I was going to wait to post more chapters until I finished the outline, but I got bored and gave up and decided to do another chapter to get moving because I lumped things around on the outline so I could get to the fun part, so what's the use of the outline if I don't follow it anyway.
Getting abstract with it again. It's fun. I hope it makes sense. No, I was not stoned when I wrote the first part.
I've seen the history of the world, back to the beginning. I'd like to show you, she thought.
Leonardo evaded her, trapped the immediacy of regret.
She nudged his essence again towards black empty forever with sparkling lights. All the knowledge and skill in the universe was a complete lie. His life's work meant nothing because it equaled nothing and he should stop fighting and realize the truth. The energy of nothing will kill the universe, forcing everything to the edges of space and time and nothing. The end of all things. Nothing equaled quiet. No more problems. No future. Peace.
But Leonardo relived the moment when she kissed his shoulder. He liked it and didn't want it to end. She knew he'd never really felt that kind of affection and saw his life flying back down a dark tunnel to a blank beginning as if he had suddenly existed with a burst of consciousness. That must be wrong. His energy couldn't come from nothing. Cherry forced herself through him again, drifting fast down dark spaces full of violence, eventually slamming into a wall of nothingness.
They both stood next to Cherry's bed, watching the moment, frozen in time. He silently reached for her bra as she kissed his shoulder, wrapped quietly and anxiously around each other.
"This moment is unimportant," she reminded him, still slamming herself into the void of his beginning and finding nothing.
He watched them both, peacefully at one for a few poor seconds. "This is an important moment to me. If it isn't important to you, then why did I find you here too?"
Cherry could feel him pushing into her, searching for something.
She remembered the moment of Real Birth. That plank time second when energy overtook darkness and her shame grew to the edges of the boundless creation and she wanted to devour him in darkness, absorbing him back into the truth of that moment. So male and hot and hard… Repulsive creature.
But that wasn't Cherry. That was Chaos' thoughts. She pushed the negativity of Chaos away and watched herself and Leonardo in the past, wrapped softly around each other. She asked him, "What happens next?"
They watched themselves, caught in the cyclical memory of the past. "Next I apologize," he said. "I know you are lonely. You're my friend." But his widened and filled with fear, like a child seeing a monster in its closet. "What is that?" he asked, pointing behind her at something she couldn't see.
Cherry knew that he would find the answer to the problem if he pushed hard enough. "It's nothing," she said, pulling him away from the memory, Chaos crawling behind them, snarling a warning at Leonardo.
She felt his heart thrum through her hands as she hurried them through a crowd in GIRLS XXX. He stopped to watch her dancing against the pole, eyes dead, focusing on the EXIT sign. But this familiar place existed in Leonardo's memory and he pushed her away from his memories, watching her from the dark corners of the club night after night, texting his brothers on his observations, making crude jokes that she must have heard this brilliant information from a patron and passed it off as her own work. Cherry filled with momentary rage and felt Leonardo's hands burn in hers, he hushed her and said, "I'm sorry. I was ignorant. Don't give in to that. Tell her to get back!"
Cherry pulled Leonardo away through the crowd away from the red burning eyes of Chaos as she silently mouthed her hateful truth at Cherry; freeze the hard proud blood out of that thing you drag along with you Cherry, Chaos thought.
"This is all very confusing," Leonardo said, his hands stinging against her palms. "I see the red eyed Nothing and she shouts, but there's only silence. It's so dark and far away in here. I need to get out of here and away from that thing!"
Cherry said, "You're so still and strong…" She closed her eyes and fed on his steady energy, quieting her guilty emptiness and desire.
His hands still stung, but his heart quieted, the fear quelled.
She drove to the cemetery and searched vacantly for her father's grave. She didn't go to his funeral and her mother wouldn't tell her they'd buried him. She didn't find the grave and went home. She came back and searched again and didn't find it.
Leonardo didn't like the cemetery. Too much time spent creating funerals for other people.
"Why are you here? Why are you watching this?" she screamed at him as she watched herself wandering the cemetery with bright pink hair in a cold evening mist, searching for a grave that didn't exist. Her mother told her the next year on her father's birthday that she'd had him cremated and spread his ashes while Cherry had been out drinking all night with Eric Peterson.
Leonardo's brown eyes widened with shock and sweet emotional innocence, absent of the killer. His true spirit. Helpful and quiet. Wanting to please. Forced into action by circumstances.
He worked alone, training, exercising; feeling his muscles growing stronger. His brothers fell farther and farther behind him. Every day he looked back at the road and added another pace between them.
And then she was back in her bedroom, staring at Leonardo, his hands withdrawn from hers. She reached out in front of her, hands still half-clasped around nothing. "What's wrong?" she asked.
He said, "It's… not relevant… any of my…" Leonardo rubbed his palms against his knees. "You really did burn me! For real, I mean! Not just in your head!"
Cherry leaned forward and grabbed his hands. Both of his palms glowed pink with heat. She stiffly rolled off the bed, joints cracking as if she'd sat still for hours. She rummaged in the bathroom medicine cabinet for burn cream.
He followed her and lingered in the doorway. "Do you know where she spread the ashes? Maybe I can ask and we can go there…" he said, his voice quiet with hesitation.
Cherry slammed the medicine cabinet door shut and tossed the burn cream roughly in his direction. He grasped it easily as it flew towards his head. "Yeah, like I want to relive any of that shit! It doesn't matter. Ashes are just… carbon, you know. Did you get any useful information or did you just get to probe around?"
"I saw a dark female creature. Like a burning shadow with red eyes and she screamed at me. I know she hated me. Just because I'm male or something… But she wasn't a person. She was… nothing…" He rubbed burn cream on his palms and placed the tube back on the edge of the bathroom sink.
Cherry's mother shouted harshly up the stairs, voice full of gravel, "Evelyn! Leo! You have breakfast waiting! Get your asses down here! Your brother's waiting! What are you two doing? Do you need a condom?"
"Mom!" Cherry tried to shove Leonardo out of the bathroom, but he just stared, eyes narrowed as if condom usage had been her idea somehow. After he left the room, nose slightly in the air, she threw her clothes on as fast as possible, then pushed past Leonardo as he timidly crept down the stairs towards the sound of Cherry's mother and his brother laughing loudly in the kitchen. Cherry shouted, "That isn't funny, mom!"
Cherry's mother placed a Thanksgiving turkey platter covered in bacon and sausage on the table and Leonardo's brother helped himself to at least a third of the offered food, grabbing it with his bare hands.
"Manners, Raph…" Leonardo chastised through clenched teeth as he politely pulled out Cherry's chair for her.
"Oh, thanks!" she said, unable to contain her shock at the chivalrous gesture. "Mom, you can't just scream at me about using condoms when guests are around! It's not even funny when it's just us! And it it's definitely not funny at family Christmas!"
"Oh, shut up and eat your bacon!" her mother said, as she sat down and then muttered out of the side of her mouth to Raph, "I told you it would get them down here fast. And grandpa thought it was hilarious."
Cherry took a few pieces of bacon as Leonardo held the platter out to her before helping himself. "You were talking about me and cousin Gary! He's like forty five! It was disgusting!"
Raph chewed with his mouth open and shook with a laugh.
"You should come faster when I call for dinner then! Grandpa needs to eat at six so he can take his insulin!" Cherry's mother watched Leonardo picking at his meat. "What's the matter? You like your crispy or something?"
"No, it's fine, ma'am," he said half-heartedly. "I just want to thank you for saving my life earlier. I can't express my gratitude."
"Really?" she said, eating sausage with one hand, her other hand holding a burning cigarette. "I have a bunch of wood that needs to be chopped. Could you manage that?"
"I would be honored, ma'am," Leonardo said.
"I guess you'll have done you're good deed for the day," Raph said with a mouthful of half-chewed sausage. "What's the matter, Fearless? Don't enjoy your hearty meal? You're treating your hostage a lot better than I'm treating mine. I thought we were supposed to concentrate on the job here. Not…"
Leonardo clanked his mug full of orange juice heavily on the table. Cherry suspected that normally he would have lectured Raph mercilessly. He said to his brother, in a cool voice and with narrowed eyes, "In the spirit of Buddha, I eat anything that my host offers. You should listen to Sensei a little harder when he talks about it. You look like a pig."
Raph ate half hunched over his plate, chewing with his mouth wide open, both his arms taking up most of his side of the table. Cherry's mother sat back in her chair with her legs crossed, smoking her cigarette for breakfast.
Cherry looked at her watch and realized that it was only eleven o'clock in the evening. "Mom, why did you make breakfast for everybody in the middle of the night?"
"I couldn't sleep anymore and the big guy was hungry."
Raph nodded emphatically to solidify his position as the big guy.
"I was thinking about visiting wherever you spread dad's ashes," Cherry said, not eating anything that she had placed on her plate.
Her mother blew smoke towards the open screen door and said, "I don't remember where I spread his ashes."
"You do too remember! How do you forget something like that?" Cherry shouted. She felt Leonardo's hand gently press a warning against her thigh. She took a breath and said, "But I guess it doesn't really matter that much." She pushed herself up from the table and lingered in the doorway, hoping Leonardo followed her upstairs to her room.
Leonardo seemed to understand the gesture and glanced at his brother, who shook his head minutely. Leonardo said to her, "I need to stay with my brother the rest of the night. We need to attend to his hostage."
"You three can sleep in that spare room. There's a wheel chair in the corner and a lot of quilting racks. I can move them if they're in the way." Her mother kept smoking, looking out the screen door towards the barn.
Raph stood up, wiping his greasy hands on his legs. "I think I want to get some sleep. I'll haul the asshole upstairs. Think we got time to sleep before the end of the world, Fearless? I been up for a week straight and I want to be fresh for tomorrow, you know."
"I suppose." Leonardo stood up and bowed to her mother. "Thank you for the food, Mrs…."
"Diane. I mean, Mrs. Hyde." She blew a plume of smoke in Leonardo's direction.
Cherry headed towards her room, following Raph up the stairs and heard Leonardo making polite promises to her mother to chop as much wood as possible when he wasn't needed interrogating the hostage tomorrow.
"Guess you have to sleep alone tonight," Raph said, scowling at her as he disappeared into the guest room. She heard the vague sounds of pleading and moaning and a swift blow and command from Raph as he entered the room.
She lingered in the hallway, waiting for Leonardo. He sighed heavily as he met her and said, "We'll work more on figuring out your issues tomorrow. Just don't go anywhere. Understand?" All the friendly tone had changed back to the impatience of the first few minutes of their meeting.
"Okay, whatever," she said. "Not like I have anything to do like work or exams tomorrow or anything important, Mr. No-Job." Cherry slammed her bedroom door, hoping it bruised his pretty face.
Stay here? Stay here? Cherry sat on her bed, legs crossed, reading The Communist Manifesto. Well, she stared at the same page for twenty minutes and decided that she understood just as much as if she had really read the book. Stay here?
Leonardo. Mr. Bossy-Pants. Well, he didn't wear pants. A prisoner in her own house? Not likely! She could go anywhere she wanted. Cherry imagined pelting him feminist speeches in the morning, smiling triumphantly as he admitted his wrongs as a bossy alien ninja.
Why wait until morning? Cherry had an exam tomorrow. She would just knock on his door, wake him up and berate him for being a chauvinistic ass who thought he could keep her locked in her room like that woman in The Yellow Wallpaper and then steal Grandpa's Ghost and head back into the city. She might make it just in time to take her exam. And it wasn't like he needed her company anymore. Now he had Raph to eat bacon like a Neanderthal and take up all the leg space in the car with his overt displays of machismo.
Cherry put her books in her backpack and found her shoes under the bed. Her chest clenched when she realized that his blood crusted her shoes, as if she'd waded through a red lake. His blue mask lay in the trash, now brown. Well, Raph could protect him when he tracked down Hal Barton again and he mentally hacked him to pieces like a meat slicer.
The old floorboards of the farmhouse creaked under her feet as she attempted a quiet escape to freedom and she decided not to chance any unnecessary noise outside the door of the sleeping ninjas and hurried down the stairs in the dark, nearly tripping over her a butter churn painted with a marijuana leaf pattern. Her dad bought it at a yard sale and thought it was hilarious.
Her mother usually left the car keys under the driver's side floor mat and Cherry found them immediately. She turned the key and fumbled for good driving music. A fast drive on a still hot night. Who needed sex? Not Cherry. Didn't need to make out with the polite Buddhist alien if he wanted to sleep in the other bedroom with his brother. Not that she had planned on it. She'd imagined propositioning him, but repeatedly told herself that it was just vain fantasy. So, Leonardo, she would say as she closed the bedroom door behind her. Uh… something something about being sexy…
She blasted a local top forty station and turned up the volume as she remembered stripping to the same song at least twenty times. As she turned the key and the engine rumbled like a snoring giant, she checked the gas meter and gladly found it full. Grandpa's Ghost drank gasoline like water and she didn't want to pay for more than a full tank.
Grandpa's Ghost spun dirt in two trails as she stepped on the gas pedal as hard as she could, speeding down the driveway, the hot breeze filling the car and whipping her hair in her face. The open road. No worries. No bossy ninjas.
After ten minutes, she found the highway and let the tires spin in the intersection, smelling burning rubber and laughed out loud at her own recklessness. The trees rushed by in a green and orange blur of variegated color and a mist of bugs splattered the windshield, bits of their bodies sprinkling her face and bare arm like tiny shards of glass.
Grandpa's Ghost sailed over a steep hill and her guts jolted excitedly into her diaphragm, the car leaving the ground for a few sweet seconds like a roller coaster. Her mother's cooking and father's ashes flew into the distance at 80 miles per hour.
Familiar sights flashed past in a second and she smiled, knowing that nobody knew her in the city. No Evelyn. No Mitch's daughter with the pink hair. Just Cherry the honor's student and whore who dances naked for money. She passed the grain elevator and nearly clipped a semi-truck as it backed awkwardly into the road in an attempt to park its heft under the grain output.
The car idled at an intersection next to a house famous because it's living room wall lay only four feet from the road and four cars had crashed into the living in the past ten years. Cherry laughed at the large rock placed in the corner of the yard mere feet from the site of usual impact. As she hung her arm out the window in the warm darkness, she heard the loud rumble of a motorcycle racing up the road behind her. She adjusted the rearview mirror and saw a motorcycle, pretty similar to the motorcycle that Raph had shut up in the back of the semi-truck. The motorcycle pulled abruptly to a stop a few inches from the bumper of Grandpa's Ghost and the driver revved impatiently, waiting for a green light.
A fit young man in a battered red helmet drove the motorcycle and just as her eyes flicked to the light to check for green, the motorcycle cut around her car with only a few inches of clearance and then stopped right on the yellow line of the abandoned country road.
Cherry thumped her fingers angrily on the damp metal of the car door as she recognized the hard round back and strong limbs of Leonardo, riding his brother's motorcycle. She shouted out the window over their engines, both rumbling in tandem, "It's past your bedtime, Leo!"
"My hostage ran off!" he shouted through his helmet and over the sound of the engines. "I told you to stay there! What part of…"
The light turned green and Cherry stepped on the accelerator as hard as she could, leaving Leonardo lecturing back at the intersection. She laughed and turned up the radio racing into the starry night, leaving the determined ninja in the exhaust of her Chevelle. But as soon as she considered slowing down, she heard familiar rumbling on the rushing night air and looked back in her side view mirror, spotting Leonardo on the motorcycle following her like a buzzing insect bent on a lecture.
Cherry gripped the leather steering wheel cover with sweaty palms and stepped on the accelerator again and watched the odometer creep past 100 miles per hour. She slammed on the break as she thundered into a curve and thanked her hometown advantage in this race. Cherry knew every bend and pothole better than she knew anyone in the city. She sped up again as soon as she rounded the corner, the guardrail covered in wild grapevine and the yellow curve sign covered in bullet holes flashing past. She chanced a brief look back at the motorcycle and watched as it gracefully took the curve, the driver going so low to the pavement that he actually allowed his gloved hand to skim the pavement.
Did he do that on purpose to show off?
The Baker orchards flashed by on either side of the road and apple crates lined the ditch like grey wooden forts. The road peaked in steep hills over and over and she let Grandpa's Ghost reach the top of the hill, wheels leaving the ground momentarily as it soared back to the pavement, swelling with adrenaline as the car lurched and metal groaned.
Cherry didn't need to look in her mirrors to know that Leonardo was right behind her. The sound of his engine purred like a content lion.
Finally, Cherry turned a sharp right, the car veering with momentum onto the dusty shoulder, throwing up a cloud as the car fishtailed in the road. Cherry chanted, "Shit shit shit shit," as she turned the steering wheel as quickly as possible. The engine stalled and she pumped the clutch rapidly. The ninja could not win.
The motorcycle took advantage of her wide turn and cut her off on the shoulder. As Leonardo slowed down long enough to yell into the Chevelle and Cherry wrestled the beast's heavy weight under control, "What's the matter? Getting tired?" He slithered around the stalling Chevelle and headed down the road towards the twelve or so lights that represented the nearby town.
Cherry turned the key off and flicked it on again, mumbling to herself, "Alien bastard…" The engine coughed as it reignited and she spun rubber on the pavement again and then desperately raced over the pot-hole filled road, eyes on the lone motorcycle ahead.
But she slowed down suddenly when she reached a familiar faded street sign announcing the City Limits of town. Small houses clumped closer and closer together every feet. The motorcycle turned into a dark patch of trees and she saw its headlights go dark. Cherry coasted down a hill and pulled into the trees after him. Leonardo put down the kickstand on the motorcycle and pried off the helmet, still sitting on the back of the motorcycle.
Cherry turned off Grandpa's Ghost and the quiet of the night filled her ears, crickets chirping and frogs croaking in the nearby lime pond. "So what's the matter, officer?" she asked, strutting to the motorcycle and leaning against the front end like a magazine model. "I was just trying to get away from this creep that won't stop stalking me. He likes to jump out at me while I'm on the john."
He nearly smirked, but descended from the motorcycle, peeling off the driving gloves and shut them in the case on the back. "I couldn't sleep because my brother and other hostage both snore. I thought I would go for a peaceful night drive at over 100 miles per hour. I think I should say that you need to be more careful driving that thing so fast at night. You can't have very good visibility. What if a car had been on the shoulder or a deer ran out in front of you?"
"Then a speeding alien would have rear ended me because he was going even faster. Don't give me your 'bitch, please' eye roll either." She rubbed her sore sweaty hands on her jeans. "So do they teach you to drive like that on your home world?"
Leonardo leaned his head back slightly and rolled his eyes, sighing at the same time as if the world were about to crash around his ears.
"Don't do exactly what you just did," she said. "We're in town. We should have some fun."
Leonardo nervously glanced down the road towards the sound of cars driving slowly through town. "I don't know, my… mother ship doesn't allow me to be seen in public. There isn't much I can do out here, exactly." He cocked his head as he listened to the eerie bark of a distant animal.
After several minutes of teasing and coercion, Cherry finally convinced Leonardo to get in the Chevelle and leave the motorcycle hidden in the trees so that they could find something to do. "It's dark. Nobody will notice. Just keep your window rolled up or something. You can wear your helmet if you think it will help."
Leonardo got into the passenger's seat of Grandpa's Ghost very carefully as if the floorboards might fall out from underneath him. He shut the heavy door silently and Cherry said, "I'm impressed that you did that so quietly." Cherry jumped into the driver's seat and slammed the door and listened to it echo through the woods. Leonardo flinched.
"We should chill out by the river. You know, relax and talk about the impending end of the universe. The usual stuff in a small town on Friday night." She followed the main street, lined with old businesses recently converted into insurance offices and antique stores. The road curved over the railroad tracks and Leonardo gripped the top of the window, as the car bounced on its bad shocks.
"I need to kill Hal Barton…" Leonardo said darkly as he looked out the passenger window into the distant tress.
Cherry parked near the children's playground and noticed that all the old metal swing sets that she'd played on as a child had been replaced with blue and yellow plastic. "Want to push me on the swing?" she asked him.
"As long as nobody sees me," he said.
Cherry sat down in one of the swings and let it twist her weight left and right, waiting for a push. Finally, she felt two masculine hands push on her back with enough force to send her into flight. "Hey, easy cowboy!" she said as she swung her legs. "So I hear some guys over there. I think I'm going to go to say hello. I have an idea…"
Leonardo stopped pushing and stepped around the swings, stopping to shout, "I can't be seen, remember? Go hang out with those people if you like. I'm staying here! Why did you bring me over here if you're just going to go party with some losers you don't even know! Now I have to stay hidden to make sure nothing happens to you! You just as irresponsible as…"
"Oh, shut up!" she said, digging her heels into the dirt. She left him standing in front of the swings and headed towards the direction of the voices.
After fifteen minutes Cherry knocked on the passenger window of Grandpa's Ghost. Leonardo looked straight into her face, obviously aware of her presence already. He rolled down the window and said, "Did you have a nice visit?"
She held up a bottle of fire whiskey and said, "Yeah, I made some friends and they gave me a present. Get out. Let's go sit somewhere."
They sat on the bank of the river on muddy tree roots, their feet in the cold water as it rippled past and listened to teenagers laughing further down the bank. A girl giggled wildly in flirty feigned protest.
"You do realize that somebody needs to drive back right? I mean, I can't leave the motorcycle here. I have to get it back somehow. Maybe it would fit in the trunk of the car though…" Leonardo said, looking thoughtfully into the night sky as if the answer were written in the blue patchy clouds.
"Maybe. It's hilarious how much free stuff you can get if you pretend you like a guy," Cherry said, unscrewing the bottle and smelling the bitter sweetness inside. "So I was thinking, you know a lot about me. I don't know anything about you."
"Yes, and…?" Leonardo asked, leaning back on his hands, away from the potential of probing questions.
She said, "We need to play a trust game. Have you ever played Never Have I Ever? Like you ask each other questions and if the other person has done something they take a shot?"
Leonardo rolled his eyes. Bitch, please. "I live with my three idiot brothers. There isn't much to discover. What do you mean, if you pretend to like guys? Did you do some… pretending to get a hold of that?"
Cherry smiled brightly and put a hand on his arm, "It isn't hard or anything. They practically want you to have it."
He angrily brushed her hand away and said, "I don't need a display of your skills. Ask me a question."
She spun the plastic cap around and around on the bottle. "Well, if you admit that you're an alien then we'll just call it a night. How much of me did you see when we meditated?"
"I have been all the way inside you," he said deeply and pulled a wet twig out of the water between his toes and flung it further into the stream of the river.
She laughed and said, "Not even Eric can make that claim about me. Okay, do you live on a spaceship?"
"No." Leonardo crossed his arms and smirked as he thought. "Have you ever been on the Dean's List at your college?"
Cherry scoffed and put the bottle to her mouth, taking a small drink. The sweetness burned her throat. "You know, I remember this stuff being a lot better when I was sixteen. Probably because I wasn't supposed to have it. Okay. Have you ever been on a spaceship?"
Leonardo glared and reached for the bottle. He took a small swig and said, "I didn't live there though."
Cherry smiled a cheesy smile of triumph.
Leonardo said, "Do you want me to throw you in the river?" He thought for a second and asked, "Okay, have you ever had a traffic ticket?"
Cherry grabbed the bottle and took another drink. "I've had enough to decoupage my dorm room."
"I could tell by your driving tonight." He leaned casually to his side against a tree, pulling his feet out of the water.
She said, "Have you ever lived anywhere but planet earth?"
"No." Leonardo yawned and pulled up a few blades of grass in his fingers.
"Ugh!" Cherry pounded the ground in frustration.
They asked questions back and forth for ten minutes. Leonardo was forced to take a drink when he admitted that he had parents, he supposed, somewhere in the world, but he'd never met them and so he couldn't honestly answer that they weren't aliens. He was adopted and could say with certainty that his adopted father was not an alien. Cherry had taken so many drinks that she'd single-handedly emptied more than half the bottle.
"Well, now you know that I skipped school, I drove the tractor, I've only kissed three guys, I buy my panties from that online place where it's all cheap surplus… I got in a cat fight at the club once!" she randomly blurted. It somehow seemed very important that he know.
"A cat fight?" Leonardo was smiling too much.
She wobbled to her feet and the river bank tilted on the horizon. "Yeah, Melanie said I took her tip bag and I said, 'Bitch! Get out of my thong! That's where I had my cash. She put her hand in there to grab my money and I pushed her and she fell over. It's like naked high school!" She waved her hands wildly, trying to wordlessly pantomime the social injustice of the moment while simultaneously batting away mosquitoes. "Like they all bitch and complain about the same shit like boys and stuff only you're all naked and there's money involved."
"That sounds like a good show," he said, lazily. "Normally, I'd pretend to be outraged. Thank you, fire whiskey." He held up the bottle and spoke to it as if he were an actor in a Shakespearean play speaking to the skull of a long dead friend.
Cherry tried to do some sexy dance moves and tripped on a clump of grass. "You need to loosen up, precious."
"If I relax, then my brothers all die of incompetence," he said, standing up. "Show me your fight moves. Come on. Give me a demonstration. I want to improve your technique. Pretend that I'm you and my belt is a thong."
Cherry laughed hysterically, bending over double.
"Come on! You be that Mel… Min… be that bitch that grabbed your thong and I'll be you." Leonardo assumed a tactical defense position, looking very intense and professional. "Now pose me like I'm you. And then you show me what she did. I'll show you what you should have done and then when naked women attack you in the future, then you can do it better next time. I like to help people! Especially naked women."
Cherry tried to remember Melanie and her cloudy mind conjured a tall brunette, bobbing her head, arguing and pointing at Cherry's thong. She tried to cast a spell of bitchy attitude at Leonardo and she said, "Cherry, get your skinny ass back here and give me back my money ho! I know you put it up your ass where you keep all the… um… she said like I take it in the ass for twenty bucks or something…"
Leonardo made a disgusted face and said, "You know, if you really want to be realistic for this, you should be naked too. I'm naked! It's fair that way!"
"We're in public," she said as she instantly peeled off her shirt and unbuttons her jeans. "If we get arrested, I'm going to make you bend over for the soap and you'll like it!" She tossed her jeans at him and he batted them aside.
"I think I'm more drunker than I thought," he said, smiling widely. "Okay, Mela… Wendy… Come at me, bitch!"
Cherry put her hands on her hips and abruptly rushed at him, trying to scratch and hit him, but he grabbed both of her hands and said, "You should have done this!" He lifted her over his head and the world swirled around in a blurry mess. She felt his hand smack her backside lightly. "That's how you win this fight!" Then he swung her around in a circle, finally setting her on her feet.
Cherry stumbled sideways and he reached out to steady her, still smiling. "See," he said. "That's how you win that fight. Wow, I'm being so fucking loud! What's wrong with me! Sensei would be ashamed!"
"Who cares!" Cherry yelled, picking up her clothes from the dew covered grass. "The world is ending remember? Yell as much as you want! Are you an alien?"
"I'm not…" He took an unsteady step backwards and said, "Hey, I'm not drunk enough for that! All I'll say is that I'm a native of New York."
She put on her clothes and said, "You know, I think you should have to live with udderly… terrible… scaring… utter… utter… consequenshes because you won't tell me," she said, fumbling to find the button hole on her jeans.
Leonardo's hands pulled her forward by the band of her jeans and said, "Can't you figure out something this simple, Miss Genius?" He fastened her pants for her and then did some acrobatics in the grass, running and tumbling like a gymnast.
"Wow, the car is a long ways away," Cherry said, as he took a few steps from the bank and watched the ground, the grass drifting about like a green cloud.
"Hey, can I see your phone. I want to check how much money I still have in my account." He held out his hand and gestured with his fingers.
Cherry said, "Well, you'll have to find it. Work for it." She did a few sexy moves with her hips and shimmied away from him.
Leonardo stepped up to her and everything went black and hot as he pulled her t-shirt up over her head and then she felt a few hot fingers reach into her sweaty cleavage, fishing out her phone. He yanked her shirt down and she breathed in a gust of air and found him smirking and unlocking her phone.
"I am… going to get your name tattooed on my fucking ass if you don't say you're an alien!" Cherry leaned on the front end of the car as her senses failed momentarily. She wondered how she'd gotten so far so fast. "Did I just teleport?" she asked. She patted her chest and yelled, "Fuck! What happened to my phone! It must be in the river!"
Leonardo followed her, looking about himself warily. "Wow, I can see! It's a miracle. You know, that whiskey is already wearing off. Maybe it wasn't any good. What do you mean, get my named tattooed. It's your… prime real estate… Do whatever you like with it."
Cherry stomped off towards town, heading towards the tattoo parlor. "You have to come stop me!"
Leonardo climbed into the car and after a few minutes she heard it start up and headlights lit up the dark playground. She could hear the car rolling behind her on the gravel at about 2 miles per hour. She ran to the open window and yelled back at Leonardo, who was leaning on the window at her, "You can't drive! You've been drinking!"
"I hardly had anything! And I'm fine now." He let the car idle and said, "Sorry… but if you want to get my name tattooed on your body, I can say that I am flattered and so are my possibly alien ancestors." He smirked and rolled up the window.
Cherry stomped through the grass and walked down the side of the road, pursued at a snail's pace by the ninja driving Grandpa's Ghost. "Are you an alien?!" she shouted in vain at the car creeping protectively behind her.
Finally, she jumped over the cracked curb and onto the main street. Leonardo parked the car near the fire hydrant, but he didn't get out to stop her as she opened the door of Mos Eisley Tattoo Parlor.
An hour later, with a head full of the murk of alcohol, Cherry left the tattoo parlor, a hand on her left butt cheek, rubbing the sore skin.
Leonardo opened the passenger door and she climbed in, shouting out incoherent vulgarity as she put weight onto it. "My ancestors, wherever they are from, are pleased, Evelyn," he said as he reached across her body to pull out her seat belt, buckling her in like a child. She took the opportunity to smell him again. Herbs and aftershave and river water.
"Hey, I've been planning to get the name Leonardo on my ass for years, okay. It just happens to be your name too. I'm a big Dan Brown fan," she said.
He pulled the car into the now abandoned main road.
Cherry said, "I hope this doesn't affect my tips since I have another guy's name on my ass. Might break the illusion."
"What illusion?" Leonardo steered with one hand, the other on his kneecap, reaching over to shift occasionally.
"The illusion that we're these sexy nymphos who are there only for them. And that they really lucked out because they found this super hot chick that just happens to be into them because they're such a stud. It never occurs to them that it's our job and we're paid to be there like how a waitress must just hang around refilling your coffee for the fun of it, you know. Fucking men." She rolled down the window and let her hair swirl in her face. "Whatever. They're the ones stupid enough to fall for it and pay too."
They drove in silence and stopped briefly to strap the motorcycle awkwardly into the trunk. It barely fit and Leonardo only made 40 miles per hour the whole trip home. She watched him drive, stern and absorbed by the road, mind probably full of the professional tasks at hand tomorrow. Kill serial killer, torture the hostage, get vital information from his primary hostage…
After half an hour of silence, he said, "Well, how would you know anything is real then?" He hesitated for a second. "I mean, how are they supposed to know if it's real or not if you're actively leading them on?"
Cherry shrugged. "Not my problem."
He stepped on the gas and sped up a little. The motorcycle thumped dangerously in the back.
The sun came up pink and orange over the trees as he pulled Grandpa's Ghost into the driveway. He pulled the motorcycle out of the trunk and carried it in his arms to the back of the semi-truck, putting it back where he'd found it.
Cherry stumbled slowly up to bed, her mouth dry and head spinning and sore. All the fun had drained away and left nothing but the poison behind.
She felt Leonardo's hand on her back as she stumbled on a step. "Watch it," he said, all of the playfulness now gone. He helped her to her bedroom door and then whispered, "I'll be busy helping my brother tomorrow. I want you to stay here and spend your time figuring out the information that I need. I'm tired of being led in circles. I know what's in your head. I know she follows you around. That red eyed thing." His voice sounded sharp and angry. "This ends now. Okay? This is too important. And I'm sorry if I'm rude, but I don't have time for these games. Good night."
He watched her for a second, eyes flickering with doubt. Then he silently crossed to the end of the hall and opened the guest room door. The snores of a captive and his captor roared in harmony from inside as Leonardo closed the door behind him.
In the morning, Cherry awoke to the sounds of her mother and Raph standing in the hallway demanding that Leonardo immediately wake up and find out who siphoned all the gasoline out of both the motorcycle and Grandpa's Ghost. Leonardo said that he didn't think the culprits were too far away, but he didn't have time to deal with that and without any more comment, he escorted his brother and the hostage, still in his white lab coat, groveling and begging the two monsters for mercy, out to the barn for an interrogation.
Cherry pulled out a pen and paper and tried to remember.
