Authors: S. G. Browne

Tags: #Humorous, #Romance, #General, #Contemporary, #Fiction

Fated (8 page)

BOOK: Fated

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To the Metropolitan Art Museum, where she spends three hours, most of it viewing a special exhibit of Cézanne.

To the farmer’s market in Union Square.

To a two-bedroom loft in SoHo.

To the Blue Note Jazz Club in Greenwich Village.

To a memorial for victims of the World Trade Center.

To a three-bedroom condo in Midtown.

To a bar called Bongo in Chelsea, where a hotshot twenty-eight-year-old financial planner buys her a drink.

Sure, it’s technically stalking, but I have a license. And it’s not like I’m going to chop her up and store her in my freezer. Still, she could do so much better than this loser. In less than ten years, he’s going to be in drug rehab to try to kick the cocaine habit that ate up most of his paychecks.

You’d think people on the Path of Destiny would manage to hook up with other people on the same path. Kind of like kindred souls who found each other through the chaotic journey of life. But I guess unless the people are destined for each other, they’re as likely to make bad relationship choices as the humans I have to deal with.

So I’m standing outside Bongo, watching Sara and the hotshot drug addict through the window, wondering if I should go inside to make sure this loser doesn’t slip some GHB into her drink. Sure, it’s a lame excuse. But I’ve been following Sara around for nearly a month and I’ve grown accustomed to her presence. I follow her almost everywhere.

To the park.

To the movie theater.

To the women’s locker room at her health club.

To the grocery store.

To the dry cleaner’s.

To her gynecologist appointment.

I’ve watched her overtip a cabdriver and compliment a kid with a mohawk and cry at a Kodak commercial. I’ve watched her walk into a sliding glass door and eat a Polish sausage and buy tampons. I’ve even watched her pick her nose. Only once, but it was a definite pick.

I’ve watched her day after day, night after night, and still I know nothing about what makes her special. All I’ve learned is that she sometimes laughs when she brushes her teeth. That her voice seems to resonate from deep within her throat. That the smell of her shampoo trails after her when she walks unknowingly past me. That she looks so content and beautiful when she’s sleeping or when she’s reading or when she’s sitting in Central Park watching the turtles.

And then it hits me.

I’ve fallen in love.

CHAPTER 11

Rule #7: Don’t
fall in love.

Having sex with humans, while not encouraged, is tolerated more often than not. We have the Greek gods to thank for setting the precedent on that one. Even Jerry dipped his nib in the mortal ink once, so to speak. Which, of course, resulted in the birth of Josh and led to grumblings of nepotism among the rest of the immortals, but eventually we all got over it. Except for Resentment. Go figure.

But where the Greek gods often fathered progeny with their mortal conquests, other than Jerry the rest of us don’t have the ability to procreate. Wouldn’t do to have us flitting around the globe, creating half-Immortals and altering the gene pool. So while our DNA prevents us from breeding, even with one another, we can still get our groove on without creating any cosmic repercussions. But developing feelings for humans and contemplating or pursuing a relationship with them is a definite no-no.

“What should I do?” I ask.

“Why don’t you try talking to her?” says Honesty.

“Talk to her?” I say.

“It’s called communication,” she says, stubbing out her cigarette. “Women like that sort of thing.”

In cases like this, it helps to get some good advice, and I know Honesty will always be candid and confidential. She’s kind of like a therapist for immortal entities.

Honesty lives on the Upper West Side in a three-thousand-square-foot, two-bedroom flat on the top floor of a six-story building with a view of Central Park. From the couch in her living room, I can see the North Meadow through the picture window.

“But if I talk to her,” I say, “won’t that encourage a relationship?”

“Is that a problem?” she says.

“Well, isn’t fraternizing with human women against the rules?” I ask.

“Whose rules?” says Honesty. “Your rules? Jerry’s rules? The rules of emotionally unavailable men?”

“Is that a multiple-choice question?” I ask.

Honesty lights up another cigarette, then takes a drag, leans back in her chair, crosses her legs, and says, “Are you afraid of intimacy?”

The thing about Honesty is that she’s passive-aggressive.

Being an Attribute, Honesty doesn’t so much have an impact on the decisions humans make but instead provides them with one of the tools they need to overcome the challenges thrown at them by Temptation and Shame and Anger.

Oh, by the way, while Anger pulls double duty as an Emotive, payroll has him officially listed as a Deadly Sin.

“So you think I should talk to her,” I say. “Maybe ask her if she wants to have some coffee or invite her out to a nice dinner?”

“That’s generally what humans do,” says Honesty. “And I know you’ve interacted with human women before.”

It’s true that I’ve had a few dalliances with human women over the past five thousand years or so. Up until about twelve thousand years ago, man was still evolving from his apelike ancestors. You really didn’t want to get involved with Paleolithic women. Trust me. They didn’t call it the Stone Age for nothing. Even early Neolithic women weren’t much to look at. Sometimes you still couldn’t tell the difference between the males and the females. And none of them looked as good in a mammoth-skin bikini as Raquel Welch in
One Million Years B.C.

You pretty much stayed away from hominid women until the Greek civilization began to rise around 3000 B.C. After that, human women started to look pretty good.

Nefertiti.

Helen of Troy.

Marie Antoinette.

And who
didn’t
want to sleep with Cleopatra? Show of hands? I didn’t think so.

My countless affairs with human women were nothing more than fanciful larks, one-night stands that resulted in pure sexual gratification. But this . . . these feelings I have for a mortal female . . . it’s unprecedented.

It’s a bad enough idea to develop a romantic relationship with someone who lives in the same apartment building, because if things don’t work out, it could make your living situation uncomfortable. It’s even worse to develop a romantic relationship with someone who lives in the same building when you’re Fate and you know ahead of time when you’re going to have an argument and what it’s going to be about, how many pets you’re going to have, the vacations you’ll take, the sex you’ll have, and when your human partner is going to die.

Except since Sara’s not on my path, I can’t see how her life is going to develop, so I can’t see how a potential relationship between us would turn out. Still, it’s against the rules. It’s interaction. Interference. Influence. All of which are bad.

Bad. Bad. Bad.

Problem is, everything about Sara makes me feel good.

Good. Good. Good.

I want to watch her and be near her and touch her and kiss her. I want to shower her with affection and adoration. I want to run out and buy her flowers and candy and other things that will wilt and die or rot her teeth.

“Is there any way I can just make this go away?” I ask.

Honesty takes a drag on her cigarette and blows the smoke in my face. “Make what go away?”

“This,” I say, gesturing toward my body with my hands but not knowing where to point. “This warm, tingly sensation I get just thinking about her.”

Honesty looks at me and smiles, the way she does when I know she’s going to say something brutally honest.

Something truthful that can’t be denied.

Something I don’t want to hear.

“No.”

CHAPTER 12

Instead of taking
Honesty’s advice and talking to Sara, asking her out or making small talk to get to know her, I decide to take a different approach, one successfully taken over the course of history by so many human men.

I go to a strip club.

“Hey, honey,” says a brown-haired cutie in a black G-string and a black mesh bra who sits on my knee and tells me her name is Bambi.

Bambi is nineteen and says she’s earning money so she can go to college. Which is a load of crap. She never intends to go to college but will instead use the money she earns here to buy a BMW and then end up working as a cocktail waitress at a martini bar in Jersey.

I’m at a place called Scandals in Queens, just on the other side of the East River in Long Island City. More like the Jersey warehouse-style strip clubs than their uptight New York City counterparts, Scandals is a little more hands-on than the clubs in Manhattan, which is why I like to come here.

Not that I go to strip clubs all the time. Just whenever I get the chance. It’s kind of like homework for me, a place where I can go to find humans in their most primal element. Some of the places are a little seedy and can occasionally get rowdy, like this one, but I understand why human men enjoy going to strip clubs.

Beautiful women dressed in not much, walking up to you and sitting on your lap, smelling like yummy. Not to mention the private rooms and pole dancing and naked flesh in Technicolor abundance. True, the strippers are being paid to be nice and flirtatious and desirous, but technically, when you go out on a date with a woman, you’re paying for it, too. And unless you’re Greed or Frugality or a tightfisted bastard who insists on going Dutch, you’re going to spend about as much money on a date as you are at a strip club.

Of course, if you and your date don’t connect for whatever reason, you’re stuck on the date for at least a couple of hours until it ends. You can’t just walk out after paying the cover charge and say, “Thanks a lot.” And when the evening finally does come to an end, chances are your date won’t rub up against you, give you a lap dance, and brush her breasts against your face and say, “Oops.”

“Oops,” says Bambi, as I slip another twenty into her G-string.

I’m sitting in the lounge area, back in the shadows in one of the booths that ring the outer edge of the club. In the center of the club, a circular bar surrounds the dance floor, which provides for maximum intoxication while you watch the endless parade of women removing their clothing as they dance around the pole.

From my vantage point, I can view the entire bar. That is, when Bambi’s breasts aren’t in my face. In the middle of the afternoon, there aren’t a lot of customers, just a dozen middle-aged men who are all looking at a lonely future full of ESPN, pepperoni pizza, and Internet porn. But then I spot a familiar figure sitting at the far side of the bar, someone who wasn’t there when I came in an hour ago.

Once Bambi is done with my lap dance, she asks me if I want to adjourn to one of the VIP rooms. It’s very tempting. And it’s not like I can’t afford the treatment. But I’m not so desperate I need to pay for a hand job. So I tell her I’ll pass, slip another twenty into her G-string, then grab my Jack and Coke and head over to the bar.

The figure sitting at the end of the bar nursing a bottle of Budweiser looks more pathetic than all of the other doomed men in the club. He glances up from his beer, looks over and sees me with his baggy, bloodshot eyes, and offers a wan smile.

The thing about Failure is that he’s manic-depressive.

He also has a perpetual half-grown beard, his unwashed hair is limp and greasy beneath his faded Chicago Cubs hat, and his chinos are so wrinkled it looks like a fashion statement.

I pull up a stool next to him.

“Fabio,” he says, without much enthusiasm. “How’s business?”

“Predictable,” I say. “And you?”

“A rousing success,” he says, taking a swig of beer. I can’t tell if he’s being serious or facetious. Either way works, I suppose.

I run into Failure now and then, which isn’t surprising, considering most of my humans don’t earn a passing grade on life. Once in a while I find him hanging out with Addiction or Guilt or one of the other Lesser Sins. You don’t tend to find the Lesser Sins socializing with any of the Deadlies, who look down at the more venial vices as second-class sins.

We sit in silence while a bleached blonde with breast implants climbs up the dance pole, wraps her thighs around it, then slides down inverted until her hands are touching the stage. I’m not that impressed, but I throw a couple of dollar bills out for the effort. Besides, she’s going to need the money for liposuction treatment when she’s forty-five.

“So I hear you had a meeting with Jerry,” says Failure.

“That so?” I say. “Where did you hear that?”

Failure looks at me with an expression that says:
Where else?

BOOK: Fated

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