Page 19 of Stuck-Up Big Shot
I also let go of the doubts swimming in my head over Miles and his standoffish behavior and allow myself to move and grind to the music.
I lose all track of time, throwing my arms in the air and singing at the top of my lungs with my girlfriends, demonstrating my newly found skills in hip rolls. At some point, I also lose track of Miles, who no longer sits in the spot he occupied earlier.
Disappointment rushes through me, but it’s just as well. Nothing would have come of that anyhow, as it seems he wants nothing more to do with me.
He seems to have other things to occupy his time, and so do I.
Good riddance.
10
Miles
“Just get out of here,asshole. Both you and your limp dick!”
The door slams loudly in my face, the sound reverberating and echoing in the starless night. I clutch at my wrinkled dress shirt and sling it over my arm, reaching out with my other to steady myself against the closed door, and against the harsh words and the world spinning and turning faster than it ought to.
I’m not sure exactly what happened over the past three hours, but sadly, I’m certain I didn’t fulfill my sexual obligations to this woman. My hand instinctively slides down the front of my pants, covering my groin as I cup my cock and balls, confirming that my assumptions are correct.
Whiskey dick did me no favors tonight, which I suppose is the reason my hookup is upset.
It could also be my inflammatory statement about how fake her tits felt and how “uneven and plastic” they were while motorboating said tits. Not my finest hour, folks.
I chuckle to myself out of sheer apologetic humor while I turn around and stare at the landing below. By my drunken estimation, it’s a ten-foot drop. To ensure I don’t trip and break a leg, I plop down on my ass to scoot down to the bottom. But I get stuck somewhere in the middle and decide I should just lay down because…Goddamn, why is the sidewalk moving? Shoving my shirt under my head, I cuddle up on the hard cement and fall asleep.
A disgruntled male voice jars me awake, and I jolt upright before dropping my head in my hands. Christ almighty, why so loud?
“Yo, buddy. You can’t sleep there. Get the hell up and move along, asshole.”
My head is the weight of a cinder block. I try raising it, opening my mouth to reply but shutting it just as promptly because I have no idea what to say. No matter, since the guy is already walking away, hand raised in the air, flipping me his middle finger. My body rumbles with laughter, but my tongue is so thick and throat dry, I can’t get the sound out.
Having the wherewithal to know I need a ride home, I extract my phone from my pocket, click on the ride app and wait. It claims a driver is three minutes away, meaning I have to sit here and relive this horrible night in my clanging head and wish I could forget it all.
I’ll never be able to forget it, no matter how much whiskey I drink because it’s my baby sister’s birthday. It’s a date I never want dismissed or passed over or forgotten. Melodie deserves to be celebrated and remembered every fucking day of every fucking year for as long as I live.
The only problem with celebrating this day is that it opens the old wound that, for most of the year, hides behind a scar. But it never fully heals. And on what should have been Mel’s twenty-fifth birthday, it was reopened and I feel like I’m bleeding out.
When I woke this morning, I had high hopes for the day. I did my usual memorial ceremony in my living room, laying out photos of Mel through the years, her trophies and ribbons, school report cards, and much of the homemade art she’d produced as a kid.
I’d called Granny’s nursing home in the afternoon, not only to check in on her rehabilitation and her pain level, but Granny is the only person in the world I could talk to about Mel. Thankfully, Granny said she was fine, recovering well, and she seemed fairly lucid—unlike some days where she doesn’t remember who I am.
It disheartened her that I couldn’t come to visit her this weekend, as we typically celebrated together, but after the long week I had, I just couldn’t do it. I promised I would soon, remaining noncommittal with the timing.
But I could hear it in Granny’s tone, her feeble attempt to disguise her disappointment. And it made me feel like shit. Except for Graham, who seems to think I walk on water for some unknown reason, I am shit to anyone else I get close to.
Ask my almost-hookup tonight. She doesn’t even know me but knows that I’m an asshole.
A car pulls up to the curb, and the driver opens the passenger window. “You Miles?” he asks, looking a little weary and tired from a Saturday night of picking up drunks.
Nodding, and with some uncoordinated movements, I stand up and climb in the open backseat, my head throbbing with the reminder of all the ways I’ve failed the ones I’ve loved.
Closing my eyes for just a moment, I see flashes and images of my life, as if on an old movie reel. Frame by frame, the life I’d had disappearing, leaving just the black film cutting in and out, replacing the good from the past with the misery that has become my daily existence.
“Hey, man, wake up. You’re here.”
I lift my head and glance out the window, my eyelids half-mast and heavy laden, coming out of what seems like a dream, but is the nightmare of my reality.
“Thanks,” I acknowledge, opening and then slamming the car door shut behind me, my brain desperately trying to communicate to my feet that the right foot should go in front of the left as I head toward my apartment building. The night doorman, Frank, sees me struggling and rushes to my side, offering an arm and scooping another behind my back to keep me from falling over.
