If I'm Honest Ch. 09

Here's where shit started to get really strange.

After she licked my dick clean, and believe me, she was thorough, she moved to sit me back down on the edge of the bed, careful to avoid any of the large wet spot she'd made from squirting earlier, then moved over to her purse.

"You were actually a great fuck, Deke, which I wouldn't have thought when I first looked at you," she said, reaching into her purse, pulling out her cell phone, setting it down on the table. "But if I'm honest, I was going to fuck you no matter what."

The next thing she took out of the purse was a.38 special, which she set down next to the phone, and at that point, I was starting to get nervous.

Finally, she reached into her purse one more time and pulled out a pair of handcuffs, moving back over towards the bed. I remember thinking to myself that I could probably get to the gun before she could, but before I could spring my plan into action, she put the handcuffs on one of her wrists and then the other, and sat down on the bed.

"How much money do you have on you right now, Deke?" she asked, sliding back on the bed until her back was against the headboard, her makeup still running from the sweat and tears of our sexual activity. "Were you telling the truth, or are you really some kind of high roller?"

"I... I think there's $300 in my wallet, and my credit cards have got, like, ten grand limits on them?"

She sighed. "Fuck. I knew you were small potatoes, but you were the only fish in that bar all night long, and a girl's got to make her money somehow. If I'm honest, my boyfriend and I do this thing a couple of times a week. I lure some guy up to a hotel room, fuck him, and then he storms in and robs the guy. That's why I didn't fully close and lock the door. You just need to send the word 'now' to the first person in the message list, and he'll come running in here, but he's only going to have a knife, and you're going to have my.38 special, because if I'm honest, we need to stop this kind of shit. I'm sick of fucking strangers just to score. There's a second pair of handcuffs in there, and once he's in here, you can figure out what to do with us."

I moved off the bed and grabbed the gun. It felt heavy in my hand, and I know enough about revolvers to be able to open the chamber and check it, and sure enough, it was loaded, five rounds and one spent shell casing. With that in my right hand, I grabbed the cellphone with my left hand, and it was unlocked, so I could see the top name in the message list was "Vinnie" and the last several messages just said "NOW." They were timestamped at around 2 a.m. at various days over the last few weeks. There must've been dozens of them. I put her phone down on top of the table for a moment. I glanced inside the purse, and sure enough, there was a second set of handcuffs, so I pulled them out and set them on the table.

I pulled my pants up, zipped them closed and rebuttoned them, as I considered my options, not really liking any of my options. Unsure entirely what to do, I pulled out my own cellphone and set it on the table, turning on the voice memo recording app. Then I picked her phone back up, the beginnings of a plan in place.

I typed the word "NOW" into the phone and sent the message, and stepped back into the corner, as moments later, the door burst open and a guy ran into the room, a big knife in his hand as he rushed towards the bed. As soon as he saw Olivia-3, he turned to look around the room, and I leveled the gun in his direction.

It was the fucking bartender.

"Sit down, champ," I said to him. "And drop the knife."

"Fuck," he muttered as he let the knife fall to the floor and moved to sit on the edge of the bed. I didn't feel at all bad that he sat down right on the wet spot. "What happened, baby?"

"He got the drop on me," she lied. "He found the gun and he knows what we were planning."

"He's drunk enough I could probably--"

I cocked the gun and he shut up quickly.

"You aren't half as good a bartender as you think you are, Vinnie," I told him. "I'm not that drunk. And I'm betting this whole 'jealous boyfriend robbery' thing was your idea, because it's got, like, a million things that could've gone wrong. Shit, I don't even have much worth robbing."

"Yeah, well, usually it's more of a blackmail thing, where I come in taking pictures of my girl and some dude she's lured up here, and we threaten to send the pictures to his wife unless he pays us."

"Told you I didn't have a wife," I said to Olivia-3.

"Hoped you might've been lying," she sighed.

"Besides," Vinnie said, "ain't nobody else come into the bar tonight who met the profile, so we figured we'd take you for what we could get. Rich motherfucker like you's always got shit worth pawning. Watch. Phone. Jewelry."

"Grab Vinnie's wallet out of his pocket for him and toss it over here," I told her, and she complied, making it easy for me to catch it with my left hand and set it down on top of the table.

"All said and done, even if you took me for everything I had on me, including the suit, it's barely more than a few grand."

"Still enough to get a couple of eight balls," Vinne grumbled.

I grabbed the other handcuffs with my left hand, tossing them over to him. "Cuff your wrists together, interlocked with your girlfriend there."

"What's your play here, man?" the guy asked me, as he did as he was told.

I slowly uncocked the pistol, setting the hammer gently down so as to not set off the weapon. Then I reached into the purse with my left hand and found the little wallet in there, removing it as I looked at the driver's license. "Ruby Alexopoulos," I said, pulling the license from its little plastic holder. So she was Greek. "Why 'Olivia?'"

"Sounded expensive," she said to me.

I set the license down on the table top then opened up the wallet, finding the bartender's license. "Vincent Fernandez," I said, taking his driver's license, setting it on top of Ruby's. His wallet had about eighty bucks in cash in it, probably his share of tips from the shift down at the bar he'd just finished a little bit ago, so I took that out and tucked it into my pocket. "Here's what we're going to do, you two. I'm going to excuse myself and leave you two here handcuffed to one another. At some point, probably tomorrow, room service is going to find out and let you out, unless you two can find a way to get yourselves out of here after I'm gone." I picked up both of their driver's licenses and tucked them into my pocket. "Now, I know you're thinking to yourselves, 'we'll just tell the cops that this guy robbed us,' but the problem is that I have a recording of you both admitting you were intending on robbing me on my cell phone here," I said, picking up my phone.

"Fuck. You couldn't have said something?" Vinnie said to her.

"Vinnie, I didn't--"

"Yeah, Vinnie," I said, "why don't you give the girl a break, huh? This is your shit plan to begin with. Do you know the stupidest thing about it? You work here. That means you're really easy for the cops to find. Your victims? They're travelers, so you don't know who or what you're getting into. See, I now have your IDs, meaning I know where you live, but me? I'm not even from this state. I've got friends who are, though, and they're going to watch the police reports and see if anyone else is getting robbed from this hotel. If they are, well, I'm just going to drop your driver's licenses and this recording to the hotel manager, and you two will be arrested so fast your heads will spin. One of the first rules about being a predator is that you do not shit where you eat."

"Like you know how to hunt shit," Vinnie spat at me.

I gave him a wolfish grin. "You know that if I pushed a pillow against the end of this gun and then pushed it against your chest and pull the trigger, it would mostly be quiet enough that I could just walk right out of here. So how about you shut your fucking hole?"

He glowered at me, but kept quiet at that point.

"Good, it is capable of learning. Let's hope the two of you learn from this little experience and reevaluate what you're doing, because being fucked up drug addicts trying to pull smash and grabs to get your next score isn't working out for you. And Ruby, honestly do you want to be with a guy who's encouraging you to fuck other guys so he can get his next fix out of it? Think about it." I shrugged a little, stopping the recording on my phone before tucking it into my pocket. "Seriously. Do better."

I slipped out of the room and into the hallway. About half way down the hallway was a chute to dump trash down, so I removed the bullets from the cylinder of the revolver, wrapped them in a napkin I stole off a used room service tray in the hallway and tossed them it down the chute before wiping my prints off the revolver, folding the napkin around it and pitching it in afterwards.

Fun night, the bracelet thought at me.

"Fuck you," I thought back at it.

I never saw either of them again, and my friend in NYC kept watch for reports of robberies at the hotel for six months before he gave up and we assumed they'd moved on. I like to think they got their lives in order.

About a month or so later, I made my last major fuckup, when I was at the Paramount Theater to see a band called Lesser Wednesdays, sort of a combination of shoegaze, EDM and Madchester. I was older than most of the people in the audience, but I've been used to that for the last several years, attending tons of shows where the average age of the concert goer might barely be of drinking age.

The Paramount's a nice place to see shows, and on this particular Saturday night I didn't have anywhere else to be so I'd actually showed up early enough to catch the opening acts. The first one was some little local folk artist who bored me to tears, but it was the second act, a sort of Blondie meets Evanescence neo-electro goth rock group called Titanium Graveyard.

The music was okay, but the frontwoman was this twenty-something Indian British woman who was dressed in fishnet stockings, a red and black plaid school girl skirt, a white sleeveless t-shirt stretched far too tight and a long Manchester United scarf hanging around her neck. Her name was Aisha and...

... and she looked incredible and she had this almost visceral domination over the audience in between songs, and I remember thinking to myself, "Could be fun."

That was when the bracelet decided to chime in.

C'mon man, you don't want to do this.

"I thought it was your job to get anyone I wanted to fuck me to actually fuck me so I could find out if they'd be a good match for me," I thought at it.

Sure, but maybe you want to let this one go, huh? I have a bad feeling about this one for you, and if you aren't going to look after yourself, maybe I have to for a while.

"You didn't warn me that the girl in the hotel bar was going to try and rob me last month," I thought.

I mean, fair, but I did stop her from actually robbing you. If you really want to go down this path, we can go down it, but afterwards, you're probably gonna wish that you hadn't. All I'm saying.

"Let me learn the hard way then."

It is your life that you're choosing to fill with these regrets.

Towards the end of their set, Aisha ran off stage real quick before running back on for their last number, a song she called "Fatal Drifter," and when that song kicked off, one of the bouncers tapped me on the shoulder and gestured for me to follow him, leading me behind the barricade and towards backstage.

As soon as I got backstage, Aisha and her band were starting to come off of it. She was saying something to the band that I couldn't hear as she grabbed me by the hand and pulled me towards the back of the venue. Her voice was tinged with a south London accent, and I could smell booze on her breath, even as she dragged me along. "Saw ya from th' stage, an' thought, he looks a spot of fun. 's your name, cutie?"

"Derrick, but most people call me Deke."

"Well Deke, I'm Aisha, but you kin call me 'thank you Mistress!'" she said with a laugh, as she pulled me out the back door of the venue and into the little alley behind it where the tour buses were parked. She kept pulling and banged her fist on the door of the tour bus to the right, and the driver opened the door, cocking his head at her. "Need it for like half an hour or so, Teddy, so keep watch, wouldja?"

The bus driver nodded, stepping out, making room for us to step onto it, and then he closed the door behind us, locking it, although I don't think he left, standing guard at the door, making sure none of the rest of the band came barging in before she was done with me.

"See, what's so bad about this?" I thought to the bracelet.

Oh just you wait.

"Lemme see what we're workin' with here," she said, dragging me the length of the tour bus to the very back, a number of bunk beds along the way, but the very back of the bus having a larger bed, clearly where Aisha as the frontwoman slept, so she didn't have to share space with her bandmates. She shoved me back onto the bed and then bent down to nearly rip open my jeans, fishing out my cock, giving it a few good strokes. "I think we kin work wit' that, don't you?"

I was about to say something when her other hand reached up and pushed one of her fingers to my lips. "Don't talk, Deke. You're too pretty to be allowed t' talk." She let go of my cock and used that hand to quickly lift up her skirt to flash me. "Looksee? No knickers! Ha ha!" Beneath the skirt, the stockings went up to her waist, but other than the fishnets, there was nothing covering her brown snatch, shaven clean, as she started to crawl over me. "You just lay back an' think of England, babes," she told me as she moved to straddle me, grabbing my cock to help her align it before she sank down on it with a throaty groan. "Oooooh yes, mama likes...." she purred.

At this point in my life, I was starting to be able to discern between a good fuck, a great fuck, a mediocre fuck and a bad fuck, and while Aisha wasn't a bad fuck, she certainly didn't seem to give much of a shit about my pleasure, and was way more focused on hers, although I guess as a star looping in what she thought was a groupie, she didn't have to be.

She bounced her cunt up and down on my cock for a while, tugging her tanktop inward to make her tits pop out, both of her deep brown nipples pierced with large gauge silver rings, and she grabbed a hand of mine up to make me tug on one of them, which only made her groan and squeal more.

For someone I expected got a lot of random sex, she got off extremely quick, orgasming on my cock in less than a couple of minutes, well before I'd gotten a go, not that she cared one bit. She climbed off me as soon as she was done, sliding to lay down next to me on her belly, her head turned to face me. "You're fun and all, but if I'm honest, I don't give a shit about other people, and I'd probably just leave ya with blue balls most nights."

"Shit," I remember thinking, "if this is the worst of it, it was bad, but not that bad..."

Wait for it...

"Also, if I'm truly honest, I ain't emotionally trusting enough for a relationship. You know that song, 'Fatal Drifter,' the one we was playin' before we came off stage? I wrote that about how one night after a gig in Manchester, I was drivin' back down to London, drunk in a funk, an' I hit some guy walkin' across the road in the dark. No idea if I killed him or not. Didn't stop. Jus' kept on drivin'. Think about tha' a lot, I do." She sat up suddenly, her hand coming from beneath the pillow with a switchblade in her hand, pushing the button to extend the knife suddenly, pointing it in my direction. "An' you're gonna keep your mouth shut about it, ain'tcha Deke?"

I nodded, unwilling to say anything.

"Good," she mumbled. "Now get th' fuck offa my bus."

I did my best to tuck my still hard cock into my pants, and shuffled towards the front, as Aisha's head slumped back down against the pillow and I think she passed out, although I didn't look back to see, because god help me, I just wanted off that fucking bus.

You'd think the fear of getting stabbed would've been enough to kill my erection, but apparently the fear kept the blood pumping, so I was terrified and worked up all at once, pale white fright and deep blue balls all competing for who got control.

I climbed off the bus and past the driver who was still standing there and headed towards the nearest alleyway exit, desperate to get to my car and get home. I staggered into my car, and then sat there, gripping the wheel for a few minutes, trying to rein in all that adrenaline coursing through my veins, when the bracelet decided to make sure I'd gotten the message.

Like I said, Deke, I'm just trying to help you. You believe me now?

"Shit, okay, okay, I get it," I thought.

Good. Now that we've gotten that shit out of your system, next weekend we'll go have a celebration, a sort of last hurrah before we get down to the real work of getting you a wife, okay? And since you've been a good sport about all of this, I'll make sure it's the kind of once-in-a-lifetime experience that you'll be glad you have, as long as you promise me that after that, you start directing me at women you think are more Miss Right and less Miss Right Now, deal?

"Yeah, sure, okay, bracelet. You win."

I always do, Deke. I always do...