Author’s Note: This unedited spew is the result of a 750words.com session – I’d like your opinions, good and bad, but understand if it’s just too much to read. I’ve got a second part to this, and it may actually be shaping up into a real story. Let me know if you would be interested in reading more!
She was sipping a tall drink the color of cotton candy and just about as sweet in a bar filled with romance and love. She sat alone, and at the bar, her small, rhinestone encrusted clutch sitting just above her drink like the stem of an exclamation point.
“I need another one of these,” she told the bartender, an attractive woman several years younger than herself.
“Sweetie, you barely started that one.”
She shook her head and fumbled with the clasp on her clutch. She pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and held it out between two fingers. “Another.”
The bartender shrugged to herself, and went to mixing another Very Pink Drink.
Abigail sighed with a huge intake of breath, inhaling all the wonderful scents. The place was probably designed to appeal to all the senses that two people in love would get turned on by. So they’d feel more romantic, buy more expensive wine to show off.
She could pick out vanilla and steak, actually. And a heck of a lot of butter.
And an overwhelming amount of cologne and perfume.
Abigail should be here with her own date. Bob was going to arrive just as soon as a cab could get him here from the airport. The date had been set for months, only hours after his flight had landed in Japan. He said he was lonely, and now that he was so far apart, he realized how much he loved her.
His heart shattered without her. He was in constant pain. He had called the restaurant just before he’d called her, the most romantic in town, the one you got a reservation at if you were going to propose, or celebrating your wedding anniversary.
He wanted to meet her there after his flight returned. The moment his flight returned. He would surprise her with something.
Abigail ignored her mother’s voice in her head, the one that told her not to slurp through her straw, and finished off her beverage as another icy glass slid across to replace it.
“Thank you.”
“Hon, can I ask you a question?”
Abigail looked at the young woman. She was so young. Barely in her twenties, where Abigail was creeping through her thirties.
She felt old.
“Sure. But don’t call me ‘hon’.”
The waitress ignored her second statement. “What are you doing here? You’ve been drinking for hours. You’re obviously not waiting for anyone.”
Abigail sighed again. She was past feeling pain, now. That question just an hour ago would have caused the lump in her stomach to crawl back up her throat, choking her as her tears would have blinded her.
She didn’t feel drunk, but she was. She just felt nothing. So answering the question was not difficult in the least.
“I am celebrating my new-found freedom,” she replied, lifting her glass and saluting someone who was not there. She gripped her straw with her newly manicured and styled fingernails.
Done for Bob.
“You don’t look like you’re celebrating.”
“And you don’t look like you’re old enough to drive,” Abigail returned in a failed attempt to insult the girl who would probably replace her in Bob’s arms.
He would love her. She was taller than average – model height. Slender, athletic even. And she had a job.
“Seriously, sweetie. What’s wrong?”
The alcohol not only loosened her tongue, it broke all the locks. So she told her. How she had gone to the doctor for something stupid, a bit of bleeding that was just a bit longer than her regular period. She shouldn’t even have gone. But she did, and the doctor put her through a million tests, and then he told her he was going to have to take out her baby maker.
“Wait, ‘baby maker’?”
“A hysterectomy,” Abigail clarified. She shouldn’t have to use five syllable words in her condition. “Get me another.”
The bartender didn’t move. “So? Your man didn’t stick around?”
Abigail snorted. “Oh, he was in Japan, remember? Doing important work for his important job. No, he stuck around. Made reassuring phone calls and told me everything was going to be all right. Of course he had always dreamed of having his own children, but he could always adopt.”
“You mean you could,” the bartender said when Abigail stopped. “You could adopt a child together.”
Abigail shook her head. “No, he never said that. He said ‘he’ could always adopt. He never said anything, ever, about doing it with me.”
“What an asshole.”
Abigail smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. In fact, it didn’t even reach her lips. It was a wry, dead smile in her head that didn’t express joy or happiness or love, or anything at all.
“He changed his status on Facebook when he got back into town today.”
“Wait, what?”
Abigail played with the straw and the last bit of drink left in her glass. “He was going to come meet me here right after his flight landed. But instead he changed his status on Facebook to ‘Single’ and posted something about getting his things out of our apartment, but he hoped I enjoyed the reservation. He heard the food was ‘awesome’.”
“And he was too much of a coward to tell you this to your face.”
Abigail nodded. “Way too much.”
“It’s a good thing you can get back at him, just a little.”
Abigail stared at the bartender. She could barely focus her eyes to read the woman’s name tag – “Elise”, it said.
“Wait, what?”
“Revenge. Some say it’s best served cold. You know,” Elise grabbed Abigail’s glass and started mixing something non-alcoholic, “I’ve always wondered if that saying means that you should only get revenge when you can be cold and emotionless about the entire thing, or whether you’re just supposed to wait until everyone’s forgotten about revenge and do it then.”
“I never thought about it.”
“Well, I have. Personally, I think it probably means that you’re supposed to wait a long time, then not get pissed, just get satisfaction. But I rather think that in this case, we should grab our chance while we’ve got it.”
Abigail shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Elise clucked her tongue. “Of course you don’t.” She set a glass of water with lemon down for her customer. “You’ve been drinking poison all night. What you fail to realize in your misery is that our restaurant requires anyone reserving a table to give a credit card number. If you fail to appear for your reservation, you’ll be charged whatever – a hundred dollars or something – as a penalty. We are very much in demand, you see,” she said with a wink.
“I still don’t get it.”
“I’m not done. So since you’re here, since Bob is such an asshole that he waited until you would most likely be away from your apartment – like a coward – to break up with you and remove himself from your life, you should still take advantage of his earlier generosity in getting you an opportunity to try the best food you’ve ever had.”
Abigail blinked.
Elise sighed. “His card is on file. You can still eat dinner, and he’ll pay for it. If he’s dumped you like this, he’s probably too much of a pussy to challenge the charge on his credit card if you stay and eat.”
Using small words helped, and the fog that had settled on Abigail’s brain cleared momentarily.
“And I could eat the most expensive thing on the menu,” she replied with a smile that actually showed on her face.
“And you could order one of everything, if you wanted, and just sample it all.”
“Elise,” Abigail said with another salute, this time raising her glass to the girl across the bar, provider of sinister and wonderful ideas, “you’ve got a date.”
Or maybe they have more to talk about and don’t have to struggle for interesting content all the time.
