Along Came a Spider Ch. 06

"It's nothing," Tabitha said quickly. Of course that didn't work. If anything, James only looked more intrigued.

"Tell me," he urged. "Please."

She bit her lip hard and dropped her eyes to focus very intently on the comforter. "I just think that I...I really like you," she finally said, feeling her cheeks heat up as she spoke. I really like you. She sounded all of fifteen years old.

Horrifyingly, he let out a laugh. But it was a gentle laugh, a quiet laugh, and then he was shifting a bit closer to her on the mattress and touching her hand. His fingertips were as cool and soft as bedsheets on a cold day.

"I think I really like you, too."

--

Sunday, 12:45 am

"Something on tap. Something cheap," James said when the bartender asked. When he dared to look up, she was staring at him very much in the way that one might stare at a wriggling family of maggots that had invaded a slice of meat. "...Please," he added ruefully.

She only pursed her glossy lips and, without speaking, stalked away to the beer taps. He watched her back turn with a touch of remorse. He hoped he hadn't offended her terribly. The city was brimming with bars, of course, but he had grown fond of this one. Their beers were reasonably-priced, for one, and not diverse enough to be listed in a menu the size of a composition book.

"You look like you're having a bad day," said a voice from his left. When he turned his head, he saw the very tippy-top of a head full of short, white-blonde hair. When he looked a little further downward, he saw two pale blue eyes. They belonged to the rather dainty-looking woman in a black hoodie who was perched two stools away, her sneakered feet swinging idly through the air. She was clutching a pink beverage, and she looked young enough to make him wonder if the bar regularly ID'd all of its patrons and just old enough to make him second-guess himself. She had a cute nose.

"Why do you say that?" he asked, trying to hide his bemusement.

Her lips pursed around the tiny cocktail straw in her drink as she thought. When she surfaced, the amount of alcohol in her glass had dwindled significantly. "Anyone who's that much of a dick to a bartender is either having a shitty day, or gets off on people spitting in his drinks," she said. The bartender darted forward to deliver James's beer and scurried off without a word, and his new acquaintance pointed to it as he lifted it to his lips. "Beer's easy to spit in, too. At the burger place I worked at, the bartender told me that if you spit first and then pour, you can barely tell. All the fizz hides it."

"Was that something that happened a lot?" James mumbled around the rim of his glass. After gazing deep into its depths, he tilted his head back and took a deep swig. The texture seemed normal. The woman shrugged.

"People are jerks everywhere, especially to their waitstaff. If you don't get petty revenge every once in a while, you go crazy. You just can't get caught. I guess the customer can sue the crap out of you or something."

James lifted his eyebrows. "Really."

"It's pretty freaky when you think about it. You're contaminating someone's food with your bodily fluids. A waiter got a year in the slammer for it once." James nodded idly and took another long draught of beer, and the woman watched him from the corner of her eye. "So...you gonna tell me what's bothering you? I mean, that's what strangers in bars are for."

"And here I thought you all came to drink."

"Little of column A, little of column B." When he only shook his head and took a sip of his beer, she smirked. "Lady trouble, then?"

"Something like that."

"I figured. Mom says that alcohol was invented to help men and women tolerate one another. Or, you know, men and men. If that's your thing."

James gave her a long sideways glance. "No."

"Hey, you never know." James said nothing, and she rolled her eyes before sucking down another good inch of her beverage. "Well, for what it's worth, I'm sure a strong, silent type like you is just drowning in it. You'll find someone new."

"I don't think I'm that approachable," he said grimly. The woman snorted into her drink, and he rested his elbows on the table and regarded her curiously from over the rim of his glass. "Why are you talking to me?"

"Should I not?"

"It's an honest question. I don't usually get much conversation when I come here."

"Well, maybe if you...said more words, sometimes," she said, watching him carefully as she spoke. "And didn't sit in a corner..."

He smiled wryly. "So you singled me out?"

The woman rewarded him with a grin—a wide, lazy grin that showed lots of teeth. "I like to bother the quiet ones. I've been all over, and from what I've seen, it's the people hiding in corners who have the best stories."

"I don't have any stories."

"Sure you do. Or you wouldn't be drinking alone." When he didn't respond, she sighed. "Look, I leave tomorrow. You could literally tell me anything. I mean, you didn't murder her parents or something, did you?"

James took a swig of beer. After he swallowed, he gave her a good, long look, then began to speak. "There's something she doesn't know. At least, I don't think she knows. If she doesn't, I'm worried what she'll think of me when she does."

The woman looked disappointed. "So you cheated on her? Well, if you're not going to tell her, you better make sure she isn't gonna find out."

"It isn't like that. It's something else." He closed his eyes. "I think it's gone too far. I like her too much—more than I wanted to. I could live without her, but I don't think I could stand it if she thought less of me. It would probably be easier if I just left her alone."

She reached out with one of her short arms, teetering on the edge of her stool, and awkwardly patted his shoulder. "Hey, don't be like that. If she really likes you, I'm sure she won't mind...well, whatever it is."

James opened his eyes to give her a forlorn look. "There are some things in the world that are too difficult to accept."

"I think you're just making a big deal out of it. It can't be that bad."

"Maybe," James said vaguely, turning his gaze back to the back of the bar. The two of them sat in silence for a while, but then James downed another mouthful of beer and looked down at her. "You said you were leaving. Where are you going?"

"To be honest, I don't really know. I guess I'll find out soon enough. Why, you wanna come with me?" she teased. Her smile wavered with his stare. "Wha--no, not like that. Just exploring the world. Strictly platonic."

James squinted at her, then shrugged and took a sip of beer. It was almost gone. "I feel like it's implied," he said.

The woman made a face. "Don't say that." She sucked up more of her drink and stopped when the straw began to rattle, looking disappointed. "All ice," she mumbled before shoving a hand into her bag and removing a few tattered bills from a tattered wallet. She slapped them onto the table and hung her leather satchel back over her shoulder, then dropped down from her bar stool. Now that she was standing, the top of her head barely reached his chest.

"Heading home?" he asked, and she offered him another friendly grin.

"Yeah. Thankfully it's close—I'm a little sloshed."

James wet his lips. "I'm about to leave, too. I could walk with you, if you wanted."

She laughed, bubblier than the suds at the bottom of his tumbler. "You're one of those chivalrous ones, aren'tcha? It's okay, it's just around the corner."

"You sure?" James said, keeping his eyes trained on her face. "It's late."

The woman opened her mouth to reply, but then paused. He saw her eyes focus on his—rigidly, like she was seeing them for the first time—then drop to examine the shadows around his eyelids, the pallor of his cheeks, the way his mouth was parted ever so slightly as he watched her. When she grinned again, the expression was tentative, careful.

"I'll be okay on my own," she said. Her tone seemed a little more guarded. "I'm a big girl. I can take care of myself."

James's lips curved into a thin smile. "Suit yourself," he said softly. "Maybe I'll see you around." She raised her eyebrows.

"Not if I see you first," she said, and then she began to tread towards the door with her hands stuffed into her hoodie pockets. "Good luck with your stuff. And don't forget to be nice to bartenders," she called. James watched her stumble out the door in silence, his fingers tapping a pensive pattern on his beer glass.

"Looks like you scared her off," someone chuckled. He looked over his shoulder and saw a man with a thick beard sitting at a table behind him, nursing a bottle. The man shook his head. "You can't stare at them like that, boy. Girls don't like it when you stare. Makes 'em nervous."

James gave the man a blank look and turned back to his glass. "I'll keep that in mind," he said dryly.

--

Friday, 10:01 pm

Once upon a time, there was a girl named Chloe.

Chloe was seventeen years old. She liked indie movies and photography and Micky, her dad's car mechanic who once told her she had a pretty smile. In about three months she would be headed to Boulder for college, so she had picked up an extra shift at the restaurant she worked at. Her savings account was already packed to bursting with funds from generous family members and paychecks that she squirrelled away, but she knew a little more couldn't hurt.

The activity in the restaurant had waned in the past hour, so she decided to take a much-needed break. Chloe liked to look nice at work, and there was always a price to pay for looking nice. By this time of the night, her heels were sore, throbbing knots at the backs of her shoes. She winced a little with every step as she clacked through the steamy kitchen and into the back alley, taking a moment to adjust the rubber doorstop before heading for her spot behind the dumpsters.

She rummaged around her purse until her fingers closed around a plastic baggie, then grimaced when she pulled it out and saw the joint inside of it had snapped in half. She missed her enamel cigarette case—the one her parents took last week. There had only been matches inside when they found it in her purse, but she caught hell for it anyway.

She managed to finagle the torn paper around one half of the joint into a new, tightly-twisted end and set it ablaze with her lighter, closing her eyes as the smoke filled up her throat. It made her feet hurt less and her mouth smile more, made her forget that she was stuck here until eleven p.m. on a perfectly good Friday night.

Once her diminutive half-a-joint had dwindled down to a speck, she crushed it beneath the toe of her leather bootie. Then came the vanilla body spray; lots and lots of it, until the air was thick with sugary fumes that clouded inside of her mouth and made her cough. She checked herself in her compact mirror and, when she was satisfied that her eyes weren't too bloodshot, began to make her way back to the door, careful to keep the heels of her shoes away from the storm grate set into the concrete. The stagnant air wafting up from it seemed much more unpleasant than usual.

As she passed it, she saw a few tiny somethings scatter in its depths. Her body gave an involuntary shudder. When Chloe was little, her older brother always threatened to push her into the gutter at the end of their cul-de-sac, where she imagined she would be swarmed by ravenous beetles and rodents that would eat her right up until there was nothing left but bones. Now that she was older she knew better, but she still couldn't help but imagine the creatures that lurked in the deepest crevasses of the city; big and black and blind from the dark with far too many legs.

She stopped a few feet from the door. The streetlamp overhead was catching on something yellow-grey at the very bottom of that drain. It looked wet. Most of it was covered with leaves and other detritus—cigarette butts, old newspaper, wrappers and mud, all congealed into a black mass—but as she moved in for a closer look, she saw a dark hole gaping open beneath the trash.

Her feet drew her forward even though her brain was recoiling in horror. Something black and swollen was lolling out from it, and around the perimeter of that chasm, she saw a line of pearly teeth. And behind those teeth, pale things were moving, wriggling into the gums to get big mouthfuls of rotting flesh.

Once upon a time, a girl looked down into the dark and saw something she shouldn't have. And she screamed, and screamed, and screamed.