[pirate witch]: 524.Novels.NaNoWriMo 2007 chapter 10

The music was playing very loudly at the strip club. Livia had been there many times before, to pick her friend for lunch or ballet practice. She usually went in when it wasn’t actually open, though, and seeing so many middle aged gentlemen with their suit coats and money clips threw her for a slight loop. On the low stage that was surrounded by a bar, Livia’s friend was sliding a dollar bill slowly into the bra she was wearing. 

The moment the door shut behind them, Livia and wren dropped arms and stood farther apart from each other. The walk to the club hadn’t been particularly pleasant, and she was glad to have a chance to listen to other people grumbling besides Wren. He took off in the direction of his client, and she began to walk to a corner where there was a coat rack, but suddenly she felt a hand on her shoulder. She expected it to be one of the sleazy men who wasn’t home with his wife, but when she whirled around she saw that it was Wren. 

“What?” she demanded, “Shouldn’t you be dealing drugs right now?”

“Not so loudly, please,” he muttered, “I’m just coming to let you know that you should be sticking with me. It wouldn’t be very loyal of you, as my girlfriend, to go wandering off,”

She sulked, but when he pulled her next to him she didn’t resist. The two of them walked up to a thirty something year old woman who didn’t quite seem to fit in with the rest of the crowd. She was watching the dancers without much interest and kept on checking her gold watch. A bartender was eyeing the watch greedily, and when the woman saw this she pulled her sleeve over it.

“Hello, Maryanne,” Wren said to the woman when he pulled a seat up next to her
at the bar. 

She looked at him in confusion for a few seconds, but then her face relaxed into a smile. “Why, Mr. Morton, how exciting to see you,” she said, leaning forward to give him two fake kisses on either cheek. Wren had picked up the arrogant voice of someone who was too rich to care about much, and the two of them could easily have passed for lovers having an affair. Livia watched from behind the woman’s chair as Wren spoke to her. 

“I must be going, dear, I’ve got to get my girlfriend home,” he said to the woman with a little wave. She stood up to embrace him, her eyes meeting Livia’s over his shoulder. It was all a very convincing act, Livia realized, for when Wren was back at her side he had a wad of cash in his hand, but she hadn’t seen the actual transaction take place. No doubt the woman now had a little of gold dust in her purse, but no one would be the wiser.

“That was simply superb,” Livia said to Wren. There was sarcasm in her voice, as she had intended, but secretly she actually thought that his deal was pretty smooth. She would never admit this, of course, since they were still livid at each other, but she couldn’t help but be impressed. This didn’t, however, change the fact that he was an arrogant prick.

“Well, thank you my dear,” he replied, putting his arm around her shoulders as though they were a smitten couple. He was smiling at people who he knew, presumably those who had bought Gold Dust from him and were hoping to stay on his good side. They called him by different names; David, Darren, and once Mr. Mitch, but he answered to all of them as though he had been born with that name. 

Livia’s friend, Rosa, had finished her shift of dancing and was sipping a margarita while chatting with the bartender. She had changed out of the pleather bra and studded thong and was now wearing a hoodie sweatshirt from the college that her boyfriend attended and baggy camouflage jeans. Next to her, Livia looked more like a stripper. Wren had raised his eyebrows when he saw her dancing, but as he looked at her now, he didn’t seem so impressed. When Livia sat down in the seat next to Rosa, he stood behind her chair and allowed his eyes to wander around the room, to the dancers on the stage and to the alcohol that was on display behind the bartender. Livia took advantage of him ignoring her to roll her eyes to her friend and explained the situation, without mention of the drugs, to her friend.

“To be honest, I don’t really care so much,” Rosa had told livia, swirling her finger around the rim of the glass, picking up some salt and licking it half heartedly. “In my line of work, I get a lot of guys trying to get me in the sack, I’m used to it,” she laughed then, and put her hand on Livia’s arm. “Plus, I keep a large thing of pepper spray on me at all times, and no one can get past this monster,” The can made a loud noise when she put it on the bar, and some of the guys who had been approaching her with offers of drinks backed up.

Wren turned to Livia after Rosa had put the pepper spray away. “It’s time for us to get going, hun,” he said, “I’ve got someplace to be,” He jerked his head towards the exit, and Livia stood up reluctantly. No matter how much she had been enjoying her little vacation away from her life, it was nice to see a friend of hers.

“What’s the rush?” Livia asked. Although it was very late, any sense of tiredness that she had been feeling earlier was gone. She felt good again, anger had always been a galvanizer for her, and she had been pissed at Wren still, even if he hadn’t tried to pick up her friend.
“We have to go,” he said without any more of an explanation. “So say goodbye to your friend, and we’ll head out,”

After a very short goodbye to Rosa, Livia got up to leave with Wren, wishing that she could have stayed longer. They walked through the city for what seemed to be the hundredth time that night, towards Willow Street. She had thought that they would go to her hotel, but they never even went down that street.

“Aren’t we going to the hotel?” Livia asked as they went up the steps where she had passed out earlier that day.

“No,” Wren snapped. He had been snapping at her the whole walk back, using single syllable sentences

“And why not?” She shot back. Obviously, she hadn’t packed a change of clothes for the day, since she was not planning on any adventures that involved staying in the apartments of drug manufacturers. 

“Because I don’t trust you, as you
may have guessed, and if I allow you to wander off, you could very probably betray Neil and I. This is not my goal at all. So, in order to keep you from blabbing, you get to spend a lovely night with Neil and I,”

Livia backed up.

“A sex free night,” he amended. She stopped backing up but did not walk towards him again. He sighed and held out his hand. “I swear upon my life, and Neil’s, that you will be perfectly safe as long as you come inside the apartment without any trouble,”

She stared at his hand. “And if I don’t?”

“Then I can’t guarantee anything, although you can know that I won’t be the one directly causing you trouble,” he said and waved his hand in front of her face. “Shake my hand, Livia, and we can go inside where it isn’t so bloody goddamn cold,”

Her breath was coming out in puffs of steam around her, and her nose was completely numb. She took his cold hand in hers for a fraction of a second and shook it quickly before dropping it. “I’ll go in,” she said, “but I’ll whine,”

“Fair enough,” he growled, and they walked into the lobby doors. 

It was warmer inside, but not a whole lot warmer. The dingy lobby was empty except for a mouse scrambling around an overturned trash can. The sound was grating on Livia’s nerves as she and Wren headed up the stairs to where she assumed that Neil lived. They couldn’t fit up the stairs besides one another, so Livia was forced to walk behind Wren the whole way up. He stomped the whole way up, and she followed suit. Some dogs barked in the doors that they passed, woken up by their footsteps.

When Wren pushed open Neil’s door, Livia didn’t realize that they were stopping and strode right past him up the stairs. Embarrassed, she turned back to see him laughing silently inside the room.  Neil had his back to the door and Livia heard the clicking and clacking of what she assumed to be really stubborn computer keys. When she was in the room, though, she saw that it was not a computer at all, but rather an old fashioned typewriter. He was bent over it and was typing quickly, his eyes nearly level with the paper. 

“We shouldn’t disturb him,” Wren whispered, gesturing to Neil and tiptoing to the bed. “If we do he’ll feed us through that damnable typewriter without a second thought,”

Livia nodded and sat down on the large bed. It was surprisingly comfortable. “Where am I sleeping?” She whispered.

“There,” he pointed to the bed. “And before you worry, I will be sleeping on the floor. You should go to bed now, so that you can get up early in the morning,”

“It already is early in the morning,” she said, but found that she was quite tired now that he mentioned it. She crawled beneath the covers fully dressed and curled up. She was mildly uncomfortable about spending the night in a stranger’s apartment, especially a stranger who made and dealt drugs, but as far as being captive went, she was glad for the bed. Within moments, she had drifted off, lulled to sleep by the sound of typewriter keys and angry muttering.


Something had jogged the bed. For a moment, Livia thought that it was the cat she had kept when she was little jumping up, but in a few seconds she remembered that the cat, Lily, had died when she was twelve. After a few seconds of getting her bearings, Livia got up slightly and turned to see what was on the bed.

Livia screamed. She screamed loudly, and shrilly, and for several seconds. This caused the man who was sleeping beside her to roll off the bed in surprise and land on the floor with a muffled thud. Her screams stopped, as she had run out of air.

“Don’t complain!” a voice grumbled from the floor. Livia scrambled to the side of the bed and peered down. Neil was fast asleep again and lying beside Wren, who was sitting up looking unhappy. “At least he didn’t land on you,”

“He was in my bed!” She shouted, pointing to him as her volume rose again. 

“Well,” said Wren, sounding unbearably reasonable, “it is his bed. And I told you, he’s not interested in you,”

Livia scoffed. If he wasn’t interested in her than why had he tried to impress her with the shark story?  “He’s a boy!” she shouted at Wren, amazed that Neil could sleep through the noise, “he’s automatically interested in any girl in his bed!”

Wren sat up straighter and she was
sure that he was glaring at her in the dark. “Then you shouldn’t have bloody well slept in his bed, should you?” he shouted, “I did offer you the floor! In fact, I urged you to sleep on the floor. The floor came with marvelous recommendations! But no, you wanted the friggin’ bed. And you got everything that comes with the bed, while I got everything that comes with the floor. I would like to point out that Neil landed on top of me, not you!” He shoved Neil with his elbow, “It was in no way a pleasant experience. Somehow I think you got the better end of the bargain, so just shut the hell up, ok?”

Try as she might, Livia couldn’t remember Wren telling her not to sleep on the bed. In fact, she remembered quite clearly him pointing to the bed and telling her to go to sleep there. She had complied, as was the polite thing to do. He was obviously angry, though, so she decided not to push it.

In her silence, Wren got up and hobbled to the bathroom. Apparently, the large weight that toppled on top of him had caused some damage, and Livia couldn’t help but smile to herself. Oh, karma was a bitch, but today that bitch seemed to be on her side. When the door to the bathroom door shut, she pushed herself out of bed and padded around the apartment in her socks. There was a coffee machine teetering haphazardly on the edge of the sink, and a bag of ground coffee lying next to it, spilling into the drawer of cutlery. She fiddled with the machine a bit and managed to get it to turn on. Within moments there was a gurgling sound as the first drops of hot brown coffee trickled down into the waiting pot. 

It took a few tries to find the cupboard with the mugs in it. The first one she opened had cracked saucers and plates. The second had spices. The third had what seemed to be large envelopes full of paper, and she shut that door quickly. Finally, she found some mugs from Disneyland and pulled out one with minnie mouse on it.

That mug was broken rather quickly when she dropped it in surprise. There was a sudden shout from near the bed, a loud, angry cry that sounded something like, “toffee!” Livia put her hands to her mouth to stifle a gasp as it came again, until she realized that the word was coffee and that it was just Neil waking up.

“Coffee!” he shouted for a third time and staggered to his feet. He looked a dreadful fright in his pajamas, so she turned away as quickly as she could, found another mug, and poured coffee into it. She didn’t get a chance to try any of the caffeinated bliss, however, because something knocked her forward from behind, nearly spilling all of the coffee into the sink.

“Wha...” she started, and turned around. There was Wren with a towel wrapped around him and nothing else. He knocked the mug out of her hand with a single swipe and poured it into the sink as though the drink was a ticking bomb. 

“Hey!” she shouted, but couldn’t continue any farther than that before a disgruntled and crazed Neil barreled into Wren and knocked him over, shouting “coffee” over and over.  He reached around Wren for the coffee pot, still looking like a crazy person who had escaped from prison. The pot tipped over, sending coffee down in a small but deadly waterfall onto the floor. It pooled around Wren, who was pinned by Neil, probably burning him somewhere on his arm.

Now Wren was screaming too, and the ungodly harmony of two men screaming in the morning, one in pain and one in what appeared to be sheer distress, caused Livia to panic herself. Her yelps joined into their shouts, creating veritable frenzy. Like a zombie, Neil threw himself at the coffee on the floor, lapping it up without a moment’s hesitation. 

The sight of Wren on the floor, tied to Neil by his towel, the coffee being lovingly crooned to by a deranged Neil, and shards of Minnie Mouse lying about made Livia laugh until her lungs gave out.