Ink-stained fingers scrabbled over yellow legal pads, bone meeting skin meeting pen, thoughts scratched in a soup of gobbledegook. Arrows were drawn to related paragraphs, questions were scrawled in the margins, and small drawings littered the page.
Theories were thick in the air.
Half-crumpled sheets of his legal pad lay solemnly at his feet, and his bare feet kicked at them as he set his pen down, lying back and rubbing his eyes. It was four in the morning. Jackson decided it was time to perhaps go sleep.
---
His notes came back to him during lift-off, and he smiled to himself as he bounced in his seat. Next to him, Lisa had begun to stiffen and close her eyes.
It was when they were off that he launched his surprise. Her eyes widened, just as they had done in his numerous imaginations and ruminations of the scene, and she looked almost like she would vomit. (Please, not on my shirt.) A sick glee rose in him like a blush.
Click, went his mind, capturing this scene for later love. An attachment had formed in him for Lisa. He wanted to remember this moment forever; it was almost like a first date, an anniversary. He didn't have very good relationships with women.
She is going to be sick! Sit down, you dumb bitch.
Finally, she listened.
In many of his daydreams, she had become an accomplice to him, forming an impromptu Bonnie and Clyde. He would take her along with him, and she would tag, it would be merry, pleasant, he'd finally get some sex after years, maybe he'd leave the business. A glass of red wine.
This was not going to happen. Lisa was not going to cooperate.
This thudded. It sort of hurt -a breaking of delusions.
---
I am going to kill her. Would she ever get out of the goddamn bathroom? The kid was staring at him.
He slipped inside.
While she wriggled about and he threatened her, a strange feeling of dominance tinged him, like frostbite beginning at the fingers. Like clockwork, a happiness of his total control of the situation. This feeling was probably the reason he had entered his choice of work - the need for power.
It was a frightening need.
Guttural threats came from him, feeling as large and real and whole as the eggs snakes swallowed. She was cowering, and his fingers swept over her sweater and shirt, rough skin petting that scar like sandpaper. His fingers were filing it off of her. Seeing that scar was chilling, but instantly, he understood. Something dramatic had happened to her, and all of this theories from his crumpled notes flushed back to him. "So, that's what it is," he whispered, almost smiling. Checkmate.
Now, torturing her into making that phone call would only be too easy.