Aftermath
My best friend and coworker Kegs—pronounced Keegs, a shortening of his last name Kegels, which we busted his balls about almost daily—was bouncing slightly as he blew into his cupped hands. He looked like a kid who had to pee really bad. It was only five in the morning and the sun hadn’t risen yet, causing a crisp chill in the morning air. Standing cross-armed, I turned my attention from Kegs and stared at our students as they gathered and huddled together, talking quietly where Kegs and I couldn’t hear. I had no doubt they were talking shit about us. They thought we were assholes. Good. I wanted them to think that. My job wasn’t to coddle them and give everyone a trophy for participation. My job was to teach them how to protect their client and themselves. A few of the students would fail this course. Security at this level wasn’t meant for everyone. And that’s why we pushed and messed with them when they fucked up. Helped them grow a pair. This job could be life or death for them. We took that shit seriously.
Kegs stopped bouncing long enough to speak. “You look cheery this morning,” he noted, the sarcasm evident in his tone.
I grunted, “Yeah, yeah.” Apparently, it was obvious I wasn’t in the best of moods. By the time I’d gotten home the night before it was close to 2 a.m. I was running on about two hours of sleep, and had the evening with Hannah been enjoyable, my sleep deprivation would have been worth it. But it wasn’t. She was nuts. I’d had time to think about it the whole drive home after she pushed me out her door. And it pissed me off. Because she was also cool and funny. Sexy even, if I didn’t count the whole mace incident where she looked like a blind, half-drowned raccoon by the end of it. But the good times were small in comparison to the rest of the drama that took place. I shouldn’t have been thinking about her. Normally, I’d wipe a loony woman from my mind faster than I could blink. So why was I still thinking about this one?
“What’s with you?” Kegs snickered, continuing to rub his hands together.
“Long night, bro,” I grumbled. “Very long night.”
“Oh yeah. You had a date last night. How’d it go?” I couldn’t help but chuckle. I wasn’t even sure how to quite describe it to him. “Was she hot?”
“Yeah.” I chuckled again.
Narrowing his eyes at me, he quirked his mouth into a questioning smile. “What’s so funny? You get laid? Was she a freak in bed?”
This time I bent over and full-on laughed. “No, man. Definitely not. No action whatsoever. But I will say it’s a date I will never forget.”
After explaining the details of the previous night’s happenings, we were both laughing. “Damn, dude. Poor lady.” He shook his head. “She sounds like a piece of work. And you deserve a medal for lasting as long as you did.” Yeah, I really did.
Zipping up my jacket, I let out a long exhale. “She was something, all right.”
“Hey, at least she was hot,” he offered.
I smirked as I thought about her. “Yeah, she was a looker.” I sighed, disappointment setting in that she couldn’t have been more leveled.
“You met her on that dating app?” he asked before jamming his hands in his pockets.
“Yeah.”
“Now see. There’s your problem. Women in that age group aren’t that hot and single. And if they are, it means there’s a reason, and that reason is usually they’re batshit crazy,” he laughed. Giving me a hard slap on the back that made me grunt, he added, “Well at least you saw the crazy right out of the gate, bruh. You’ve only wasted one night on her, saved yourself a lot of time and effort.”
As he walked away, yelling at our students to line up, I nodded. He was right. I’d only lost one night. “Forget about her,” I mumbled to myself. “You don’t need that chaos in your life.”
It was after seven by the time I left work that evening. My eyes burned with exhaustion, and it was all I could do to keep them open on the way home. I needed some damn sleep. When I parked my truck in the driveway and cut the engine, I grabbed my bag from the passenger seat, but stopped when I saw something pink on the floorboard.
Hannah’s scarf.
Closing my eyes, I growled in annoyance. She’d left her scarf, not even thinking about it in her vision crisis. Leaning over, I stretched my arm out and managed to grab it, pulling it to me as I righted in my seat. Before I knew it, I was holding it to my face, inhaling it. It smelled sweet and clean. It smelled like her. With a jerk of my hand, I tossed it aside, leaving it in the passenger seat before I climbed out of the truck. I was smelling her scarf. If I was going to go smelling a woman’s clothing, why hers? I didn’t want her. It had to be my exhaustion. There was no other explanation for it.
After a quick shower, I climbed into bed when my phone chimed indicating I had a text. It was Kegs.
Kegs: They want us in a 5 a.m.
Me: All right. See you then.
My job required long days and sometimes weeks without a day off. It made it tough to date and try to turn anything into a real relationship. Women like attention and unfortunately giving it to them requires time, which was something I was short on. But my job was important to me—and I didn’t just mean monetarily, even though I did get paid well. I had been offered this position because I was one of the best at what I did. Chosen to train young men and women to be like me. I was proud of my life and work, even before I took the position at Morrison. I’d served this country as a marine, fighting beside some of the best men and women I’d ever known. It was my greatest honor. They say work isn’t everything, but to me, it was. My dedication, success, and accomplishments were what made me who I was. Some people couldn’t appreciate that. That was their loss. I couldn’t deny I was rigid, stoic even. Even abrasive. I rarely showed emotion and had little tolerance for those who did. It wasn’t because I thought I was better than anyone, or that I lacked feelings, it was that I had trained myself to overcome obstacles and setbacks. When people feel, they tend to let those feelings hinder them; stop them from fighting on to reach their goals. Women especially weren’t crazy about my lack of emotion. Which was perhaps why I was in my late thirties and still single. I hadn’t found one that could either deal with it or found a way to break it out of me, if that was even possible, which I wasn’t sure that it was.
Before I switched my phone off, I scrolled through and tapped on my photos. The first picture to pop up was the one I had wanted to see. It was of Hannah from the night before. The bright scarf wrapped around her head and face, only revealing her dark eyes, was a great shot. Even though her mouth was covered you could still see the smile in her gaze.
Letting out a loud sigh, I scrubbed my face roughly with my free hand. “Goddammit, Wren,” I muttered. I didn’t want to do what I was about to do. But I had to. I just had to.
I texted her.
Me: Want to have a do-over?