone and the other was looking at me with a broad smile painted on her face to greet me. As I stepped forward, I glanced over to my right toward what looked like the bar seating of the restaurant.
It took all of two seconds before my eyes were irresistibly drawn to a single table directly in the center of the otherwise crowded area. Sitting behind the table was a woman who seemed to be waiting for someone. As soon as I saw her, it felt like everything around me stopped, or ceased to even exist. My surroundings became no more than a blurred haze. I was staring so hard that it felt as if my eyes were being pulled from their sockets.
She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. She was sitting on a stool at a bar table, wearing a single strap, sleeveless, low-cut green dress…
Green?! A perplexed voice sounded in my head breaking through the haze. That’s not right! It wasn’t green!
It was a low-cut salmon-pink dress that clung to her skin ever so tightly. The dress ended halfway down her thighs and exposed pale white, well-toned legs. Despite being seated, her body was clearly athletic, with sweeping curves as far as I could see. Large breasts…, she had a body and then some! And a lovely face with blond, wavy hair that ended just above her shoulders, Plum’s lips, an upturned nose, and alabaster skin. However, her almond-shaped eyes captured my heart. Bottomless and blue like the ocean or maybe they more reminded me of the bright azure of a perfectly clear summer sky…
It’s her! It had to be. I didn’t know how it could be possible, but she was even more beautiful than her pictures. We caught one another’s attention at the same moment and our eyes locked together without either of us rising or saying a word.
A stunned silence followed, one that could have been shared between two people who had just opened their eyes for the first time. The exhilaration was overwhelming, like nothing I’d ever experienced before. It was like I dove off a tall cliff and, just before I was about to hit the ground, spread my arms and soared through the air, the light of the sun welcoming me with its deep embrace. I felt warm and safe. As cliché as it may sound, I knew that what I was experiencing was a gift, something that only a very select and lucky few ever receive. In that moment and every moment after that, I belonged to her.
I swallowed hard, shaking myself free of the stasis that had temporarily turned me into a gawking fool and walked over to her. It seemed like my feet were wedged hopelessly in gooey tar. Her confident, sassy smile and full lips made my knees shake.
As I placed one unsteady foot in front of the other, I suddenly became aware that everything around me had become very still and quiet. Never daring to take my eyes off the stunning woman in front of me, something nagged at me nonetheless. In response, I begrudgingly stopped staring at her for a moment to glance around.
What I saw nearly stopped me cold in my tracks. It was as if everything was temporarily on pause. Even the background music had stopped playing. Everything was quiet. No one was talking, and no one was moving. Everyone was literally frozen in time, mouths open, some quite wide, trapped in mid-sentence while their hands remained suspended in the air, making all of them look like mannequins. Everyone was absolutely still, all except for their eyes. As I stepped forward, one foot practically dragging behind the other, I knew their eyes followed me; they were watching me. Everything that was happening prior to the moment when I saw the beautiful blond became unimportant and not worth completing. My fateful meeting with her was something so cosmic and powerful that it interfered with time itself, throwing the world into a paralyzed stupor. Now, the only thing the people in the room could do was watch.
All eyes in the room remained on me. They continued to stare, silently imploring me to go towards the table where she was waiting for me. I couldn’t explain why, but something suddenly felt very wrong. I was reliving a memory, an amazing one, and one that in its rightful essence, often filled me with an overwhelming happiness. It was the type of memory from which you never want to wake up. However, it didn’t detract from the screaming voice inside my head that kept telling me something wasn’t right.
“This isn’t how it happened,” I stammered loud enough for the whole room to hear me. I wheeled around, facing everyone and no one. Their eyes watched me, questioning me, baiting me.
I looked back into the beautiful face of the woman who waited for me. She hadn’t moved an inch from her seat and that smile was still stuck on her face. It disarmed me, bringing me immediately right back into the loop of the memory.
“You must be Superman,” she said with a taunting smile as I reached the table. Her voice was as delicious and rich as a piece of dark chocolate cake.
I laughed at the inside joke, which immediately put me at ease. We met online (who didn’t these days?), and exchanged pictures. One of the first things she texted me prior to this, our first physical meeting, was how my last name reminded her of a certain mild-mannered reporter who was also Superman’s alter ego. I was relieved at hearing her comment, which swiftly dispatched all the anxiety that had previously flooded me. Plum was so natural and real in her reply that she instantly convinced me that she was very easy to talk to. Naturally, I was beyond grateful to her for that. Generally speaking, social interactions made me uncomfortable and were often a struggle for me to begin with. Never mind socially interacting with a woman who was so beautiful that she could have been Helen of Troy in the flesh.
“Hi,” I smiled, shyly extending my hand. “I actually go by Isaac.”
“Hi, Isaac. I’m Plum.”
As she said that, the sheer magnificence of the smile that spread across her angelic face, temporarily blinded me.
It quickly consumed me whole in a flash of white, searing light. I was instantly transported elsewhere.
*
The light was so glaring and oppressive that all I could do was shield my eyes with my forearm. I fought the urge to retch as a violent rush of nausea overtook me. Even with my eyes sealed shut, it felt as if everything around me was spinning. Perhaps only I was spinning in the midst of everything around me. Forcing myself to slow down and take several deep breaths, I tried to regain my composure.
Pulling my forearm away from my face, I finally opened my eyes. To my absolute shock and confusion, I discovered I was no longer standing in the friendly confines of Giuseppe’s Italian Bistro. And Plum was nowhere to be seen.
Instead, now I was surrounded by… nothing. Everything around me was pitch black and the only source of light came from the crescent moon in the night sky above. But even that was obscured by large, black clouds that spanned across the entire sky, threatening to extinguish its illumination altogether. As a result, I barely managed to see what lay a few feet in front of me – a narrow wooden pathway, comprised of weather-beaten planks that were hardly wide enough to accommodate me.
I felt the ground beneath me suddenly shake, bow and sway as I was overcome with nausea once more. I shut my eyes and took a deep breath, waiting for it to stop, but it only worsened. I began to crouch down onto my ankles in an effort to combat the queasiness, hoping if I could lower my center of gravity, the discomfort would go away faster. All of a sudden, the ground beneath me was struck by something and a blast of frigid ice water struck me in the face. I was stuck halfway in a squat and the blood blanched from my face before I even dared to glance over the edge of what I now realized must have been a bridge. The sight beneath me did absolutely nothing to alleviate the panic that instantly swept through me.
Pelting the bridge mercilessly on either side of me were angry waves. The sprawling ocean seemed to stretch in both directions as far as the eyes could see. Even with the embattled moonlight ricocheting intermittently off its surface, I could see the water was just as black and mysterious as the night sky enshrouding me. Looking down across the dark and frightening landscape, it suddenly struck me that what I saw didn’t resemble an ocean at all. From my point of slight elevation, the surface of the water seemed to actually be comprised of an amalgamation of bodies clinging together, grappling against one another and desperately trying to free themselves from a prison I couldn’t see. Silver strands of mist rose from the water, like long tendrils that seemed to reach out, tightening their wispy fingers around my legs and arms, threatening to drag me down into the abyss of a black, watery grave.