It wasn't like she had anticipated doing it. She wanted to see Money in the Bank but...Petula looked at her phone. Sure Jon had given her his number so that she could call him but...was it worth talking to him. Her father was on a ventalator now, he was unconscious. At this point it was almost a week since she had gone back to LA to be with her Dad and she hadn't called him. Was he waiting for her, was he going to talk to her even after a week of not talking?
"Dad, I'm going to be right back." She got up from the chair next to his bed. She wasn't sure if he could hear her or not but Petula knew that she needed to get out of there.
The hospital was big and busy, it's not that she hated germs, she just couldn't handle so many people. The work she did wasn't bad, it's not like she was surrounded by the crowd at these events. Her Dad didn't have a lot of time left and she was being bombarded by questions she didn't know the answers to. It was like she was expected to know them but she didn't.
"What the hell do you want?" Jon's voice demanded.
"Jon, it's Petula, I'm sorry." She didn't mean to cry, but...everything was going wrong all of a sudden. "I'm sorry, I'll call you back."
"Tula, what's wrong? I'm sorry if I snapped at you." She heard shuffling around in the background. "It's like eight in the morning here."
"Again, I'm sorry. I just...needed someone to talk to."
Oh God, he heard her choking up on the other end. Thank goodness he was in a room to himself. By now, Jon was sitting up and rubbing one eye from sleep. "You can tell me, Tula. Really, I'm sorry I snapped at you. It's just early from this end."
"My Dad isn't going to last long." She said, sitting down on a bench outside the hospital. "I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm his last relative and...I don't know what to do. We've talked about this before he got worse and he said he would like to be cremated...so that he could fly with the wind."
"If that's what he wanted then you should do it, because it's what he wished."
"I know. I just don't know how I am going to deal with him being gone." He could hear her about ready to cry. "Dad was a police officer before he started getting the headaches and they found the tumor. He was fine at first but...then it started to go bad. It was cancerous and the cancer spread throughout his brain. The tumor itself was big, and where it was located was too dangerous to be operated on."
"Oh Tula." She heard him say.
Jon didn't know what to do. He had never been in a sitaution like this.
"Where's your mom?"
"I don't know, she left when I was two. She left after..." she didn't want to finish the statement, she was too embarrassed.
"After what...Tula."
"I was diagnosed with a type of autism, they called me a sevant. I'm highly skilled with electronics and I am good with learning that stuff. But...I'm socially a weirdo."
That wasn't something he expected to hear over a phone conversation.
"So you're a little different..."
"Try a lot different, Jon. I...I ramble sometimes, about things no one else is interested in. I like things that others don't. Useless facts retain in my head, and sometimes I don't understand simple comments that someone say to me. Stu was telling me that Drew doesn't have his horses lined up right and I actually thought Stu meant that Drew actually had horses."
Jon took a deep breath, now he understood. Now he got it.
"I don't care." He said, leaning against the head board, starting to crave a cigarette.
"You don't? I'm a freak..."
"No less than I am." Jon smiled to himself. "And besides, friends stick together. I'm not going anywhere. Besides back to sleep if I'm lucky."
"Then I should let you go. I don't want you being tired all day. If you're tired, you'll get grumpy. You don't look nice when you're grumpy."
"That's an under statement, Tula. But thanks, I'll take my grumpiness out on Colby. He deserves it half the time. Call me if you need anything."
"Thank you, Jon. I like talking to you. Bye."
She hung up, and when she did Jon flopped back onto the bed. Did it bother him that she was autistic? No, not really. It's not like he had any intentions other than getting to know her. And it hurt to know she was hurting and neither of them knew what to do about it. That's what bothered him. He shouldn't be feeling this way about a woman he hardly knew.
Stu hadn't seen his little Pet in three weeks and he was starting to miss her. Two Raws and the Money in the Bank Pay-Per-View had passed and he hadn't seen her working like she did. Then the Raw three Mondays after MITB he sees her assembling the ring. Well what better time to go see where his little Pet had gone off to for that long.
"Pet, there you are." Stu said approaching.
She looked at him, not in his face but sort of. She was so...withdrawn it seemed. Petula, though usually brighter than this, was sullen in some ways. Stu wondered what he could do to bring a smile to her face.
"Pet, hey, what is it? Where have you been?" He asked.
"I had to go back to LA to be with my Dad. He died." The way she put it made him curious. Was she even sad about it? "I took his ashes to his favorite spot, a cliff that overlooked the ocean and spread them out there. And to keep my mind off of loosing him I decided to come back to work."
"Are you sure, maybe you mum..."
"She left when I was two. She left Dad in charge of taking care of a disabled kid." She went back to tightening the ropes that connected the ring posts together. "I'm sorry if I wasn't there for Money in the Bank, I wished you could have won."
"Thanks, Pet." He smiled slightly, even though the word disabled seemed to put him off.
She wasn't going to say that she also wanted Jon to win, she would have liked to see either of them holding that case instead of that annoying Sandow guy. Not that she knew anything about what goes on with wrestlers behind the stage but she knew where she stood. She wasn't even really supposed to be talking to them.
"Look, I would love to take you out for a meal. Supper sound fine after the show?"
She looked at him, she short hair waving as she moved her head. Petula didn't know what to say to him. Should she tell him that she was already heading out to dinner with Jon after the show?
"How about tomorrow night, after the tapings? The crew doesn't leave until Wednesday anyway. I would like to have that time with you."
She wasn't trying to play them, she just wanted to spend equal time with these two men who didn't seem to care about her misgivings in life. Even though she still thought she was fat and ugly, still worthless because she couldn't properly be there for her Dad, being around either man made her think less about that sort of stuff. To Petula, she was gaining friends, something that she never really experienced in life.
That's all she really wanted, she wanted friends and people that just accepted she was different.
"All right, Pet. Tomorrow after the SmackDown taping. I want to take you out to a special place."
"I don't like dresses. Never have and I probably never will." She said it with a monotone voice, Stu had a hard time believing that she was serious. "I don't like fancy cloths, dresses or heels. I just want a turkey burger or something."
"Sure, Pet. Anywhere you want to go is fine with me."
She smiled, she was happy that he still agreed to what she had said. That just made her even a little more grateful.
Elsewhere, Jon Good needed a smoke and badly. He'd wished he'd grabbed his pack from the locker room, but instead decided to go outside. He hadn't seen Petula, his little Tula, since she returned. He'd hoped to have seen her, but she called him and told him she was going to take him up on the dinner after Raw. That's why he wanted a smoke, to get this strange nervous feeling off his chest, he wanted to feel the toxic fumes invading each cell of his lungs, now that would preoccupy his mind.
What he found was a sight to behold. He saw Petula lighting up a cigarette just outside the building. He watched her inhale and then exhale, snapping the Zippo lighter with a flick of her wrist, like a pro.
"I'm impressed, Tula..." he watched her spin around. "You play around with that thing when you're doing nothing?"
"I used to play a lighter game with my Dad. He'd show me how to flick the lighter and spark the flame. I practiced for like three months on a daily basis until I perfected it." She flicked the Zippo top and a flame appeared on it. "I came out here to think, I didn't want to worry about our dinner plans later." She silently offered him her cigarette and he happily took it from her, taking a well needed drag off of it.
"Why would you worry about that, it's just dinner between two people."
"Because I think I made a mistake."
"What...by accepting my offer. I'm not going to let you back out of it."
"It's not because of you, Jon. It's something I did. I don't know how, or if I made a mistake in doing it."
Jon was confused, probably as much as she was. "Well, are you going to tell me or are we going to mime it out?"
"Stu asked me out to dinner too." Oh shit, Jon thought handing her the cigarette back. "I told him no for tonight but I said yes for tomorrow. And...it feels strange."
"Why?"
"Because I said yes to both of you, it makes me feel like a floozy."
"As friends, that's all we're doing, Tula. Whatever Stu has planned, I don't give a shit what you do with him." He said as she handed him the cigarette for another few drags. "Look, Sunshine, you are an adult. You just need some friends."
"Yeah, I don't have a lot of those around anyway, just the head makeup artist's wife that seems to care about what I'm going through."
"The gay guy has a wife?"
"Wait, everyone thinks he's gay?" That actually amused her.
"Because he does makeup probably better than any female around." Jon smiled. "So you smoke if you get anxious, huh?"
She shrugged. "It helps the nerves. It's the only bad thing that I do, aside from not really doing much exercise." Petula ran a hand over her stomach.
"Well, I'm not a licensed trainer but...I could give you a few pointers. And if you want, you can ask Stu about teaching you boxing. He was a bareknuckle fighter back in Europe."
"I don't know, maybe. Thank you for the suggestion. Where do you want to meet up after the show?"
"Right here is just fine. I'll have the guys take my crap back to the hotel and we'll catch a cab." Jon motioned between the two of them.
"Okay. That I can do. I don't have anything to do for the show. I'll find something to do. You can finish that if you want to."
"Great, thanks."
Jon knew about autism, there was a kid that was autistic in his neighborhood back in Cincinnati and his little cousin would play with that kid. The boy preferred baseball, baseball anything. Too many times he'd play catch with his cousin and that kid and hear about basball stats from every Major League player out of Ohio, or others that caught the kid's attention. But that kid hated being touched and he never looked anyone in the face.
"Wonder what happened to that kid?" He mumbled stomping out the cigarette before following Petula's path back into the arena.
Well that was interesting to say the least. What did you think?