All That Glitters by Margo Talbot

Author:Margo Talbot
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781771604345
Publisher: RMB | Rocky Mountain Books
Published: 2020-07-27T19:20:09+00:00

Chapter 9:

Shades of Beauty

I was two months shy of my twenty-eighth birthday and still living in my truck and dealing drugs. I had kept the promise I’d made to myself never to freebase cocaine again, but I had no problem continuing to do my other drugs of choice. And I was drinking because the best place for me to sell drugs was at the bar, where everyone could get hold of me. That’s where I connected with Paul. I had known him for years, but he had an air of unapproachability that had kept me at bay. Little by little, though, we interacted through mutual acquaintances until we had formed enough of a relationship to discover a shared attraction.

As far as my sexual initiation was concerned, Paul took over where Doug had left off. It was the most intense and passionate sex I had ever had, but our passion was a double-edged sword. Paul’s rage and mine were a volatile combination. We were two deeply traumatized people coming together without any idea of the destruction we were capable of causing. We triggered each other’s rage and pain continuously and mixed it up with too much alcohol and too many drugs. What initially seemed to be a match made in heaven was only the mirror image of my internally devastated self.

People stayed away from us, mostly because they took the anger in our eyes to mean that we wanted to beat them up. Sometimes we did. For the two years we were together we got into many fights, with outsiders and between ourselves. We were also a magnet for cops. On my own I wasn’t much of a threat, but I can only imagine the effect Paul and I together had on those around us.

We were under surveillance in bars as we both had a history of causing disturbances. The cops would approach me easily enough, but they were intimidated by Paul, who was six feet tall and two hundred pounds of solid muscle, with blue eyes that radiated an inner wildness. He had a reputation in that town: on one occasion he had fought off four bouncers at the Athabasca Hotel, all at once. Another time he was taken to the local police station after being subdued with pepper spray because he had been demolishing an abandoned house with his bare hands and a wooden club. When the police finally got him into their car, he proceeded to tear up the interior of the vehicle.

Jasper had a reputation as well. A town of about four thousand people, it boasts one of North America’s highest per capita rates of alcohol and drug consumption, as well as a high incidence of suicide. Since it is a tourist destination, news of these unique claims doesn’t make it beyond the town limits, because those facts would spoil the beautiful Rocky Mountain resort image that the town relies on for a large portion of its revenue. Other than the families that live there full time, Jasper’s residents are largely young people who come to work in the tourist industry.

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