Here to Fall (Tyler/Allison - WttR/RM Crossover Fic)
Chapter One
I hated Aidan. He was a horrible roommate. He ate all the food and moved things to places that he didn’t recall. He didn’t clean up after himself at all (which, I was lax in this area, too, on occasion), he spilled beer on furniture, and I hated when he did this: when he somehow talked me into going out when I didn’t want to in the first place, and then we wound up in loud bars, with equally horrible music and mediocre beer, and a hangover that lasted long past the morning after when I’d wake up next to some faceless chick whose name I didn’t know in the first place, much less could I be expected to remember. I suppose that’s why I loved him, too. He was a good friend, even if he was a horrible roommate.
Hell, maybe I was the horrible one. I didn’t like to socialize anymore; there was no point. He’d made some grand production about going out tonight because I’d become an introvert and used to go out with him every night of the week. It just all seemed so pointless. Going out now was pointless, inane, and…vacant. It felt vacant. I felt vacant here. I could do this at home with more enthusiasm and less social requirement. But Aidan looked like he was having fun being himself, and I knew he was only trying to help in his own way.
The girls we tended to meet, the faceless ones whose names I didn’t know to begin with, much less remember, didn’t interest me. They were shallow and vapid, and they were here because they’d been dragged by a friend, or were as mindless as Aidan. That was being overly harsh. He wasn’t mindless; he just liked having a good time. The problem was, I didn’t think this was a good time anymore. It was just more of the same. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy a random fuck; it was just more work than I wanted to put forth tonight. Not that the girls we tended to meet required work, either. I was just tired of it all. They were all the same. Fuck it. He’d managed to latch onto these two girls near the bar and was thoroughly engaging a blonde that looked way out of his league. That left me with the other one.
Her hair was an unidentifiable color; something between red, and brown, and black, and auburn, and she looked about at excited to be here as I did. I pulled a cigarette out and lit it, tossing the match into an ashtray on the bar and glanced at her. She was watching me, watching my mouth specifically, but it wasn’t in the way I thought it was going to be. Ordinarily, when a girl looked at your mouth that way, she’s got something on her mind, but she seemed transfixed on the cigarette. I smirked and blew out a puff of smoke, already trying to stuff down the feeling of annoyance if this chick was some non-smoking advocate. It was a fucking bar! If she expected to come into a back-alley bar in New York and not leave with the smell of stale beer and smoke on her clothes, she’d come to the wrong place entirely. I held out the pack to her, raising an eyebrow in an offering way, but she waved me off, mumbling something.
It was too noisy in here to mumble. Jesus Christ, she was going to have to speak up.
“What?” I asked, leaning toward her.
She was fidgeting. Like, nearly vibrating right next to me, like she was a ball of energy just waiting to explode, and yet she mumbled.
“I said, I quit.” Her mouth was nearly to my ear by the time she uttered it, loud enough that I could hear over the music this time.
I backed up and studied her a minute and then nodded. “That sucks. I keep promising my sister I’ll quit, but I never do,” I said in that half-shouting-while-trying-to-be-conversational way you had to adopt in bars, and I hoped that she’d catch on and do the same.
She was a tiny thing. Like, seriously tiny. She looked like she needed a decent meal, or fifty. And then there was the vibrating/fidgeting thing. I wasn’t sure if it was nervousness or, fuck me, for all I knew, she could be high as a kite. She didn’t seem high, though, just high strung or something.
“Your sister?” she said, her eyebrows pulling down.
I nodded, “Yeah. She’s twelve,” I said in way of explanation.
She nodded back to me, her face still puzzled. Honestly, I had no idea why I’d even told her that. I didn’t normally do family stories about my kid sister and her disapproval of my smoking habit on the first meeting, or ever, because there normally wasn’t a second meeting. It’s not like this was a date, or that it would ever lead to one.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked. Might as well be hospitable for our one meeting here. She eyed me warily. I took another long drag from the cigarette and stared back at her. My eyebrows rose in question. “It wasn’t a marriage proposal, I just thought you might like a drink.”
She let out a deep breath, “Yeah, ok. I’ll have a Diet Coke.” Thank God her volume had risen.
“A Diet Coke?” I asked, smirking again. She nodded. I waved the bartender over, “Can I get a Diet Coke?”
The bartender sat it on the bar without even looking at me again and I handed it to her. She took a tentative sip from the straw, as if I’d spiked it or something in the three-point-two seconds I’d even had the glass in my hand, and averted her gaze from me. Her eyes darted to the door for a second and then back to me. “Thanks.”
I nodded back, watching her again. This was odd. And not at all like the usual scenario. For one, she was totally sober, and ordinarily, a few drinks more and we’d be well on our way out the door. Two, this whole nervous, fidgeting, look-to-the-door and did-he-spike-my-drink thing was sort of a big, fat, red, blaring alarm. And I should know better than to stick around blaring alarms. It normally led to trouble and I got myself in enough of that on my own. Then I started wondering if something with me was just off because, I thought I was doing a pretty decent job of looking normal and not psychotic. I’d been pleasant and offered her a drink, and I didn’t think I was giving her any reason to find me dangerous or run-for-the-door worthy. I could be charming when I wanted to be, and I wasn’t throwing it all over her, but I hadn’t been a complete dick, either. She was strange. I didn’t normally have to talk this much.
Hmm. “So, you from New York?” I asked, grabbing my beer from the bar and putting the cigarette out.
She shook her head, her gaze bouncing from her friend and Aidan and then back to me.
I chuckled, “So where are you from, then?”
“Originally Florida.”
“Originally?”
“I’ve been around.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep.”
Jesus, this was like pulling fucking teeth. “Anywhere I might know?”
She looked bored with this conversation, or annoyed. She let out a breath and looked down, shuffling. “Yeah, I was in New Orleans for a while. Texas. Vegas.” She shrugged, “Now I’m here.”
“What brings you to New York?”
“What brings you to New York?” she parroted back, and a mite snippily.
I chuckled, “Born and bred.” Wow. I was so not getting laid with this chick tonight. I wasn’t used to this amount of effort. It was kind of refreshing.
She nodded, looking at her friend again.
“You late for something?” I asked, casually leaning on the bar.
She sighed again. “No. I just…” she waved her free hand at me, “forget it.”
I watched her gaze bounce again. “If you’re worried about your friend, Aidan is harmless.”
Her gaze fixed on me. Holy shit. She’d never actually looked me in the eye before. Her eyes were quite striking, demanding and accusing all at once. And they were green. Even in this shitty, dim lighting, with the stupid bar signs and the strobes and the smoke, I could make out the color easily. When under the scrutiny of that gaze, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Part of me wanted to look away. “And what about you? What are you?”
I smirked, “Oh, I’m dangerous. Me, you definitely want to watch out for.”
She cracked a smile. That was a first, too. She looked incredibly younger when she smiled. It suited her. “So, you’re from New York, huh?”
I nodded, “Yep.”
“And you’re dangerous?”
I nodded, “Yep.”
She snorted, shaking her head. “I don’t think you know what danger is.”
“I don’t?”
“No. What part of New York are you from?”
Oh, she was playing dirty now. I didn’t answer.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. You do this a lot? Come down to these bars and pick up chicks?”
“Your friend doesn’t seem to mind,” I nodded to where she was hanging all over Aidan.
“My friend knows how to hustle just as well as I do.”
“Is that what you’re doing here? Hustling?”
“Look, just forget it, ok? You seem like… Thanks for the drink.” She walked over to her friend and started prying her off of Aidan.
Aidan was incredulous and confused. “What? Where are you going? I thought we had a connection. Don’t go!” He chased after them. Oh, Christ.
This night was turning into a clusterfuck of epic proportions and I could have just been at home, happily drunk by now. Fucking Aidan. I threw a few bills down on the bar and ran to catch up before he got himself robbed in an alleyway by two hustler chicks or some shit. He had the worst taste in women.
“Aidan!” I yelled. “Fucking stop!”
Of course he acted like he hadn’t even heard me, running right out the door and following them down the alley beside the bar, lamenting over their connection and their plans to go back to our place.
“Fucking Christ, Aidan,” I said, grabbing him by the back of his shirt and jerking him back just when he’d reached them. “Get a grip.”
He shrugged me off, “Ladies! Come on!” He ran a few more steps. “Candi with an ‘I,’ wait!”
Oh, God. I was never letting him drag me into a night like this again. Candi? Jesus. “Aidan, you dumbass.”
By the time they actually stopped and I caught up to Aidan fawning all over the blonde, I had half a mind to just let her have him. Let her take him for whatever he wanted to give away. They’d probably be living in our apartment by the time she was done with him. And it’d probably serve him right. Her friend, my witty conversational partner, now just looked bored, and resigned, and tired. I knew the feeling.
So we both just kind of stood there with our hands shoved in our pockets while Aidan and Candi continued this rather pointless and disgusting display of flirting or…whatever it was called that they were doing.
She was back to the nervous fidgeting, chewing her nails and looking down the alley. Exits. I think she was looking for exits. There was a clatter down the alley and she jumped slightly. I turned my head and watched as a few guys walked in front of a van and the van driver honked, stopping just short of driving over them. And then the driver and his passenger proceeded to get out of the van and start to beat the shit out of the guys that just happened to walk in their path. I wasn’t a Good Samaritan; I was just pissed off that this night had gone from bad to worse to clusterfuck, and I was walking toward the crowd before I really even knew I’d started. My fist was in the air and flying down on the van driver in the next instant, and it all got kind of hazy from there. There was pain in my knuckles and gravel digging into my cheek, and blood in my mouth and my ears were ringing, and I was in handcuffs lined up next to Aidan and the assholes who started the whole thing.
The cop who was handling all of this was a real prick. They let us go after, shockingly, Candi informed them that we had only been trying to help and weren’t directly involved to start with. I thought Aidan was being stupid; maybe she wasn’t out to hustle him because it’d be a pretty elaborate scheme to keep it up that long. My Diet Coke friend was just staring at me with this completely perplexed look on her face. Her eyes were all squinty and her mouth was set in a line, and I really didn’t care what she thought, but the staring was getting a little old.
Once I was out of the cuffs, the prick cop was still spouting off and was going to send all of them to lockup. I attempted to right his assumption, since they’d let us go, and let them know that it had been the van driver and his friend who had started the whole thing. He wasn’t interested in what I had to say at all. And that pissed me off. I will admit, it was my own fault, because you shouldn’t ever grab a cop. I will also admit, I tend to do things sometimes without thinking them through. However, the one-eighty degree turnaround I got and the slam to the police cruiser windshield was a little excessive, in my opinion. The huge gash that sprouted over my eye would agree. Pain shot through my head and blood smeared all over the windshield while he cuffed me again and reread me the same rights that I’d just been read.
And suddenly, all I could hear was shouting. And it sounded like it was coming from my previously barely-chatty friend. She was tiny, but holy shit was she spunky. She got all up in the cop’s face, screaming, “What the fuck is the wrong with you? He was just trying to tell you what happened! You fucking cops always think you know the truth. You’re so wrong. You’re so fucking wrong! It can be right there in front of you and you don’t even notice it.”
She made her own fatal mistake when she shoved him. She should have learned from my previous example that those particular moves were disastrous for any shot at not getting your ass thrown in the can. They had to forcibly remove her, hauling her off while she kicked and screamed.
She looked incredibly sexy when she was angry, her indescribable hair all a mess. I could still hear her yelling about “fucking cops” and kicking at the seats in the cruiser they’d dumped her in as they shoved me into the back of another. Aidan was shoved in the other side, and I rested my head back while they drove us to the police station. I had no idea what prompted her outburst. Or why the hell she gave a damn about the cop busting my shit all up. She was so incredibly strange. I smiled all the way to the station.
They put us all in holding cells, wisely separating the groups. My head was killing me and I really wished that I would have drank more, because maybe then it wouldn’t have hurt so much. I think I resembled that of an accident victim after a crash; my shirt was covered in variously red-colored patches of blood and I could feel the bruises forming everywhere. Why I did this kind of shit, I couldn’t explain even to myself. The pain was oddly liberating, though. It was different. Alive. It was a break from the mundane sameness. I supposed that the next time I wanted a release from the monotony, there were easier ways.
Aidan was making his phone call and I finally sat down on one of the benches near the side. I could see into the cells across from us; the asshole van driver and his buddy yelling shit, still, and the next cell where Candi and…fuck, I didn’t even know her name, were being held. Candi was sitting on the bench, looking appropriately bored, and my cop-loving buddy was pacing back and forth like a caged animal.
“Hey,” I called.
Her head jerked in my direction but she didn’t stop pacing. “Hey,” she called back, not looking at me.
“My name is Tyler.”
“Yeah, I know. Your friend was yelling it repeatedly when you were going after that cop.”
I snorted, “Right. Are you gonna tell me your name, or do I have to ask?”
“Mal - Allison. My name is Allison.”
I watched Candi’s leg stop bouncing on the bench and they shared a look.
“Nice to meet you.”
She made some vague gesture back to me, but I supposed her feelings on meeting me were clouded by the fact that she was in the clink now.
“That thing with the cop…” I started, “What was that exactly?”
She shrugged, “I dunno. What was yours?”
I shrugged back, standing and leaning against the bars. “Maybe I like to push things.”
“Maybe I don’t like cops.”
Aidan came back then, and a random patrol cop told me I could have my phone call, but that was not happening. There was really only person I could call and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Aidan started yelling all sorts of shit at me that I really didn’t need to hear. And I really didn’t feel as bad about this particular jail episode as some of the other shit I’d gotten him into. As far as I was concerned, this night was entirely his fault. He finished the yelling about the same time that my father’s lawyer showed up. Fucking Aidan.
“Yeah, that’s right. I called your dad.”
Well, fuck me.
I walked out of the cell and craned back to look at my cop-disliking friend. Allison. Our eyes met for a brief second but then she was gone again, back to pacing. We completed all the out-processing shit, and the lawyer my father had sent was signing all the necessary paperwork so we could get the hell out of here. Aidan was still livid and yelling at me in hushed tones, but I tuned him out this time.
As we were walking out, I stopped the lawyer. “Hey, can you do me a favor?”
He looked at me, guarded, like I was going to ask him to get me out of a murder charge or something.
“There were two girls with us who got dragged in with everyone. Can you bail them out, too?”
He regarded me a minute. “Are you turning into a humanitarian, Tyler?”
“Someone should bail them out. It’s kind of…my fault they’re here, so…” I didn’t say please. I wouldn’t. I would never say please to my father, or one of his many minions.
He turned around without saying another word and we started for the door. Aidan was still on about shit.
“Aidan.”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”
“Not really. And I don’t really give a shit, either. You’re the one who dragged me out tonight, and out into that alley. So, really, it’s your fault.”
He scoffed, “You are such a dick.” He seemed to notice that I’d stopped after we got outside of the police station. “What are we doing just waiting here? Let’s go.”
“In a minute.”
“Fuck, Tyler. Are you waiting for her?”
I didn’t answer.
“What do you think, man? She’s gonna be so grateful that you that she jumps you right here on the steps of the police station? Are you still trying to get laid out of this?!”
I didn’t answer that either. Truthfully, I had no idea what the fuck we were waiting around for. What I was expecting. Was that all I wanted out of this? To end the night with a bang with her? Was I looking for something else? I think, mostly, she just confused me. Surprised me. She was different, and I couldn’t deny that it was appealing. There was something about her. Something about the way she watched me, looked at me. There was such a profound sense of…loss. And I knew something about that. I don’t know. I just knew that I didn’t want it to be the last time I ever saw her. And if I just walked away and didn’t look back, I’d never find her again.
She and Candi came barreling out of the doors, and she seemed genuinely surprised when we were still there. The lawyer followed a few steps behind and nodded to me on his way to the car. She and Candi shared a look, and I made myself as unassuming and non-threatening as possible.
I tried for a smile. “You ok?”
She nodded. “You?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I dismissed. “I just wanted to make sure before we took off.”
She looked rather amused, “Yeah, we’re used to taking care of ourselves.”
I shrugged, “Well, you would have been in there all night otherwise.”
She laughed. Like, genuinely laughed at me. “It’s not the first night either of us has spent in jail.”
Ungrateful little bitch. “What’s your problem? I was just trying to make it right.”
“By what? Having your daddy bail us out? Does he always bail you out, Tyler? Have you ever actually had to take care of yourself?”
“You don’t know anything about me. Where do you get off making judgments about me?”
“You were judging me the minute you laid eyes on me with your cocky smirk, and buying drinks. It doesn’t always work that way, Tyler.”
I really wished she would stop saying my name like that. It was hard to concentrate on being mad at her when she kept using my name. “I should have left your ass to rot in there, I don’t even know why I bothered.”
“Fuck you, Tyler. You know dick about my ass. And I was just fine waiting it out in there. What were you expecting? How did you think this was going to go when we came out?”
“I didn’t -”
“Did you think I was just going to fall at your feet and blow you right here? Your father’s lawyer doesn’t impress me.”
“Fucking Christ. I didn’t mean any of it like that.”
“You didn’t want anything in return for bailing us out?”
God, she was standing there with her hands on her hips, all pissed off and yelling, and saying my name, and why was she even affecting me this way? I hadn’t argued with a chick in years. That’s why. It was so familiar and pointless, and no matter how fucked up it was, I’d missed it. Just the interaction. Interrupting me and passionate about whatever the fuck she thought I did wrong. “Maybe a little gratitude, but, no, I didn’t expect anything.”
“That is such bullshit. If all you wanted was gratitude, you would have fucking left.”
“God, you are so infuriating.” I paused, just letting her seethe there for a few seconds. “Do you wanna get breakfast? Can I buy you breakfast?”
“What?” she looked surprised again.
“Breakfast. You do eat, right?”
“I…yeah. I eat.”
“You look like you should eat more. I know a place. Come on.”
I turned and started to walk, completely ignoring the look Aidan was shooting me. He could fuck off and go home. I only stopped to check if she was following when I reached the end of the block. And sure enough, she was a few steps behind me, but catching up. Candi wasn’t with her and Aidan appropriately fucked off. I must have passed the test then - the one that she deemed me not a psycho if she could have breakfast with me. We didn’t talk the rest of the way, just walked in silence. I slowed my steps when I realized that one of mine was like two of hers and she was almost jogging next to me. I held the door open for her when we got to the restaurant and she looked at me oddly again. I could sense a few things here: she wasn’t used to gentlemanly charm, she found it odd, and she was extremely distrusting.
Part TWO
One ( Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three) | Two |
I hated Aidan. He was a horrible roommate. He ate all the food and moved things to places that he didn’t recall. He didn’t clean up after himself at all (which, I was lax in this area, too, on occasion), he spilled beer on furniture, and I hated when he did this: when he somehow talked me into going out when I didn’t want to in the first place, and then we wound up in loud bars, with equally horrible music and mediocre beer, and a hangover that lasted long past the morning after when I’d wake up next to some faceless chick whose name I didn’t know in the first place, much less could I be expected to remember. I suppose that’s why I loved him, too. He was a good friend, even if he was a horrible roommate.
Hell, maybe I was the horrible one. I didn’t like to socialize anymore; there was no point. He’d made some grand production about going out tonight because I’d become an introvert and used to go out with him every night of the week. It just all seemed so pointless. Going out now was pointless, inane, and…vacant. It felt vacant. I felt vacant here. I could do this at home with more enthusiasm and less social requirement. But Aidan looked like he was having fun being himself, and I knew he was only trying to help in his own way.
The girls we tended to meet, the faceless ones whose names I didn’t know to begin with, much less remember, didn’t interest me. They were shallow and vapid, and they were here because they’d been dragged by a friend, or were as mindless as Aidan. That was being overly harsh. He wasn’t mindless; he just liked having a good time. The problem was, I didn’t think this was a good time anymore. It was just more of the same. It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy a random fuck; it was just more work than I wanted to put forth tonight. Not that the girls we tended to meet required work, either. I was just tired of it all. They were all the same. Fuck it. He’d managed to latch onto these two girls near the bar and was thoroughly engaging a blonde that looked way out of his league. That left me with the other one.
Her hair was an unidentifiable color; something between red, and brown, and black, and auburn, and she looked about at excited to be here as I did. I pulled a cigarette out and lit it, tossing the match into an ashtray on the bar and glanced at her. She was watching me, watching my mouth specifically, but it wasn’t in the way I thought it was going to be. Ordinarily, when a girl looked at your mouth that way, she’s got something on her mind, but she seemed transfixed on the cigarette. I smirked and blew out a puff of smoke, already trying to stuff down the feeling of annoyance if this chick was some non-smoking advocate. It was a fucking bar! If she expected to come into a back-alley bar in New York and not leave with the smell of stale beer and smoke on her clothes, she’d come to the wrong place entirely. I held out the pack to her, raising an eyebrow in an offering way, but she waved me off, mumbling something.
It was too noisy in here to mumble. Jesus Christ, she was going to have to speak up.
“What?” I asked, leaning toward her.
She was fidgeting. Like, nearly vibrating right next to me, like she was a ball of energy just waiting to explode, and yet she mumbled.
“I said, I quit.” Her mouth was nearly to my ear by the time she uttered it, loud enough that I could hear over the music this time.
I backed up and studied her a minute and then nodded. “That sucks. I keep promising my sister I’ll quit, but I never do,” I said in that half-shouting-while-trying-to-be-conversational way you had to adopt in bars, and I hoped that she’d catch on and do the same.
She was a tiny thing. Like, seriously tiny. She looked like she needed a decent meal, or fifty. And then there was the vibrating/fidgeting thing. I wasn’t sure if it was nervousness or, fuck me, for all I knew, she could be high as a kite. She didn’t seem high, though, just high strung or something.
“Your sister?” she said, her eyebrows pulling down.
I nodded, “Yeah. She’s twelve,” I said in way of explanation.
She nodded back to me, her face still puzzled. Honestly, I had no idea why I’d even told her that. I didn’t normally do family stories about my kid sister and her disapproval of my smoking habit on the first meeting, or ever, because there normally wasn’t a second meeting. It’s not like this was a date, or that it would ever lead to one.
“Can I get you a drink?” I asked. Might as well be hospitable for our one meeting here. She eyed me warily. I took another long drag from the cigarette and stared back at her. My eyebrows rose in question. “It wasn’t a marriage proposal, I just thought you might like a drink.”
She let out a deep breath, “Yeah, ok. I’ll have a Diet Coke.” Thank God her volume had risen.
“A Diet Coke?” I asked, smirking again. She nodded. I waved the bartender over, “Can I get a Diet Coke?”
The bartender sat it on the bar without even looking at me again and I handed it to her. She took a tentative sip from the straw, as if I’d spiked it or something in the three-point-two seconds I’d even had the glass in my hand, and averted her gaze from me. Her eyes darted to the door for a second and then back to me. “Thanks.”
I nodded back, watching her again. This was odd. And not at all like the usual scenario. For one, she was totally sober, and ordinarily, a few drinks more and we’d be well on our way out the door. Two, this whole nervous, fidgeting, look-to-the-door and did-he-spike-my-drink thing was sort of a big, fat, red, blaring alarm. And I should know better than to stick around blaring alarms. It normally led to trouble and I got myself in enough of that on my own. Then I started wondering if something with me was just off because, I thought I was doing a pretty decent job of looking normal and not psychotic. I’d been pleasant and offered her a drink, and I didn’t think I was giving her any reason to find me dangerous or run-for-the-door worthy. I could be charming when I wanted to be, and I wasn’t throwing it all over her, but I hadn’t been a complete dick, either. She was strange. I didn’t normally have to talk this much.
Hmm. “So, you from New York?” I asked, grabbing my beer from the bar and putting the cigarette out.
She shook her head, her gaze bouncing from her friend and Aidan and then back to me.
I chuckled, “So where are you from, then?”
“Originally Florida.”
“Originally?”
“I’ve been around.”
“Yeah?”
“Yep.”
Jesus, this was like pulling fucking teeth. “Anywhere I might know?”
She looked bored with this conversation, or annoyed. She let out a breath and looked down, shuffling. “Yeah, I was in New Orleans for a while. Texas. Vegas.” She shrugged, “Now I’m here.”
“What brings you to New York?”
“What brings you to New York?” she parroted back, and a mite snippily.
I chuckled, “Born and bred.” Wow. I was so not getting laid with this chick tonight. I wasn’t used to this amount of effort. It was kind of refreshing.
She nodded, looking at her friend again.
“You late for something?” I asked, casually leaning on the bar.
She sighed again. “No. I just…” she waved her free hand at me, “forget it.”
I watched her gaze bounce again. “If you’re worried about your friend, Aidan is harmless.”
Her gaze fixed on me. Holy shit. She’d never actually looked me in the eye before. Her eyes were quite striking, demanding and accusing all at once. And they were green. Even in this shitty, dim lighting, with the stupid bar signs and the strobes and the smoke, I could make out the color easily. When under the scrutiny of that gaze, I wasn’t sure I wanted it. Part of me wanted to look away. “And what about you? What are you?”
I smirked, “Oh, I’m dangerous. Me, you definitely want to watch out for.”
She cracked a smile. That was a first, too. She looked incredibly younger when she smiled. It suited her. “So, you’re from New York, huh?”
I nodded, “Yep.”
“And you’re dangerous?”
I nodded, “Yep.”
She snorted, shaking her head. “I don’t think you know what danger is.”
“I don’t?”
“No. What part of New York are you from?”
Oh, she was playing dirty now. I didn’t answer.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. You do this a lot? Come down to these bars and pick up chicks?”
“Your friend doesn’t seem to mind,” I nodded to where she was hanging all over Aidan.
“My friend knows how to hustle just as well as I do.”
“Is that what you’re doing here? Hustling?”
“Look, just forget it, ok? You seem like… Thanks for the drink.” She walked over to her friend and started prying her off of Aidan.
Aidan was incredulous and confused. “What? Where are you going? I thought we had a connection. Don’t go!” He chased after them. Oh, Christ.
This night was turning into a clusterfuck of epic proportions and I could have just been at home, happily drunk by now. Fucking Aidan. I threw a few bills down on the bar and ran to catch up before he got himself robbed in an alleyway by two hustler chicks or some shit. He had the worst taste in women.
“Aidan!” I yelled. “Fucking stop!”
Of course he acted like he hadn’t even heard me, running right out the door and following them down the alley beside the bar, lamenting over their connection and their plans to go back to our place.
“Fucking Christ, Aidan,” I said, grabbing him by the back of his shirt and jerking him back just when he’d reached them. “Get a grip.”
He shrugged me off, “Ladies! Come on!” He ran a few more steps. “Candi with an ‘I,’ wait!”
Oh, God. I was never letting him drag me into a night like this again. Candi? Jesus. “Aidan, you dumbass.”
By the time they actually stopped and I caught up to Aidan fawning all over the blonde, I had half a mind to just let her have him. Let her take him for whatever he wanted to give away. They’d probably be living in our apartment by the time she was done with him. And it’d probably serve him right. Her friend, my witty conversational partner, now just looked bored, and resigned, and tired. I knew the feeling.
So we both just kind of stood there with our hands shoved in our pockets while Aidan and Candi continued this rather pointless and disgusting display of flirting or…whatever it was called that they were doing.
She was back to the nervous fidgeting, chewing her nails and looking down the alley. Exits. I think she was looking for exits. There was a clatter down the alley and she jumped slightly. I turned my head and watched as a few guys walked in front of a van and the van driver honked, stopping just short of driving over them. And then the driver and his passenger proceeded to get out of the van and start to beat the shit out of the guys that just happened to walk in their path. I wasn’t a Good Samaritan; I was just pissed off that this night had gone from bad to worse to clusterfuck, and I was walking toward the crowd before I really even knew I’d started. My fist was in the air and flying down on the van driver in the next instant, and it all got kind of hazy from there. There was pain in my knuckles and gravel digging into my cheek, and blood in my mouth and my ears were ringing, and I was in handcuffs lined up next to Aidan and the assholes who started the whole thing.
The cop who was handling all of this was a real prick. They let us go after, shockingly, Candi informed them that we had only been trying to help and weren’t directly involved to start with. I thought Aidan was being stupid; maybe she wasn’t out to hustle him because it’d be a pretty elaborate scheme to keep it up that long. My Diet Coke friend was just staring at me with this completely perplexed look on her face. Her eyes were all squinty and her mouth was set in a line, and I really didn’t care what she thought, but the staring was getting a little old.
Once I was out of the cuffs, the prick cop was still spouting off and was going to send all of them to lockup. I attempted to right his assumption, since they’d let us go, and let them know that it had been the van driver and his friend who had started the whole thing. He wasn’t interested in what I had to say at all. And that pissed me off. I will admit, it was my own fault, because you shouldn’t ever grab a cop. I will also admit, I tend to do things sometimes without thinking them through. However, the one-eighty degree turnaround I got and the slam to the police cruiser windshield was a little excessive, in my opinion. The huge gash that sprouted over my eye would agree. Pain shot through my head and blood smeared all over the windshield while he cuffed me again and reread me the same rights that I’d just been read.
And suddenly, all I could hear was shouting. And it sounded like it was coming from my previously barely-chatty friend. She was tiny, but holy shit was she spunky. She got all up in the cop’s face, screaming, “What the fuck is the wrong with you? He was just trying to tell you what happened! You fucking cops always think you know the truth. You’re so wrong. You’re so fucking wrong! It can be right there in front of you and you don’t even notice it.”
She made her own fatal mistake when she shoved him. She should have learned from my previous example that those particular moves were disastrous for any shot at not getting your ass thrown in the can. They had to forcibly remove her, hauling her off while she kicked and screamed.
She looked incredibly sexy when she was angry, her indescribable hair all a mess. I could still hear her yelling about “fucking cops” and kicking at the seats in the cruiser they’d dumped her in as they shoved me into the back of another. Aidan was shoved in the other side, and I rested my head back while they drove us to the police station. I had no idea what prompted her outburst. Or why the hell she gave a damn about the cop busting my shit all up. She was so incredibly strange. I smiled all the way to the station.
They put us all in holding cells, wisely separating the groups. My head was killing me and I really wished that I would have drank more, because maybe then it wouldn’t have hurt so much. I think I resembled that of an accident victim after a crash; my shirt was covered in variously red-colored patches of blood and I could feel the bruises forming everywhere. Why I did this kind of shit, I couldn’t explain even to myself. The pain was oddly liberating, though. It was different. Alive. It was a break from the mundane sameness. I supposed that the next time I wanted a release from the monotony, there were easier ways.
Aidan was making his phone call and I finally sat down on one of the benches near the side. I could see into the cells across from us; the asshole van driver and his buddy yelling shit, still, and the next cell where Candi and…fuck, I didn’t even know her name, were being held. Candi was sitting on the bench, looking appropriately bored, and my cop-loving buddy was pacing back and forth like a caged animal.
“Hey,” I called.
Her head jerked in my direction but she didn’t stop pacing. “Hey,” she called back, not looking at me.
“My name is Tyler.”
“Yeah, I know. Your friend was yelling it repeatedly when you were going after that cop.”
I snorted, “Right. Are you gonna tell me your name, or do I have to ask?”
“Mal - Allison. My name is Allison.”
I watched Candi’s leg stop bouncing on the bench and they shared a look.
“Nice to meet you.”
She made some vague gesture back to me, but I supposed her feelings on meeting me were clouded by the fact that she was in the clink now.
“That thing with the cop…” I started, “What was that exactly?”
She shrugged, “I dunno. What was yours?”
I shrugged back, standing and leaning against the bars. “Maybe I like to push things.”
“Maybe I don’t like cops.”
Aidan came back then, and a random patrol cop told me I could have my phone call, but that was not happening. There was really only person I could call and I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Aidan started yelling all sorts of shit at me that I really didn’t need to hear. And I really didn’t feel as bad about this particular jail episode as some of the other shit I’d gotten him into. As far as I was concerned, this night was entirely his fault. He finished the yelling about the same time that my father’s lawyer showed up. Fucking Aidan.
“Yeah, that’s right. I called your dad.”
Well, fuck me.
I walked out of the cell and craned back to look at my cop-disliking friend. Allison. Our eyes met for a brief second but then she was gone again, back to pacing. We completed all the out-processing shit, and the lawyer my father had sent was signing all the necessary paperwork so we could get the hell out of here. Aidan was still livid and yelling at me in hushed tones, but I tuned him out this time.
As we were walking out, I stopped the lawyer. “Hey, can you do me a favor?”
He looked at me, guarded, like I was going to ask him to get me out of a murder charge or something.
“There were two girls with us who got dragged in with everyone. Can you bail them out, too?”
He regarded me a minute. “Are you turning into a humanitarian, Tyler?”
“Someone should bail them out. It’s kind of…my fault they’re here, so…” I didn’t say please. I wouldn’t. I would never say please to my father, or one of his many minions.
He turned around without saying another word and we started for the door. Aidan was still on about shit.
“Aidan.”
“What?”
“Shut up.”
“You haven’t heard a word I’ve said, have you?”
“Not really. And I don’t really give a shit, either. You’re the one who dragged me out tonight, and out into that alley. So, really, it’s your fault.”
He scoffed, “You are such a dick.” He seemed to notice that I’d stopped after we got outside of the police station. “What are we doing just waiting here? Let’s go.”
“In a minute.”
“Fuck, Tyler. Are you waiting for her?”
I didn’t answer.
“What do you think, man? She’s gonna be so grateful that you that she jumps you right here on the steps of the police station? Are you still trying to get laid out of this?!”
I didn’t answer that either. Truthfully, I had no idea what the fuck we were waiting around for. What I was expecting. Was that all I wanted out of this? To end the night with a bang with her? Was I looking for something else? I think, mostly, she just confused me. Surprised me. She was different, and I couldn’t deny that it was appealing. There was something about her. Something about the way she watched me, looked at me. There was such a profound sense of…loss. And I knew something about that. I don’t know. I just knew that I didn’t want it to be the last time I ever saw her. And if I just walked away and didn’t look back, I’d never find her again.
She and Candi came barreling out of the doors, and she seemed genuinely surprised when we were still there. The lawyer followed a few steps behind and nodded to me on his way to the car. She and Candi shared a look, and I made myself as unassuming and non-threatening as possible.
I tried for a smile. “You ok?”
She nodded. “You?”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine,” I dismissed. “I just wanted to make sure before we took off.”
She looked rather amused, “Yeah, we’re used to taking care of ourselves.”
I shrugged, “Well, you would have been in there all night otherwise.”
She laughed. Like, genuinely laughed at me. “It’s not the first night either of us has spent in jail.”
Ungrateful little bitch. “What’s your problem? I was just trying to make it right.”
“By what? Having your daddy bail us out? Does he always bail you out, Tyler? Have you ever actually had to take care of yourself?”
“You don’t know anything about me. Where do you get off making judgments about me?”
“You were judging me the minute you laid eyes on me with your cocky smirk, and buying drinks. It doesn’t always work that way, Tyler.”
I really wished she would stop saying my name like that. It was hard to concentrate on being mad at her when she kept using my name. “I should have left your ass to rot in there, I don’t even know why I bothered.”
“Fuck you, Tyler. You know dick about my ass. And I was just fine waiting it out in there. What were you expecting? How did you think this was going to go when we came out?”
“I didn’t -”
“Did you think I was just going to fall at your feet and blow you right here? Your father’s lawyer doesn’t impress me.”
“Fucking Christ. I didn’t mean any of it like that.”
“You didn’t want anything in return for bailing us out?”
God, she was standing there with her hands on her hips, all pissed off and yelling, and saying my name, and why was she even affecting me this way? I hadn’t argued with a chick in years. That’s why. It was so familiar and pointless, and no matter how fucked up it was, I’d missed it. Just the interaction. Interrupting me and passionate about whatever the fuck she thought I did wrong. “Maybe a little gratitude, but, no, I didn’t expect anything.”
“That is such bullshit. If all you wanted was gratitude, you would have fucking left.”
“God, you are so infuriating.” I paused, just letting her seethe there for a few seconds. “Do you wanna get breakfast? Can I buy you breakfast?”
“What?” she looked surprised again.
“Breakfast. You do eat, right?”
“I…yeah. I eat.”
“You look like you should eat more. I know a place. Come on.”
I turned and started to walk, completely ignoring the look Aidan was shooting me. He could fuck off and go home. I only stopped to check if she was following when I reached the end of the block. And sure enough, she was a few steps behind me, but catching up. Candi wasn’t with her and Aidan appropriately fucked off. I must have passed the test then - the one that she deemed me not a psycho if she could have breakfast with me. We didn’t talk the rest of the way, just walked in silence. I slowed my steps when I realized that one of mine was like two of hers and she was almost jogging next to me. I held the door open for her when we got to the restaurant and she looked at me oddly again. I could sense a few things here: she wasn’t used to gentlemanly charm, she found it odd, and she was extremely distrusting.
Part TWO
One ( Part One) (Part Two) (Part Three) | Two |