Tim Shepard, to put it in a few words, was terrifying. Thrilling, commanding, addicting, and still so terrifying that Minnie Sullivan was often left with second thoughts. Those thoughts would be left in a file box somewhere when he touched her, fingers barely there, sending too many messages to her brain.
And he knew it. He knew what made her go mad. He knew what he did to her, and knew what she did to him, even though she was painfully oblivious to what she did to him. She made him lose his own game; lose his self-control, tempting him beyond belief. Just- and he hates this -by being her.
He'd given her scars, decorating her in a way tattoos couldn't. Some might call him a sadist, based on rumors alone. He'd smirked at these whispers- those girls, the ones he'd fucked while drunk, didn't know a quarter of what he could do. She never told. From age sixteen onward, she'd left behind the shell of Little-Minnie and became Femme Fatale Minnie.
Rumors and whispers, she ignored. Those guys, the few she'd slept with while drunk or the few she'd managed to get to "see things her way," weren't capable of the things Shepard could do. They could come close, the could pretend, but they wouldn't dare. They might stare awkwardly at the small, barely-there scars, and then just ignore their suspicions and give in.
Sadists and masochists go well together, she'd once mentioned. It was the way things worked out; there was always the dominant one and the far less dominant (submissive, as Dallas once put it) one. "Watch a couple like Evie and Steve sometime," she'd said. "Evie's got control over everythin', Steve's just along for the ride." Of course, these ramblings often occurred when she wasn't herself; a bottle of whiskey would do that to a person.
The thing that Shepard noticed most about her was her ability to turn a blind eye, so to speak. She was well aware of the other girls; one of the barmaids at Buck's often chattered about how Tim Shepard looked at her, how he jerked his chin ever so slightly in her direction last night. Minnie had ignored this girl, rolling her eyes and remembering exactly what happened last night.
They'd gotten used to be called 'sort of' a couple; Sylvia and Dallas had nothing on them. They both ended up in jail every so often for far different things; one always cheated on the other sometime, the only difference was that they couldn't break up- there was nothing to break up. She wore his jacket because she'd stolen it; his ring for the same reason. The jacket wasn't a symbol of anything except a cold day; the ring was nothing more than a whim. Their arguments were the stuff of legend so to speak, each had a temper and neither backed down without a fight.
Thrilling, commanding, addicting, and terrifying. It wasn't just Tim Shepard, nor was it just Minnie Sullivan.
Their whole so-called relationship was a question with no answer and an answer with no question. Separate, they were dangerous; Shepard wouldn't hesitate to kill while Minnie had the drug trade in Tulsa and a few outlying suburbs worked out to her specifications. They made the River Kings look like children in the schoolyard and the Tigers like the screaming adolescents at the Dingo. Together, Minnie and Shepard were those four adjectives- thrilling, commanding, addicting, terrifying.
They met by their own professions- Shepard's gang's meetings necessitated plenty of alcohol and a bar could supply just that. To be perfectly specific, Minnie's stepbrother supplied the alcohol and she was enlisted to serve it. Both had been relatively small-time then, Minnie had just begun running drugs to the various crime lords and gangs around Tulsa while Shepard's gang was still scrambling to work as any Tulsa gang did: together but separately.
In five years, Minnie had gone from a girl who could run faster than a cop or a half-drunk wannabe buyer to a- Jesus Christ, that ain't her, thought Shepard- to a girl who didn't need to run fast because she knew the score. In the same amount of time, Shepard had gone from twenty-three year old working to run things the way he wanted them run to a twenty-eight year old with things going (mostly) his way.
"God, look at us," Minnie was saying quietly, looking into the mirror as if it held life's secrets.
"Why?" He generally doesn't have time for mirrors, he finds them useless and mundane. Why look at the same thing over and over again? He combs his hair out and applies more grease while Minnie just stares. She doesn't do anything as he opens the medicine cabinet behind the glass and pulls out a vial of pills, but her eyes grow large when the glass is replaced. Vain little thing, she is.
"Tim Shepard, violence extraordinaire, and me, the Meth Queen of Tulsa."
Shepard stares at his reflection. He's generally decent-looking, and this is no exception. His companion, on the other hand, looks as if she hasn't eaten in weeks. Her bones are too big for her skin and her dress hangs too loosely to be ignored anymore. Hair, once glossy and be-ringleted, is limp and dull, too heavy for her head to carry. While he's grown up, she's still a kid, messing with stuff he doesn't think she knows about. He glances at the pill label, shakes a few out, and downs them.
Her words ring in his head.
Tim Shepard, violence extraordinaire, and me, the Meth Queen of Tulsa.
"Quit," he finds himself saying. She shrugs.
"I can't."
"When's the last time you took it?"
"Yesterday, and since I came down, all I can think of is more. I need more." Her fingers explore her face, finding every mark, every pronounced bone.
"Lookit that, huh?" He guides her hand to a cluster of marks. "Think that's nice ter look at?"
"Never noticed them." Her hands cup her face for a minute, then fall to her sides. She's motionless for a minute, except her eyes. Her eyes dart back and forth, scanning her appearance, evaluating. "Fuck!" she screams, picking up a jar of hair grease and slamming it again the mirror. "Goddamn- fucking-" she continues slamming objects mirror, while Shepard steps away and sits on the edge of the bathtub. A hairbrush, a soap dish, an orange plastic medicine container, her own fists. The mirror doesn't completely fall apart; it splinters and cracks, until Minnie finally stops. She glares at the mirror, before reaching out and plucking a small piece out off the sheet. She watches as the pieces fall into the sink, some falling down the drain and larger pieces blocking the rest.
She stares. Shepard heaves himself up off the edge of the bathtub and stands by the much-repaired door. He says something about her showing up at his apartment later and time being almost up, but she doesn't move. "Go away," she finally says. "Just... go away."