11seven (final)

Knock Yourself Out - Filligar (mp3)
You Don't Know How Lucky You Are - Keaton Henson (mp3)

This is the final entry of my unfinished fiction work, tentatively titled "11seven." I offer it in small mostly digestible doses of between 700-1,100 words. It contains strong language and sexual situations as intended for a mature audience. Parental discretion is advised. (I got all that from watching "Justified"!) Each entry will come with a song from our BOTG mailbox and discussion questions for Oprah.

PART ONE: Solitary Confinement in a Convenience Store
PART TWO: Stu & the Lost Male Art of Subtlety
PART THREE: All Desperate Horny Teens Deserve Charity
PART FOUR:  Going Steady

11seven
six.

Clash of the Titans

A few weeks later, the inevitable happened. Jimmy the cop shows up when Stu’s hanging out at the counter.

Stu looked like he’d just been caught with a kilo of cocaine, the latest issue of Hustler sitting right there on the counter next to him in a brown bag. Except, he was trying to act like he wasn’t doing anything wrong. It’s the stupid guilty-looking green-under-the-collar criminals who get caught.

Jimmy smiled at Stu and leaned over the counter. “Hey hot stuff.”

“Where you been, stranger?” I asked. “It’s been so lonely I’ve had to force boys at gunpoint to hang out with me past curfew.”

I looked over at my boy, and he’d already slinked toward the exit. He looked like I’d shot him, this wounded gunshot puppy. Stu mumbled a goodbye with lightning efficiency and backed out the door.

Jimmy was looking at me. Then I looked back at him, and he looked at the door where Stu had been, and then back at me. And he had that funny halfway one-sided grin.

So I gave him my big ol’ cheerleader ear-to-ear, and he cocked his head to the side. Then he looked back at the door. And then he started taking steps toward the door.

“Jimmy?”

He was gonna go after Stu. Who the hell knows what he was going to do with Stu, but he was gonna do something. Probably just be all coppy and talk stern-like to him ‘til the kid pissed himself or something, but still.

“Jimmy.”

He stopped halfway there and watched the kid’s car putter out to into the great beyond. And then, after his display of alpha male possessiveness, he walks over to me at the counter, with his cop poker face of 20 emotions at once.

“I betcha I’m gonna love this story,” he says to me.

“What story?” I tell him, biting on my straw like some bad scene out of Grease! or something.

“That kid couldn’t’ve looked guiltier if y’all’d been fucking on the counter,” he says.

“Awww, aren’t you a sweetie, all jealous and such,” I said, and I leaned over the counter and gave him one of those June Cleaver ya big galoot lovey punches to his cop jaw.. “Even with that pretty little ring on your finger.”

“What’s there to be jealous of?” he says.

“You tell me Officer Jealous.”

“You’re not fuckin’ him are you? I wasn’t even sure he was old enough to drive.” He was sorta kidding and sorta not. But it was adorable.

“I’d answer you ‘cept that you’ve turned into exactly the kind of guy I don’t owe explanations to,” is what I told him. “If you’re that sweet cop who keeps me company and cares about my well-being and who ain’t jealous of some old widow who hardly ever leaves her store just ‘cuz she’s made pals with some sad lonely kid, then I’ll talk ‘til I’m blue in the face about every last detail. But if you’re gonna be some Rottweiler who wants to pee on my front door, then you can politely just kiss my ass.”

Cute Jimmy. If there’d been some disco strobe lights, each blink would have revealed some new microscopically-noticeable expression on that face. Pissed off. Amused. Confused. Tender. Pissed off again. But he finally settled on the worst of all: the disappointed daddy.

“I’ve hardly ever touched a hair on your pretty head, Gladys.” He pointed at the door. “That’s a boy. A boy who you said yourself is a sad and lonely boy. You are a sad and lonely woman, and you being beautiful and funny and sweet don’t change that. What kind of idiot would I have to be not to see something going on with the little drama scene I walked in on?”

I just kinda smiled and shrugged.

“You wanna play this off as me being some jealous oaf? Have at it. Merry fucking Christmas. But what it is is weird.”

“Oh get off it,” I told him. I don’t even know if it made any sense to say that, but that’s what came out.

I took another sip of my drink and chewed some more on my straw. The silence was pretty intense. I gotta tell you, it was the first time in a long time I’d really been aroused quite like I was just at that moment. In fact, the idea of dragging Jimmy into my back office and ripping every last thread off his body flashed joyfully through my mind.

“Fine fine fine. Fair enough,” I said to him. “But it’s not like that. It’s just nice to have someone to talk to sometimes. That’s as far as it goes, and that’s as far as it’ll ever go.”

I mostly meant it.

“Just like you,” I told him.

He chuckled a little and rolled his eyes. “Honey, ain’t nothing about that boy gonna ever be anything like me.”

“That kid’s gonna be a successful something or other. Big time. You can just tell.”

“Like I said, nothing, ever, anything, like me,” he says, and starts walking over to get him a coffee.