Coffee Story
We are having coffee, I say “we” but I really just meant Susan. Susan is having coffee. I say “having coffee” but I really mean she is pushing her spoon round and round that cup the way she does only when it's not just coffee keeping her up at night. The rim of the glass has her lipstick on it. Kind of a maroon color. I hate maroon. I hate her more. She looks at me. I smile. She smiles. I hate smiling at her. I finish watching this little hand dance that she performed and proceed to look around the store. At all the books behind the counter. Then I feel her fingers slipping a little white pill into my hand.
"This is what you wanted right?" she hissed.
"What?" I say with the slightest moment of hesitation.
She twists her fingers back across the table again to the cup where her maroon lips kissed the side of the rim.
"Go on."
She knows me to well, she is a siren calling my ship into the rocks. I fear the worst, that I will lose control of my body, break apart as if I was made of wax. Instead I remain nearly motionless until my thumb finds the pill in my palm. I pop the pill into my mouth and swallow then stick my open my mouth and stick out my tongue like I am at the doctors.
The rest is a blur of thoughts and shapes. I awake to the sound of water dripping next to my head. Dripping from an air conditioner working too hard on a summer day. My head is reeling, my body feels like someone took a baseball bat to it, and there she lies, motionless. I stifle my gasp. No memories of how I got to this place, remember damn it. I stand but the motion makes me feel nauseous. I gag on my own spit-up. Then the smell hits me. The smell of candles and incense. "Susan?" No response. I slide over to her, bending slowly to her chest, listening, hoping, begging that there be something there to hear. What did she slip me? Nothing. Her skin is cold against my cheek.
"Oh, god." I say lightly to myself. She looks like a wounded bird fallen from the nest, just cold and motionless with her arms flung over her body as if turning in her sleep. I hold my breath as if it would help something. To hear someone in her bedroom other than myself. Nothing.