ten toes down by asher conrad

Author:asher conrad
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781477528181
Publisher: CreateSpace
Published: 2012-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN – ‘How You Like Me Now?’ – The Heavy

My new social life begins in earnest: dissolute weeks of happy hours and bouncing around to different bars during the week and on weekends. Efforts made getting to know bartenders, waitresses and some regular patrons at the collection of haunts we choose for ourselves. Back to the club, regular visits to some live venues and then sports bars where the patron selection is poor but the staff are hot and available.

Sometimes I just hook-up, but the walk of shame irritates my psyche and I choose quickly to create several ‘friends with benefits’, regular visits with girls who’re good enough to satisfy the demands of my body but no one that can meet the demands of my spirit.

The craving for satisfaction doesn’t diminish in these encounters. It’s just space and time and function. An endless repetition of physical release that leaves me hungrier for the next opportunity and always walking away with nothing. It’s an insatiable itch that can’t be scratched, driving Ty and I to create a scorecard on the ‘fridge, body for body, to keep count of the conquests.

Some days it disgusts me. Other days, when no potential employers call back, it gives me at least some small measure in which I still control my environment.

I love and hate myself. I love that I can convince all women of almost anything, I hate myself that I’m so far from what I ever intended. But they keep lining up for the event, they keep buying the soap. Some try to stay in bad attempts to turn a hook-up into something meaningful, others treat me like the meat that I am and those do not try. I hate the clingers, but I hate just as much the ones who walk away without a word, who know that the transaction was paid for in the cost of the drinks at the bar.

And I watch myself as the days click away, divorced and unemployed and counting down to forty, waiting for the final proof to arrive that all of my careful planning for a perfect life is coming to nothing.

Pete’s DNA tests come back on a Thursday in mid-November. A plain, brown envelope in the mail that he opens with Ty and I in attendance.

We watch his face as he tears the seal, so wishing we could be someplace else and I can tell that even Ty, for once, is waiting to be wrong.

But he is not.

“Well…Pete’s mine. And that’s it,” the envelope and contents falling to the floor at his feet, looking up at us hollow-eyed.

What’s to be said? What can anyone do?

“Hey, it’s not the first time in history that a woman lied. What do you want to do?” Says Ty, quietly.

“I want my son.”

“And the others?”

“I want them too; it’s not their fault she lied to me.”

“But you can’t keep paying for them,” Ty continues.

“No, I suppose not…but they don’t know anything else and neither do I. And until those men

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