HE HOLDS THE curiosity of a cat, all Cheshire teeth and wide open eyes. Something tender, but sinister lingering behind pretty blues; unassuming right until he unhinges his jaw, and sinks his fangs in dagger-first.
Eden is a viper and he has been sitting in a corner, nursing his fifth beer, watching her. Not because she’s a pretty young thing—though, she is—but because he likes to analyze. He likes to observe, and drink in the nuances of those he is not allowed to do so.
It is a silent usurping of power. A quiet taking of agency. He does it not because he needs dominance, but because he needs to understand.
She intrigues him. With her beauty. With her little fizzy drink. With the way she stands in the corner by the pool table, looking entirely out of place, and not quite aware of just the magnitude of such in all the same breath.
Perhaps he is also unaware of himself—or, rather, unaware of the social faltering inherent to that of what he is doing. A sweaty, dirty old man, staring at a young woman all night. Misbehaving. Inappropriate.
He is still ever so slightly flushed from the day’s work. Gritty with sweat and he washed his hands before he left and once when he got here, but there’s still a distinct black embedded in the grooves of both digits and palm. He’s blown his nose thrice already, ejecting a spray of earlier-inhaled metal fragments. A mark of what he gets paid a cushy, three-figure salary to do every day.
He’s tired, and came down to watch the game and get drunk and not be around his wife.
He’s tired and he’s been staring over at her for the better part of the night, watching her engage with her friends and the surrounding grunge and wondering what it is, exactly, that she craves from life. Is it this—a shitty, run-down bar in the not-so-great part of town? Is it the thrill of its dangerous undertone? Is it to please the likeness of those girls who seem entirely unconcerned with her? So quickly, so intensely, she has captured his interest.
Beside him is a little basket of fries, all but untouched and left to go cold. They were too crunchy, and he wouldn’t eat them, because he couldn’t eat them. And he knew himself well enough that if he tried to ask for them to be remade, he would lose his temper, because he was tired, and there were too many conversations happening, and there was a strange, stale smell wafting over to him from behind the bar every now and again.
See, Eden had always been what others would term strange. Atypical. He couldn’t eat potatoes that were crunchy, and he hated the feeling of silk, and if he were allowed to, he could talk for hours about the intricacies of welding and the woodwork involved in guitar-making, as though he were a master at the craft himself. He wore earplugs at work, even though welding wasn’t considered particularly loud by his coworkers, and he often made casual conversation that always tripped up somewhere along the way, and he could never quite figure out what had been offensive.
It was all something his father had tried to beat out of him. Asserted he was defective like it was prayer. But to this day, with six decades of life under his belt and his father six feet under dirt, Eden was still as defective as ever.
In a lot of ways, he had never quite fit in. But he found his own little corner in life. At work. At this bar—where he never showed up as anything but solo, always had the same exact amount of beers and the same exact brand, too. He’d leave the same tip, and show back up like clockwork every week on the weekend, sit on the same stool ( and god forbid anyone get to it first, or they would have hell to pay ), and never speak more than a few words.
He’d come to watch the game, or whatever else was on the television above the bar, and then he’d go home, back to his boring townhouse, and his boring wife, and his boring evening.
Surely, it was time for a break in the routine.
There is a brief moment when her friends disappear into the restroom that his own bladder calls for attention, and when he gets up, he passes by her. His gait is wide-set, each step powerful, like it holds purpose—though it’s more telling of being on his feet for the past sixty years.
When he comes back out, he finds his seat again, and not a few minutes later—she takes the adjacent bar stool.
He takes this as an invitation. If not from her, then the universe. And would you look at that? An excuse to speak to her.
The bartender had a usb-c. Eden had a lightning, tucked in his pocket. He reaches in to fish for it, and brandishes it in the same moment her eyes coast over to his. “iPhone, right?” he greets, with his token of ice breaking.
“Just don’t steal it from me, or I’mma have to hunt you down,” he jokes, voice gritty—deepened from his fatigue, and the swim of booze on his senses.
Now, up close, her youth strikes him, and he wonders briefly if she’s even old enough to be in this place. She doesn’t look it, to him. But, maybe he’s not so good with gauging age anymore. His own son is in his thirties, gone no-contact, and soon to be giving him grandchildren, of which will be begrudgingly allowed to visit. Not because Eden had ever abused his boy, but because he had been a ghost as a father. There in physicality, but emotionally? He had only told his son a handful of times that he'd loved him, all before the age of ten, and had never been too good with expressing what he felt. Emotionally absent, in a way that he now regretted, but had no idea how to rectify.
His marriage was much of the same. Bland. Passionless. Still and stagnant. Comfortable, but routine. That's why he doesn't want to spend his free time with his wife, and would rather spend it here, alone. Or—today—picking apart some other woman like she is petals upon a flower's stem.
“What’re you havin’?” he asks over the bustle in a slight drawl, retained from his youth, already motioning for the bartender to get him another beer, and tack her drink onto his tab. “It’s on me.”
blakekathryn
stormborns
kianamaiart
2087
germansingergirl
