Wanted

He found her hiding behind a cloud of cigarette smoke. The empty beer bottles clustered on the scratched plastic table like flies on a carcass might have explained the red rimming her eyes and the tremble in her hands as she lifted another half-empty bottle with resigned habit.

Her mascara must have been waterproof, because there were no smudged tear tracks, but her face had recently been scrubbed, bare of the blush she always wore, paled and gray in contrast to the scalding red of her lips. That was how he knew she had been crying, half her usual mask scrubbed away.

Perhaps he should have cared about that; perhaps it should have touched him, or shaken him to see that she had crumbled. She had always refused to be anything but strong. And it should be a frightening thing to see the cornerstone that had supported your entire fortress beginning to crack.

But the bitter smoke in the air settled into his lungs the same as the apathy settled like gray sludge in his veins. He was beyond caring, and she knew it, not even bothering to look up as he loomed over her.

“What the hell were you thinking?” He had meant the question to come out loud and angry, an accusation as loaded and deadly as a gun. But it didn’t, it rasped out of his throat tight and low, wound like a spring.

She scoffed a sound that should have been a laugh and gulped the last of her bottle, reaching for the next unopened one without hesitation, fingers trembling as she tried to position the bottle opener.

“Bold of you to assume I was,” she rasped just as lowly, finally managing to pop the lid off on her third try, bottle opener clinking against damp glass.

The patched fake leather of the booth creaked beneath her as she shifted, recrossing her legs and leaning back, finally dragging her eyes up to meet his, as though they were made of white-hot iron.

He wasn’t sure whether he was trying to scoff or speak when the strangled sound came out of his throat, bubbling with an edge of blurred, feverish disbelief that churned in his stomach like cheap coffee.

“That’s the whole flipping point of you,” his voice rasped even lower, dragging over the nails he was trying to willow down, incredulity and a spiking rage battling for dominance in the shadowed edges of his emotions. “You think things through.”

She choked on a sip or a laugh, blinking rapidly, her bottle clicking against the ashtray with its still smoldering cigarette as she thumped onto the table.

“Guess there’s no more point to me, then,” she replied evenly, an edge to her tone that could almost have been amusement, if it hadn’t been quite so barbed.

But he was tired. Tired of her half answers and dried-up humor, tired of the smoke in his lungs and the low lights glinting off the bare lines of her cheeks. Tired of the world spinning around him, out of control without a firm hand on the wheel.

“Just… just tell me,” he sighed out, sinking into the other side of the booth, resting his hands on the sticky table top. He tried to reach for the anger to drive the statement, but all he had was the drunken lurching in his stomach and the gray sludge in his veins.

“What’s rule number one?” She shot back, twitching a bottle cap between her fingers until they spasmed, and it went rolling across the table.

He caught it on instinct as it rolled off the edge, focusing on it as he rolled it between his fingers instead of on the scalding red in her gaze.

“Do what needs to be done, not what you want to be done.”

She’d drilled it into him so many times. Stepped back to let him trip over his feet into the lesson of the maxim and the pain of ignoring when it hadn’t stuck. It had stuck after that. Think things through, the only justification is need. If you care too much, want too much, you set the trap for yourself.

The roiling in his stomach grew worse, a dread of reality breaking down at its edges, making him as sick as too much liquor.

“What did you do?”

“Braided the rope for my own freaking noose,” she replied, raising the bottle to her lips again.

“What happens next?” He forced himself to ask through a dry mouth. He tried to keep the apathy, the gray sludge that slowed the hot anger in his blood and the icy fear that tried to climb his veins, but it was retreating now, melting under the scalding grief in her gaze.

“Oh,” she said with such casualness that he knew it was fake. “That.” She tipped her bottle towards the air in general, encompassing the whole clouded club around them. For a moment, he did not understand.

Then he heard them too, the faint sirens in the distance.

The ice water slammed through his veins like a wrecking ball through a dam wall, sending tangled, thrumming strands of feeling and thought gushing through every nerve of his body.

“I can get you out of here,” he hissed rapidly, the sour anger pushed aside. “I can help you run.”

She did not jump at the chance. Instead, she took a long last gulp of her bottle and tossed it aside, sending it rolling into the pile of bottles at the end of the table with a chiming crash. She glared up at him, the red rims around her eyes and the dark circles beneath lending her gaze a fierce, haunted air that stilled his racing heart.

“You don’t need to do that,” she replied coldly. “We’ve already established there’s no more point to me.”

“Well, maybe I want to,” he ground out between teeth clenched tight with a stubborn sorrow and a steel fear.

The realization of what he’d just said hit him at the same time her scoff struck the air like the sharp retort of a gun.

“And that’s exactly why you shouldn’t,” she replied coldly. “Get out of here.”

And with her gaze chasing after him like a vengeful specter, burning into the back of his neck like red-hot knives, he did as she ordered and left, leaving her behind a cloud of thick, gray smoke to hang.