Page 21 of Phoenix

Phoenix

The bar is full, the music is loud, and my beer is going down just a little too easily. At least I’m not working tonight, just sitting in one of the booths with Javier and his new squeeze. It won’t last longer than a few weeks, no matter how long she’d like it too. They never last long, he’s too hung up on somebody else, somebody he can’t have because she’s his best friend’s sister, his brother’s ex-girlfriend, and who is also married to a much better guy than either one of us. In fact, I would hazard a guess he cuts things short before she can develop any real feelings for him. The poor bastard’s doomed to walk alone until he finally manages to get Lou out of his head; the sooner the better.

Lisa, the current girl on his arm, is nice enough, much better to talk to than any of his past conquests, but she’s not his type at all. She’s far too dominant, too tom-boyish for his tastes and will no doubt grow tired of his commitment to his business anyway. She offers little affection but provides him with a good chuckle and someone to blow off steam with. Unfortunately, men like Javier and me are always desperately seeking out affection from someone, even if our persona, our body language, and our general stereotyped reputations, say otherwise. Both of us lost our parents young, so we both crave that missing bond with someone special, someone neither one of us has managed to find and keep yet. Though, perhaps it isn’t fair for men like us to fall in love, to inflict our kind of life on another.

“How was Mexico?” I ask, being that it’s the first time he’s been here since he and Lisa went to visit a few of his family members down that way.

“Hot,” he chuckles, making me smile over his way of avoiding anything remotely sentimental in mixed company. He’s still heartbroken over his brother’s incarceration last year, not that he’d discuss it with me because it’s my sister who he hurt.

“You surprise me!” I tease back, slurping the last remnants of my fourth bottle of beer. I’m still waiting for some sort of numbing buzz from it, but I’m getting nothing.

“How was your…job?” he counters. “A woman, Phoenix? That’s not like you.”

“Nope,” I reply, popping the end of that word between my lips, not wishing to elaborate further, which only raises his suspicions.

“You didn’t do it did you?” He smirks.

“Nope,” I pop the word again.

“Going soft, ese?” He chuckles all the while Lisa proceeds to deal out another hand of cards for us to play with. “First Lou, now you.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I scoff.

“I mean, first she goes off to marry Mr Suburbia, a suit no less, and now you are turning down perfectly good, paid jobs, because the asshole happens to be a woman. You of all people know women can be just as lethal as a man, Phoenix. Remember Leah?”

I laugh softly, shaking my head because he’s referring to a girl I used to ‘see’, one who could get rather physical if she had had enough to drink and I had managed to piss her off enough, which was frequently given how many bruises she gave me. I never lay a finger on her because that’s not how my father raised me. In the end, I gave a good threat, one I would never follow through on, but it was enough to get her to leave and never come back.

“Leah was guilty of being lethal, yes, but this one wasn’t,” I shoulder shrug, “you know I don’t hurt innocents.”

“Did you see her?” he asks, frowning over the hand he’s been dealt, and then putting down a card that is of little interest to me.

“Yeah, I did my research,” I mutter as I put my own card down, “nothing special.”

“Uh- ha?” He grins with his teeth. “Cos the picture I saw of her would say otherwise, you lying sack of shit.”

“Each to their own.” I grin back at him because there’s no denying Jessie is my perfect type. In fact, she’s most people’s type once you get past her obvious issues. Though, the same could be said of someone like me. I’ve been blessed with good genes, and I know my parents were aesthetically attractive. But that’s just my outer layer. What’s inside is seriously messed up. “Who showed you the picture?”

“Jake,” he sighs, then pauses at me when I look utterly confused, “they have history, no?”

“Yes, but how the hell do you know about that? And when the hell did he have the chance to show you a picture of her?”

I throw my entire hand down on top of the table because I can tell I’m not going to like what he’s about to tell me; his expression says as much.

“He showed me when he hired me,” he replies nonchalantly and with a smile I’d like to smack, “to hire you…through a third party of course.”

“What.The.Fuck?!” I growl like a dog getting ready to rip someone’s throat out, so much so, that even Lisa stops what she’s doing and stares at me with a look of abject fear on her face. Javier, on the other hand, simply shrugs his shoulders, and then carefully places his cards back on top of the table. By this point, my hands are gripping hold of the table edge with such force, I might well crack the wood.

“You need to ask him, Phoenix,” he replies with his thick Spanish accent, one that is usually responsible for landing himself with his many female friends, including Lisa here. “I wasn’t privy to the details, just to make sure it was you who was hired to do the job.”

Without any other words, I leap up from the booth and shove my way through the crowd and toward the bar where I find the asshole himself, laughing and joking while serving up drinks to some of the usual patrons. He looks like he has nothing to worry about, so carefree. The sight of which has me standing there staring at him for a few minutes, trying to make some sort of sense of what Javier has just said to me. His reactions to her and what happened between them were so genuine, so real; there’s no way he would want her dead, is there? And why insist on it being me?

Anger is coursing through my veins at a dangerously fast rate of knots, and a massive headache is beginning to spread over my skull. With no clear path as to what to do first, I pinch the bridge of my nose and force myself out back, grabbing hold of my phone in the process. Jessie is not in the living room and given I haven’t seen her since I snapped at her this morning, I decide to go and check she’s in her room and not run away.

When I get inside of Lou’s old room, she’s not there, but I can hear the shower running in the bathroom, so I decide to wait until she comes out. I tell myself it’s for her safety, and not the fact that she’s already made this room smell of her or the rush of excitement I feel over the thought of seeing her in only a towel. When I perch on the edge of the bed, I hear crunching coming from underneath my ass, prompting me to shuffle back and pull away the cover.

There’s an assortment of paper underneath, all with pencil drawings, along with the pencils themselves. She must have found them in Lou’s old school stuff. Looking at them, I can already see she is a lot more talented than my sister ever was at drawing. Most of them are of dragons and caves, sometimes with her signature, sometimes labeled with the name ‘Stanley’. When I get to the last one, however, it takes my breath away; it’s not a dragon at all. It’s an intricate sketch of a phoenix rising from plumes of smoke and fire. It far outshines the work on my back; it outshines anything I’ve ever seen before. However, when I look more closely, I notice the raging flames morph into flowers, hundreds of tiny flowers.

“Sh-shit!” she yells, making me jump out of my skin which sends the drawings flying all over the floor. She’s wrapped in nothing more than a robe with dripping wet hair and a horrified expression. She’s trembling and clutching hold of her chest as she heaves in and out for breath she doesn’t appear to have.