The Worst Xian 12

"So what are we doing tonight?" Zoe wiped sweat sticky bangs from her eyes. Her skin glowed with an intensity her voice dripped with a hunger, even through the glaze of her buzz.

"Aside from more of this." Her hand softly fondled my balls. Insatiable as ever she tended to only give up after I had passed out. Not that I needed prodding, ever since I had set eyes upon her in the hospital cafeteria I had wanted to get her in bed. Indeed, she had turned out to be even better than I hoped.

A dancer with a Fix habit, I had expected her to be a one time thing. Roll with her, then go home. She had turned out to be more than beautiful, soft, and yielding. She was witty and smart with dangerous sharp edges. A sliver of obsidian or lead crystal. Beautiful and fragile, faceted and dangerous.

I reached off the edge of the bed for my drink. The ice had melted leaving it a half gin, half water mix.

"Fuck. Tonight?"

"Of course we're going to fuck." She climbed on top of me and pressed her forehead against mine. "But aside from that."

I wrapped my arms around her narrow waist and rolled her over. My large hands holding her thin wrists to the bed with ease.

It would be easy to describe Zoe as having a boy-ish build. Her hips and shoulders narrow, her breasts small, her waist short. Yet it would be impossible to mistake her for a boy. She was milk pale, her muscles well toned, but soft and fluid under her skin.

Underneath me her bangs clung in slick strands to her long lashes. Even with the drug on, her iris' thin gray ringlets against dilated distant pupils, hunger and lust streamed through. Her septum ring lay softly against her skin, its niobium and black as stark against her snowy skin as her soft jet hair. Normally she wore Cherry-Black lip paint, apparently smear and smudge proof only applies to kissing above the waist.

"I made plans with my friend Dan and his girl Leesa. We're going to grab dinner with them, then head somewhere for booze and trouble."

"Can't we cause trouble here?" Zoe purred, and wrapped her legs around my waist. She was deceptively strong, a benefit of dancing most every night. She tightened her grip and I could feel her slick wetness against me.

"You must have really missed me."

"And you better have missed me," she replied, clamping her thighs tight. Her eyes narrowed, her lips parted. The tip of her tongue stuck out from between her teeth, her own little bit of violent crazy surfacing.

"Just how many girls have you had over here lately?" Again her thighs tightened. Despite her anger she was wet and slick against me, making me hungry.

"Just Nenagh." Her legs tightened enough to make me groan.

"And who is Nina." Her legs had become vice tight around me. It took all my strength to keep her from crushing tighter.

"Just a joke," I groaned. "Just a joke. Nenagh's my central. Say hello Nenagh."

A soft hello emanated from the speakers about the room.

Zoe's thighs released their python grip. I crashed down on the bed next to her, my breath an exhausted rush.

"Evil fucker."

I rolled off the bed and finished my watered down gin. While I had missed Zoe's body, I had not missed her mood swings, or her tendency for violent post coital bouts of jealousy

"We should clean up, we're supposed to meet Dan in a couple hours."

I went to the kitchen for a drink, rubbing my sides, giving Zoe a chance to cool down.

Zoe went to the bathroom while I fixed my drink. I had decided to get a good buzz on before leaving. If Zoe didn't like Lessa it would be a very long night. Despite the loose wiring I still enjoyed watching the slight swing to her naked hips as she passed.

The phone rang. I picked the closest shirt off the floor and went to answer it.

"Jack your home! I was expecting your messenger." My mom smiled cynically out at me from the screen. "It's good to get you for a change."

The bathroom doorknob rattled. "Hold on mom." I slapped the hold switch before she could respond. Zoe emerged from the bathroom, wide eyed, bare breasted.

"Stay in the kitchen, my moms on the line."

Zoe squinted angrily as I threw a not so clean shirt at her. I clicked the line back on. My mother was facing away from the screen, talking to someone else

"Your father wants to know how your leg is." My father's torso passed into the frame behind her. He bowed a little so I could see him, smiled, waved, and walked on.

"Tell him it's fine. Matter of fact, I might have to reassess my opinion of who the best doctor I know is. Dr. Croze has really given him a run. I mean, rehabbing with dad was fun, but that t Croze is one mean reconstructor."

My mother laughed. "I assume you want a birthday present, so I won't tell him you said that." It was good to see her smiling. Too many of our conversations lacked smiles and laughter.

"I just called to remind you about your appointment with Dr. Keller tomorrow."

I sighed involuntarily. "That man is no Dr. Croze."

In the kitchen dishes rattled. Zoe came into my peripheral vision, still naked, carrying a glass of ice and a mostly full bottle of Jack Daniels. She sat down on a folding chair, outside of the camera's eye, and set the bottle lasciviously between her naked thighs. She dipped her fingers in to the glass and plucked a cube, which she pressed to her lips.

"I don't know what you have against him. He seems nice enough, and is highly though of in his profession."

I tried not to watch Zoe do things with the ice cube that she had done with me earlier.

"She," started. "I mean he's a psychiatrist." Zoe slid the cube down her neck, so Madigliani long and pale. Brought it to her breasts, circled her nipples, making them stand. A soft pink blush spreading across her aureoles as they contracted.

"I mean fuh..." I caught myself. "Uhm, I mean, I'm sure he's a great guy. I'm certain he doesn't beat his wife, or kick puppies or anything, but he's a psychiatrist. A wanna be philosopher. A person whose job it is to muck about in other peoples brain. My brain! Despite having a head full of bad wiring himself."

I caught site of Zoe slipping the ice cube between her thighs. Her entire body shuddered as it entered into her.

"You ever think that, just maybe, you need this. That this is good for you?" My mother, a long time practitioner of medicine, found this conversation tiresome. I found it tiresome also, but more because it was the hundredth odd time that we had had it. I think it fundamentally bothered her that I hated a form of medicine.

"Actually I did one time. I thought to myself 'Self. Maybe the doctor colonel is correct. Maybe wanting to shoot people is a sane thing, and my aversion to it shows some fundamental and dangerous flaw in my being.'" My mother scowled through the screen. Zoe dropped the ice cube with a laugh.

"But then I sobered up and thought, hey, maybe lunatics are running the asylum."

"Do you hate him just because he was in the military?"

"Do I need another reason?" I rubbed my eyes. "If I do add that he's a psychiatrist and a fascist."

Zoe began to lose her shit. Naked aroused and doubled over with stifled laughter.

"Listen, I'm sorry." I shook my head slowly. "I'll go see Keller tomorrow. I'll even pretend not to hate him, OK?" She smiled weakly. "Let's just let this go. This isn't about us, or between us and I don't want to fight with you."

My mother nodded. Zoe had stopped laughing and stood up, and was drinking the Jack straight from the bottle. Her eyes gleaming with a refocused lust.

"I've really got to go. Love to you and dad."

"We love you to."

********

"Shit, how long have we been drinking?"

On my arm Zoe made me feel like a million. Invulnerable. The envy of every man in the room. I remembered the night's back home, going to see her dance. Nights sipping over priced beers in the dim bar light. Nights slipping dollars into her garter as she split, spun, and ground to her two songs. The other men sitting in the dark. Fastidiously staring at her as she strutted and spread.

Loners were careful not too look around at the other men, sitting near the stage, except to nod their head in some fucked up brotherhood of misogyny. The men, in groups, mostly frat, or meshbacks types, slapping each other's backs. Proclaiming how they would fuck her, or just salivating over those long lean legs. The legs, not of some supermodel, but of the girl in your high school algebra class. The girl who powered your early and fierce desires for the soft dream of flesh.

Then there was me...

Usually alone in the back corner, sniping with the bartender. She was too overweight to dance, and too underdressed for any other bar. She was a girl who knew the real deal, and did not water down my gin and tonics because of it.

Then Zoe would come on. I would move to the stage, sit far too one side. I'd watch her slink and writhe; skin alive under the liquid lights. I'd watch the men acting out their testosterone fueled rituals and commit it to memory to write about later. I'd watch the fuckers who believed that their tips of ones and fives and tens were paying for more than a glimpse, but for a grope or a spill. But I knew Zoe pure. She was many things impure but a prostitute wasn't one of them. Those men you had to watch. I had seen there spurned advances turn to wrath and violence; a special type of black evil.

Knowing she was coming home with me allowed em to step up and slip seed singles in to her garter with pride. At the end of the night they would all go home pissed off, frustrated and wanking. Zoe and I would stumble back to her pad, pilled, shocked, drunk and fed. A fight and a roll. A fight, a licking clean, sleep, wake.

At night, in bed, the drugs and alcohol played loose and slow as they ebbed after the hours of passion she would stare at me. I would lie still, remembering the little deaths, and waiting for deaths brother, Sleep, to embrace me. In those tiny sleep deprived moments of silence and fish tank hum I would open my eyes and look at her.

"You're the most beautiful girl I know. I've always dreamt of someone like you."

Her eyes went cold and gray that night, riddled with hate and violence born of love. "I've always wanted someone who treats me like you do. I never wanted to love you." Her eyelids fluttered in the dark, blinking back pain. "You made me love you."

Music pounded as I poured another beer from the pitcher. Dan and Leesa were wrapped around one another, his charcoal suit a simple contrast of void space compared to her bass jacket. With ten different kinds of black Smoke, Ice, Carbon, India, Grease, Midnight, Blue, Laxx, Gummi, and Heat it amplified the clubs music in the subsonic range. The jacket pulsed the sound through her, affecting her basic body rhythms, matching them to the music.

"How long have we been drinking?" I shouted again A bar back came through and cleared the carnage of empty glasses and pitchers from the table. Dan's watch flared aqua blue.

"5 hours."

Leesa laughed loudly. Her voice cut through the Victory Versus Violence playing through the walls. Zoe smiled, her lips spreading wide in an ear to ear grin. Hype under the Jack over ice.

"Fuck ma, I've never been to one of these places." Dan's head swerved side to side, as goths, goffs, vamps revenants, and stray p-beaters surged about the room. Currents of music and conversations flowed them about us, the dancefloor, and the bar. He grinned in a viciously happy manner. He knew most of the people here thought of him as an outsider, a mundane. Yet there he sat his super grl on his arm, serious old school friends at his side.

A Shrek gave us the evil eye. His rat like teeth caught the light unpleasantly.

"Fuck, I could deal with being in places like this a lot less."

Zoe flipped the shrek the finger to a chorus of our jeers.

"Fuck"

"Yeah"

"Fuck!"

"Woohoo."

"'Nother round!"

********

"If you don't mind, doc, I have a killer headache."

Keller tapped his note pad and the transcendental music disappeared.

"Thanks." I rubbed my temples, as Keller smiled softly. He did everything softly. He asked questions softly, condescended softly, and hated me softly.

"So, James." My skin crawled at the sound of my full name. It brought back memories all kinds of bad high school teachers. "You've been out drinking."

"Yes, very, very much.

"Do you think that drinking excessively is going to get you through this section of your life?"

"Honestly, doc, I think that drinking heavily is the only thing getting me through this part of my life." I coughed my head ached dully. "'Cuz, frankly, you aren't doing much."

After leaving Stab, and parting paths with Dan and Leesa, Zoe and I had gone home to fuck and drink until dawn. I imagined how she must be at that moment, passive and asleep. Meanwhile I had to suffer my hangover and deal with Dr. Keller. How I longed to be naked and curled next to her warm soft body.

"So how is it helping?"

"I haven't beaten anyone to death with a blunt object yet. I think that's pretty good."

Keller grimaced. His square jaw flexed, seeming to chew at gristle stuck in the back of his teeth. "Seriously James."

"OK then, seriously." I stretched out further on the couch. Several psychiatrists had told me it was un-necessary to lie on a couch. But the idea of sitting through a session did not appeal to me. Laying gave me the option of staring at the ceiling rather then looking at the shrink.

"Last time I was home with my sister and her kids we were sitting around playing board games. During one game I held back and helped my nephew win; let him beat me. He immediately became insufferable. Then he won a second round and got worse. At that point I swore that I would simply crush this kid at the next round.

I rolled onto my side and gestured furiously at him. "So here I am," I clawed my hands. "Playing board games with no other thought in my mind but to destroy a five year old child. To devastate him at some stupid fucking game."

I sighed. "What does that say about me?"

Keller shifted in his seat. The Doctor Colonel was a man of size, bulk and cheap suits. His suits were heavy. Not silk, not microfibre, not even cotton, they wore heavy. The folded heavy. They even seemed to take up room many times that of which they actually did. Suits so dense the warped space around him.

"What do you think it says about you?"

I bit my tongue till I thought it would bleed.

"You know, just once I'd like you to answer one of my questions with a statement. Some day maybe, you could answer me with something other than another question."

Keller's stylus scratched against his pad.

I sighed.

"Fine." I always thought speaking ones mind was supposed to make them feel better. Yet everything I said to Keller, no matter how honest, just made me feel worse. "It mad me crazy. Made me feel like nothing. But I just wanted the kid to shut up. I hate bad winners, even if they are only five."

"You dislike children." It was one of Keller's non-sequiter questions. A poke for no particular reason.

"No, actually I love kids. I wouldn't mind having a few of my own some day."

Keller sipped his coffee from a delicate cup, made all the more delicate looking by his blunt fingers and thick hands. "Someday? Perhaps when you meet that special girl?"

"I've already met her." The words came out hoarsely, my throat trying to choke them to death before they could see the light of day. It was far too early and I felt far too hungover top deal with this line of questioning.

"The girl you were with last night?" The light rapping of stylus against pad. "Zoe"

I hate you

"No, not Zoe."

"Do you think I'm going to kill myself?"

I heard the light click of Keller's bone china cup against the marble-topped side table. The air in the office was still and silent for long seconds. I could feel the air, treated, synthetically pure and false, as I drew it into my lungs. I stared at the ceiling.

"No." His voice was cautious and measured. "Not really." I imagined him sitting there squinting at me across the luxuriously appointed office. Something vaguely loathsome on the leather clad dissection table. Right now he was fidgeting with the pins holding me open trying to get a better look at something, as yet unknown deep on the inside.

"Then why am I here?" For the first time in the session I sat up and looked at Keller, straight in the eye. "That's why I'm here isn't it?"

"Everyone was pissed. Everyone was worried. I was this danger. 'A danger to myself and others' endquote. 'Poor Jack. Poor Jack's all fucked up.' Y'all thought I was going to kill myself, that I needed help. If I'm no longer a danger to myself then why am I here?"

Keller cleared his throat, and shifted to stare at me more directly. "There are still the underling issues; especially with how you handle your problems." Keller set his pad and stylus aside, next to his coffee. "You run away from your problems. You do it every day around here with your drugs and alcohol. It's no different than what you did in the troop carrier.

Bile seethed in me. Crawling painfully sluggishly and uncontrollably up my throat.

"Fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you." I stood up, my mouth feeling like a tight ugly scar across my face."

"I faced my problem! I may not have solved it in a manner you'd approve of, but I did it. And I took responsibility for it." Keller sat impassive.

"Maybe my solution was to run, but nobody paid for it except me and I paid. I didn't bitch once. I know you sit there thinking I'm some kind of seditious coward. It kills you, just looking at me kills you. Well don't fucking worry about it, I'm out of here. I'm leaving and I'm not coming back."

I snatched my jacket off an adjacent chair and headed for the door. Keller began to rise.

"Now, James."

Keller's office door slammed in a very satisfying manner. His secretary, Tian, looked at me with well meaning dark eyes. She had listened to more than one heated exchange between the good doctor colonel and I. A couple sitting on a couch stared in much more surprise. I turned back to the still vibrating door.

"And don't fucking call me James!"