Part 3
Mike stared at his nibbled-upon cookie, pondering the story I'd just told him. Then again, he could have been studying the pattern his teeth had made as he worked his way around a particularly large piece of walnut. I couldn't really tell... You never can with Mike. His thought processes are entirely his own.
"So..." I probed.
Without looking away from his cookie, he nodded.
I sighed.
"What?" he asked.
"You know what," I said as I stood up in a huff.
"What, you want to know what I think?" he asked, following my movement across the kitchen with his head.
I sighed again. "You know I do," I said as I opened the fridge and considered grabbing an ice cold Coke.
He chuckled. "Yeah, well... You already know what I think, so I don't see the point..."
"Maybe I just want to talk about it?" I said from inside the fridge.
"You just spent an hour talking about it," he responded.
I grabbed the can of soda I'd been staring at for several seconds and popped it's top as I kicked the refrigerator door behind me. "You know, for being my best friend, you really can be a dick sometimes..."
"What?" he said. "You just spent an hour telling me how you flirted with some older chick on the phone and when she ended up being crazy, you didn't just cut her off - instead you led her on." He looked at his cookie and studied it for a moment, then returned his eyes to me. "What do you want me to do? Feel bad for you?"
"It'd be nice," I offered as I returned to the table. With one swift motion, I reached out, snatched the cookie from his hand, and then shoved it into my mouth.
"Nice," he said sarcastically.
"Hey, if you can be a dick, so can I," I said, crumbs spraying out of my mouth. "Come on."
"Where?" he said as I marched toward the living room.
"To play Goldeneye with Juan..." I replied dismissively.
"What, so you don't want to talk?" he asked.
"Nah... If you're not going to help me, I might as well be killing... Oh shit!" I whipped around to find Mike had followed me into the living room. Immediately, I whipped up my right palm and gave a strong, sturdy HALT! signal.
He stood as fast in his tracks as I did. "What is it?" he whispered.
I re-signaled for him to hush and waved him down, as if we were treading the jungle in search of Viet Cong. Slowly, I crept past the couch and toward the window of the living room to confirm what I thought I'd seen. With every silent step, my suspicions became more and more justified as I made out what appeared to be a sneaker, which was revealed to be connected to a foot which was fastened to a hip belonging to a crying and distraught 35 year old woman from Arizona.
"FUCK!" I whispered loudly.
Mike jerked the palms of his hands upward, as if to scream "WHAT?!?" with them.
"She's on the porch," I whispered, pointing my thumb over my shoulder indicating where both the porch and Jessica were.
"Oh, no FUCKING way..." Mike said aloud. Just as he did, I looked through the window to see Jessica's sneakered foot jerk slightly, acknowledging that she'd heard him.
I shot a look Mike's way. "Great..."
"Sorry," he said, "But it's not like she didn't know we were home anyway..."
"I guess you're right... So, what do I do?"
"I dunno," he said. "That's a tough call."
"You know," I stated, "You've been absolutely no help whatsoever tonight. Thank you. Really. I mean that."
"What?" he said. "You're in a fucked up situation. Nothing I can say will help it. What do you want me to do, tell you everything is going to be alright? You've got a woman from Arizona sleeping on our doorstep. There's not much to be said, you know?"
"Shit... Yeah, I know," I replied, "I just... I have no idea how to handle this."
Mike looked at me for a moment. "You're going to talk to her, aren't you?"
It was nice to skip past all the bullshit and just get right to the point for once. "Yeah... I think I have to."
"You don't HAVE to," he said. "You could just go upstairs and pretend she doesn't exist..."
"Yeah, and then Juan gets up tomorrow and finds her sleeping on our doorstep and chases her off with a broom," I answered. "Probably not the best way to end things..."
"Well, it'd certainly end it..." Mike replied. "But you're right, you can't just leave her out there."
"Yeah, well... Is it a good idea?" I asked, implying that I was going to talk with her.
"It's no worse than anything else you've done so far, so, like... Fuck it." He patted me on the shoulder and ushered me toward the door.
Following his lead, I turned and opened it. Jessica jerked involuntarily to the sound, but then regained her sense of isolation and her entitlement to it, and with that she forced her eyes away from me.
"You... You okay?" I said.
"What do you care?" she said through her sniffles.
I didn't really have an answer. "So, like... What are you going to do?" I asked.
"What CAN I do?" she cried. "I don't have any money for a hotel room, and even if I did, I have no idea where a payphone is so I can't call a cab. And you're a TOTAL DICK so I can't use your phone..."
"Oh, come on..." I barely got to say.
"NO!" she screamed. She continued saying "no" as she fumbled around and stood up, discovering slightly too late that her left leg had fallen asleep - but that didn't deter her. She was a trooper and fought right through the pain so that she could, you know... Stand up and yell at me.
"You are SUCH a prick," she said, throwing her finger into my chest. "You pretend to be all supportive and helpful; you pretend you have my best interest at heart, and then you call me fucking CRAZY to your asshole friends..."
"Look, that was taken out of context..."
"How can crazy be taken out of context?!?" she barked.
"Like... I mean..." I immediately began constructing an argument based on how I said it was a crazy move, not that SHE was crazy, but I couldn't bring myself to lie. So I danced around the subject and brought up as many other subjects as I could to try to lighten the impact of calling her crazy, which had the same result as switching from a baseball bat to a pillow to lighten the impact of hitting a hornet's nest.
We argued for a good ten minutes. Then she cried for three. Then we argued for another seven. Then some crying, and some apologizing, and then some acquiescence, and then, the inevitable:
"So can I stay here then?" she asked.
I sighed.
I turned around.
I opened the door.
Mike was standing there.
"You know, Juan's going to freak if you invite her in," he said, reading it on my face before I could even tell him what was up.
"You're right, but what am I supposed to do? Just leave her out there?"
Mike looked at me as plainly as he's ever looked at me at any point in my life. "Yes," he said.
"Hey, fuck you!" Jessica said from behind me.
"Hey now!" I said, whipping around to face her, "Chill out!"
"He's being a dick!" she said.
"Whatever, ignore him," I said. I turned back to face Mike. I looked at him and narrowed my eyes. "Would
you?"
He studied me like a cookie. "Probably not," he finally answered.
I walked Jessica up to my bedroom. "You can sleep here," I said, showing her the bed.
"Uh, no she can't," I heard from the end of the hall. Mike had gone to break the news to Juan, who had come to break some news of his own.
"Dude... She has no place else to go..."
"How about the Salvation Army?" he said.
"Come on..."
"No, seriously, dude? Crazy McBatshit can't stay here."
"What did you just call me?" Jessica screamed.
"You deaf?" Juan asked. "You're standing five feet away from me, and you couldn't hear me clearly?"
"Okay, STOP," I demanded. "Juan - she's sleeping in my room tonight. You can lock your door if you want."
"But what about --" he said, just about to bring up the downstairs television and Nintendo and other things that could be stolen.
"She can't take a TV on the plane," I replied. "Just chill, okay? Jessica?" I turned to face her. "You're going to sleep in there, and come eight tomorrow morning, you're taking a cab to the airport. Alright?"
"Fine," she said, marching into the room and slamming the door behind her.
Juan looked at me in disbelief for allowing a stalker to sleep in our house. Mike looked at me in disbelief for snapping at Juan. I looked at the floor in disbelief that this was even happening.
"You know, I'm not even going to come to your funeral when she stabs you in your sleep tonight," Juan said as he returned to his room and, like Jessica, slammed the door behind him. He followed it up with the tiny, piercing 'CLICK!' of the lock on his doorknob.
"Well," I said to Mike, "This certainly isn't going to go away anytime soon..."
"Yeah... Expect to take over his chores for the rest of the month," Mike replied as he retired to his room and, quite refreshingly, closed his door softly.
I walked into my office and pulled out the futon, and then grabbed a notebook and began scribbling furiously in it. I was angry that I had to start a new notebook, as my current journal was sitting on the shelf in my bedroom along with the rest of my old journals and notebooks and sketchbooks... But I wasn't about to go knock on the door and ask for it. The mild dissatisfaction of having to write off about 20 unfinished pages in the last one was much preferred to whapping the hornets nest with another pillow.
I won't lie - the entire night, I fully expected to hear a knock on my office door. I believed with all my heart that Jessica was going to interrupt my post-midnight writing session to tell me how sorry she was, or how she couldn't sleep, or how she hated my guts... I knew that, at any moment, she'd lightly tap and ask to sneak in so we could talk things out, and I'd tell her how there's nothing to talk about, and she'd reply that there most certainly was and slowly let the sleeve on her oversized shirt slip down her left shoulder...
But I'd be strong. It didn't matter how much this chick wanted me, I didn't need a crazy, older woman banging on my door and then banging me. No sir. Didn't need that. Didn't WANT that. Not at all. Not even slightly... Okay, well, slightly. But not enough to go through with it... Certainly not enough to get caught doing it by Juan or Mike... So if we DID do it - which I probably wouldn't have - we'd have to be very quiet... It'd have to be slow and silent and--
*KNOCK KNOCK*
My head shot up from my notebook. Slowly, I walked over to the door. Quietly, I opened it to find Jessica standing there. "Joe..." she whispered.
"Go back to bed, Jessica," I replied.
"But I..."
"Go," I said, shutting the door.
Fantasy or no fantasy, I wasn't THAT stupid.
I didn't sleep a wink that night for fear that she might knock again, or jump out of a window, or set the house on fire. Eight o'clock came, and with it, the slamming of my bedroom door. I heard some clunking and thumping on the stairs in the hallway, followed by the opening and slamming of the front door of the house. I sat up on my futon and walked over to the window to see a taxi cab sitting in the driveway; a thirty-five year old Arizona woman climbing into the back seat. She looked up at the window I was staring out of, raised her right hand, and extended her middle finger. And like every other door she'd come in contact with in the past twelve hours, she slammed the cab door as it backed out of our driveway and took Jessica out of my life forever.
With a heavy sigh, I flopped onto my futon and slept more restfully than I had in a good, long while.
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