by M. D. Cooper
“Yeah, I would say so.”
The boy reached into his pocket, “all right, you’re right, you do deserve a tip.”
“Thank you,” Ben replied.
The kid pulled his hand from his pocket and shoved his middle finger in Ben’s direction. “You want a tip, shithead, get a better farking job.” And with his words, the door slammed shut in Ben’s face, leaving him in the semi-silent hallway of the apartment building. The only sound filtering through his ears was the sounds of loud televisions, babies crying, and his heart beating rapidly.
He could also hear laughter from the other side of the door, and there wasn’t a farking thing he could do about what just happened. Punk ass little fark, he thought as he stepped away from the door. With every fiber of his being, he wanted to punch through the door and strangle that little kid and teach him to have some respect. Fark respect, I just want to kill him, he thought as his heavy steps stomped on the thin, stained carpet of the hallway leading to the elevator. He’s not worth it, though.
As Ben stepped out of the apartment building, he was met with rain, not regular rain, but a sudden, torrential downpour steeped with the smell of seawater. “I hate this time of year,” he muttered as he pulled open the small storage container on his scooter and pulled out a black plastic bag. Ben wrapped Gli+chy diligently, trying to ensure no moisture got into her servos, causing her to gli+ch out and act erratically. The last thing I need is to whack a customer in the face while delivering pizzas, he thought, not because it had a small percentage of possibility, but because of it already happened once before and he couldn’t afford to lose his job.
After a semi-satisfying wrap job on Gli+chy, Ben climbed onto the scooter and felt relieved when it cranked the first time he tried. He donned his helmet and closed the visor, feeling the cushion of the helmet was already soaked after the several minutes he had been inside the apartment building. The moisture was so close to his face that he felt cold and it sent a chill down his spine, but he shook it off and looked over his shoulder before pulling out into traffic. Time was money, and with no time to waste, he darted between the slow-moving vehicles on his way back to the restaurant.
Pizza Bar, his humble place of employment, sat situated in a tight alley a couple of miles west of the apartment building he delivered to. But in that couple of miles, the rain did not let up, soaking him to the bone and causing him to shiver uncontrollably as he stepped off the scooter and waddled stiff-legged towards the door. The smell of pizza cloaked the exterior of the restaurant, and it was a refreshing fragrance, despite the fact anytime Ben thought about pizza it made him think about work. “Better than working in a sewage plant, I suppose,” he said under his breath. As he pulled the door open, the smell of melted cheese and marinara sauce wafted around him.
“Ben, where the fark if you been?” His manager, Tony Roman, stood with his hands on his hips amidst a pile of stacked boxes pizza waiting to be delivered.
“The little shit refused to open the door until our thirty-minute delivery guarantee was over,” Ben answered. “Perhaps you should rethink that guarantee; it’s costing us money.”
Tony shook his head, “that guarantee is older than both of us put together, Ben. Besides, it does not cost me money. It’s costing you money, and for that, I can’t give a shit less. You have three deliveries and seven minutes to make it happen. So, I suggest you get going.” Tony turned his back on Ben, focusing his attention on the industrialized environment that involved mass-producing pizza. Ben reluctantly grabbed a couple of weatherproof containers, placing the pizzas inside of them so he could strap them to the scooter. I can only imagine how much the customer will bitch about a soggy box of pizza with the weather the way it is, he thought as he banded the containers together and carried them outside. Logic be damned that ordering pizza in a storm might be a bad idea.
Heading into the onslaught of a torrential downpour for a thankless job made him question his already questionable life decisions. But the truth was, he needed the farking job to make ends meet. Losing his ship, his strained relationship with his father, and the fact he was essentially homeless, all made him feel like he failed at life.
When he felt down, though, he would always think about the words of encouragement that Chip often gave him during their trip through the darkness of space. Somewhere beneath the homoerotic, perverted comments was encouragement in the face of adversity. Ben missed that more than anything. The comradery of two people facing a challenge and overcoming it was the most powerful thing he ever experienced, and it didn’t matter that one of those “people” was a gay sex-robot.
Ben took a hard right on his scooter, and the tires sprayed rainwater on both sides as he skidded into the turn as fast as he could manage, but the water was too deep on this part of the street, and he hydroplaned, losing control. The scooter wobbled as he fought to control it. With all the weight in the front as he tried to apply the brakes, Ben was flung head over handlebars out onto the pavement of the open street. As he soared through the air, seemingly in slow motion, he felt like he was flying amongst a flock of pizza boxes that dislodged from the scooter. Together they hit the ground, skidding on the pavement to a painful stop. His ass took most of the impact, but it wasn’t enough to keep them from hitting his head on the ground as he came to a sudden stop.
Ben lay there, eyes wide and his heart pounding. He brought his hands up, feeling his torso as he instinctively checked for wounds and broken bones. Surprisingly, he didn’t feel any pain.
Yet.
“What the fark?” He took in a series of deep breaths, trying to calm his nerves as best he could before he climbed to his feet. As he stood up, the pain hit him: the scorching, burning sensation of road rash on his ass cheeks. He stumbled forward, taking hold of a parked car next to him. He leaned over it, trying to take his weight off his legs as the searing pain made him dizzy.
“Are you all right?” A bystander said, pulling Ben’s attention to the direction of the voice. It was a girl, who looked to be sixteen or seventeen-years-old. She clung to her purple raincoat as she walked swiftly in his direction.
“I’ll live, but I don’t think I really want to at this point,” he answered. He intended it to be a joke, but the amount of truth behind his words was unsettling, even for him.
“Do you need an ambulance?” She asked as she neared him. She looked at him nervously, keeping a few paces back. Ben didn’t know if she was keeping her distance because she was afraid of him, or if she was just trying to give him space to suffer.
“I—. I don’t know,” he answered. He tried to take a step but almost collapsed, falling back towards the ground. The girl grabbed his arm and kept him from face planting onto the asphalt. He was impressed by how strong she was.
“I think I’m going to call an ambulance for you anyway,” she said.” You might have some internal injuries. You did hit the ground really hard,” she said as she pulled a cell phone from her pocket. “Just keep leaning against the car and don’t try to move.”
“All right,” Ben replied as she dialed the number. She stepped away as she spoke to the dispatcher on the other end of the line. He tried to listen to what she said but the searing pain on his posterior made it hard for him to listen. Who would think pain could be so loud.
“I’ll be here waiting with him,” she said into her phone before hanging it up and shoving it back in her pocket. “The ambulance will be here in a few minutes. Do you want to try and take off the helmet?”
Ben hadn’t realized he still wore it until she said something. Bracing himself against the car, he tugged the chinstrap down as she reached up to help pull it off him. Despite the dreary day and the heavy rainfall, he had a much better view of her and realized she was older than he first thought. “I’m Ben,” he said.
“Ashley,” she replied, “but my friends call me Ash.”
“You live around here?”
“Yeah, I’m in the dorms around the corner. I’m going to the community coll
ege down the street.”
“Oh, a college girl? Impressive,” he said, realizing how stupid it sounded as he stood there, quivering from the pain of flesh being rubbed raw by crashing his scooter and sending a bunch of pizzas littering the streets. He supposed for a guy like him, maybe community college was impressive, and she would buy it as more than just mere small talk.
“Not really. I’m doing the nursing program so I can get a decent job, but going to school sucks a big one.”
“A big what?” Ben asked, his heart pounding harder in anticipation of the pending joke that he imagined Chip would deliver with expert craft.
Ash smiled. “A big hard…” she was cut off by the sound of a siren wail.
Ben had to admit he felt letdown, not hearing her complete her thought. He felt a little tickled by her.
“Good. Help is here,” she said.
“Yeah,” Ben replied, not wanting his moment with her to end. Go figure, the third biggest embarrassment of my life starts to take a turn, and I get cockblocked by an ambulance.
As the ambulance screeched to a stop, Ben took in a deep breath and watched as two men in uniform jumped out of the rectangular vehicle. From the back of the unit, a droid rolled out onto the street with a gurney. “Are you all right, sir?” The first man to approached asked.
“I wrecked my scooter, and I can hardly stand. Other than that, I’m fine, I guess.”
“I think Ben might have hit his head when he crashed. I watched him come down onto the street with a lot of force,” Ash said. “You can see some pretty deep gouging in the helmet. He might have a concussion.”
“Are you feeling nauseated or like you want to pass out?” The man asked as he ran a scanning probe along Ben’s body.
“No, other than the burning sensation on my ass and my weak legs not wanting to support my body, I feel perfectly fine.” Ben noticed a smirk from Ash when he said, “burning sensation on my ass” and he adored her for it.
“My scanners aren’t showing any broken bones or internal bleeding, but the gashed helmet is cause for concern. I think it would be best to have you scanned properly at the hospital.”
Ben wasn’t about to argue with that. “Can you contact my employer and let him know about the delivery?” Ben looked at Ash.
She seemed taken aback, but she nodded her head politely. “I suppose. Who’s the employer?”
“Pizza Bar.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Really? That place kind of sucks.”
“I love you,” he said, not meaning to and immediately regretting it when her eyes widened. “That’s not what I meant. I just love the fact you think it sucks too,” he said quickly, eliciting a laugh from the two EMTs.
“All right, you two lovebirds, it’s time to go,” one of the men said as the droid drew closer.
“We’re not—”
“Yeah, sure,” the man cut him off. He grabbed his radio and called in for a cleanup crew to tow away Ben’s scooter and clean up the mess left by the splattered pizzas. “Let’s roll.”
The first EMT helped Ben onto the gurney as the droid held it solidly in place. “Just lie back slowly and try not to put too much pressure where it hurts.”
“You mean his ass?” Ash grinned. Her question sparked a chuckle from the others, Ben included.
“I don’t think you understand just how much this hurts.”
“No? You don’t know much about me, do you?” The look in her eyes did not reveal whether she was just farking with Ben, but he was willing for it to go either way.
“Maybe we can change that?” He asked as the droid rolled him into the back of the ambulance as Ash watched in the pouring rain.
“Are you asking me out?”
“Would you accept?”
The answer came in the form of the ambulance doors shutting loudly, cutting him off from Ash and the unknown response to his question.
“Wait, what did she say?”
“I don’t know, man. You’ll have to ask her yourself when you get released,” the EMT in the passenger seat replied with a smirk.
“All I have is her name, her first name, not even her last. Do you know how many girls named Ashley there are in New York?”
“Nope. Do you?”
“No,” Ben answered. “But it’s a lot, I’m sure.”
The ambulance moved out, and the man in the passenger seat sighed. “Look, man, don’t be so butthurt about it. If it’s meant to be then you’ll bump into her again. Besides, if she’s interested, she knows where you work.”
“But she thinks it sucks.”
“Well, maybe that should tell you something.”
“That she’s perfect for me?”
Laughter spurted from the front of the ambulance. “I was going to say you have a snowball’s chance in hell, but you can go with that if you want,” the man answered as he slapped his buddy on the shoulder as the driver wiped a tear from his eye from laughing too hard.
“Thanks a lot, guys,” Ben said, letting the conversation die like the little piece of hope he had at hitting things off with Ash.
Fark me.
Chap+er Five
Lying on a hospital bed with his bare ass towards the ceiling, Ben was the most uncomfortable he felt his entire life. The number of nurses coming and going to see the superficial wounds of his posterior flesh rivaled the embarrassment three months prior when he crashed his ship in a tainted Vienna sausage hallucination. “Is it really necessary for every single one of you nurses to come in here to look at my ass?” Ben asked as he heard footsteps entering his room.
“To be honest, I didn’t think I would see your bare ass until the third or fourth date,” Ash replied as she came into view. She no longer wore the oversized raincoat, and Ben got a good look at her for the first time. If not for the straining of his neck to look up, he would not have looked away, but peering upwards for more than a few seconds tended to hurt.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said, “but you’ve seemed to have caught me with my pants down,” he joked, trying to hide the embarrassment in his voice.
“Don’t worry, I see plenty of guys with their pants down.”
Ben awkwardly shifted his gaze up to her with a frown, questioning just how many “plenty of guys” just so happened to be.
“Oh, I didn’t mean it that way,” she said with a smile. “The nursing school is a crazy place if you get what I mean.”
“I can only imagine,” Ben replied. “So, if this is a date, since I showed you mine, maybe you should show me yours?”
Ash giggled as she brushed a tuft of dirty blond hair behind her ear. “I don’t want you to get the wrong idea,” she said as she moved over to the chair in the corner of the room that put her more in Ben’s line of sight. He liked the view much better.
“I don’t know how to tell you this, but how I feel right now, all the wrong ideas sound more painful than they do pleasurable. I might need a pass on the dirty thoughts for a few days.”
Ash looked at him with feigned disappointment and pouted her lips. “Yeah? I guess that is what happens when you cruise the street on your ass cheeks.” Her words flowed with a slight hint of laughter creeping in.
Ben smiled, “I’m suspecting that you have some experience with that as well?”
“Oh, hell no,” she scoffed. “But I did fall off a horse barrel racing when I was fifteen. My foot got caught in the stirrup, and the horse made a full circle around the ring before the rodeo clowns got it to stop. It took a month for me to walk straight, and I have a skin graft on my ass to show for it,” she said.
“Rodeo? You don’t strike me as the kind of girl who rides horses,” Ben said.
“Why is that? Because I’m a small girl in a big city?”
“I wasn’t going to say that—” his words fell short as a nurse walked into the room, interrupting their conversation.
“It’s time to clean and dress your wounds, Mr. Dale,” the nurse said as she dragged a damp cloth across the raw flesh on his backside.
He closed his eyes, wincing at the sudden and sharp pain of the rag as it pulled at the partially clotted, bloodied skin.
“You don’t have to be so rough,” Ben said as he sucked in a deep breath.
“Oh, honey, this is nothing,” the nurse replied. “Sometimes I really have to get in there with some elbow grease. You’re lucky, because this could be so much worse.”
“Yeah, Ben,” Ash interjected. “I figured a guy like you would like it rough.”
“This is what playing rough gets you?” Ben asked, gesturing towards his ass with Gli+chy.
“Yeah, I don’t have a shiny arm, but I can imagine it can get to that.”
He looked at her puzzled for a moment. “What? No, not Gli+chy, that was an Army training accident. I’m talking about my ass; which is getting more attention than I could ever want.”
“You call your arm Gli+chy?” Ash asked.
“It sounds like an interesting story.”
Ben smiled, squinting one side of his face as the abrasive pain on his backside attempted to levitate him from his bed. “Not as interesting as imagining you riding a horse.”
“You’re not going to get me that easy, Ben,” she laughed, toying with the perverted nature both of them seemed to share. “Besides, we have to have something to talk about when we run out of things to say.”
“That would be rough.”
“Just the way you like it,” she snickered.
He grinned, enjoying every bit of their time together. “Speaking of liking it rough,” Ben said, “were you able to get in contact with Tony and let him know what happened?”
“Yeah, that dude is a douche,” she answered,” and he really doesn’t seem to like you too much.”
“Why? What did he say?”
Ash sat back in her seat, crossing one leg over the other as she looked at him. “He seems to think that you wrecked your scooter on purpose.”
Ben groaned at his asshole boss’ false assumption. “I swear, I can never seem to win with that guy.”