All worked up...Covenant Series, Book Six...
The bathroom, that temple of soft white lights and cool, cool surfaces. The ivory throne with its waiting retinue of beige tiles. He sets his phone up for music mode and lets those tiny speakers fill the sacred space with the howls of some incipient cretin who died from a pure dose of the constant altar offering back when he was still in love with Elizabeth.
Even whispering that name inside the confines of his own thick skull feels like pushing on the plunger after the stingers sunk. It’s only memory, hardly cheating. It shouldn’t feel wrong but it does. Hanna doesn’t deserve to play second string to a woman half a century in the ground, and mostly, she doesn’t.
There are times though, times like this where a worn-out junkie fuck gets to feeling real down lonely, so lonely he just wants someone to sink the needle with and well…memories make do. Memories like all those times they fixed together and fucked each other’s brains out, or just held one another and fell asleep, or woke up pushing against each other in the desert heat knowing that it was better to sweat and moan in discomfort than shift and risk choking on your own vomit.
Yeah, sweet dreams. Dreams like looking at the love of your life, the worry lines around her mouth, the crow’s feet dug in around her eyes. Seeing how hungrily she looks at you as she dies slowly, carrying herself off one plunge at a time while you live on, mean and evergreen like a sesame street muppet full of piss and shit.
Elizabeth. The love of his life. The one. The girl who could stand up and take it and go there and do all those things with you right up until she fucking couldn’t anymore. No, no reason to feel like its cheating to think about her now, not at all.
Randall cooks and gets the needle set and cooled just enough not to do any real damage while he peels dirty socks off of filthy feet looking for a spot that isn’t deflated and completely worn out.
You know, the fucking super hero lifestyle?
Of course, you do you’ve chugged along so far, what’s a little more?
“That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question?” Randall moans at his reflection in the mirror as he finishes dosing, he laughs at the ugly apparition in the mirror and points at it with the hypodermic in his hand. “Double or nothing, you miserable son of a bitch!”
The asshole with the black pits for eyes has nothing funny to add so he gets tired of looking in the mirror and turns away as the music settles the argument for him. Someone is shouting about Coca-Cola wars and it all seems fitting as the reality of living in post-communist Cuba comes crashing in.