Chapter 17: Patience is Overrated
Beetle stood, leaning on the outside of his roadhouse, flicking a finished cigar away and blowing smoke into the night sky. He sighed, growing a bit unsettled. Lydia had been away since that morning, and still, she hadn't returned.
Truthfully, he wasn't sure what to do. Should he let her have her space or just go and see if she was okay? Part of him wanted to spare his own feelings and just forget the whole damned thing. Lydia didn't even know how he felt about her, and yet he was letting his own chances of ever getting out slowly slip away because of her. Sure she was sweet and nice and hot as hell, but she was also very, very dead. Yeah, she would have made a damned good wife, girlfriend, whatever, but she also had zero chances of getting his ass out! It was a lost cause and he knew it. Hell, Lydia would probably never think of his nasty ass in that way, anyway. That was like asking her if she wanted to contract the clap (which he may or may not have still had).
"Fuckin' pathetic..." he muttered, disgusted with the way he'd been secretly doting over the young woman. He needed to do what he'd damn well intended to do in the first place! He'd sit and wait for that four-eyed butterball to summon his ass, like he was supposed to! He'd have one hell of a party, scare the shit out of some stupid college brats, and find himself a nice, drunk piece of ass to slap a ring on and force into marriage! That's what he intended to do before Morticia Adams had sulked right back into his life, and that's what he was gonna do now!
Beetlejuice grunted in satisfaction with his decision to firmly latch onto his testicles and not let them go running off the next time he saw Deetz's face again. He then proceeded to not care about her, while going inside to not care some more.
Beetlejuice flipped through his latest issue of Plagueboy in an attempt to NOT care about ole' whatserface and NOT glance at his watches every five minutes and NOT wonder where she was. Not that he had any problems with that, or anything.
He grinned lecherously, holding the magazine up and allowing the centerfold picture to unveil itself. "Ahhh, that's reeeeal nice, there..." he told himself, before his eyes strayed from the nudie picture back to his watches. "Uh, nice cans, too! Hell, she's even got all her appendages! I'd hit that!" he chuckled nervously, feeling a tiny twinge of fear well up inside himself. It was currently three in the morning and she still wasn't there. Where the hell was she? Surely she wasn't trying to reunite with that prick again...
"Grrr...FUCK IT!" Beetle growled, throwing the magazine against the wall and watching it fall unceremoniously to the floor. So much for growing a set.
Beetle kicked over his coffee table, as half-empty bottles of booze and ashtrays full of cigarette butts hit the floor. He just couldn't quit thinking about her, and that just pissed him off! Fine, he'd just go make sure she was okay, then he'd leave her alone. Yeah that was the trick, he thought to himself, before leaving the roadhouse and slamming the door behind him.
He walked down the crumbled sidewalk, puffing on another smoke and glancing about himself warily. "Where the hell did she go...?" he grumbled, hoping to bump into her as he had recounted doing before.
Up ahead, Beetlejuice noticed an old, nearly skeletal man sitting under a flickering, twisted streetlamp. The guy looked like he'd taken up permanent residence there, what with the cobwebs hanging off of him and all, thus provoking Beetle to make an inquiry.
"Hey! You seen a little dark-haired gal come through this way?" he asked, stepping up to the old guy, while simultaneously admiring the vast fields of wrinkles upon his skin. Beetle figured that if they were like the rings in a tree trunk, the guy must've been like a thousand years old.
"Errr...Let's see..." the man rubbed his stubbly chin, running things over in his mind. "I did see a little lady on that bridge over there about an hour ago. Just stood there, looking down into the abyss below. Real pretty little thing. Sad, though. What did ya do to her?" the man asked narrowing his already beady eyes.
"NOTHIN'!" Beetle spat, instantly irked. Why did everyone always blame him when a woman got upset? "Why do you think I did somethin' to her?!" he fumed.
The old guy rubbed his chin once more in contemplation. "Well, I heard you got yourself thrown out of some bar four times for harrassing the womenfolk..." he mused aloud.
"Okay, Methusala! First of all, it was THREE times, and that wasn't just some bar. That was one of the hottest damned nightclubs in the Nietherworld!" Beetle growled, snarling just inches away from his face. Besides, he didn't even get thrown out last time. He left with Lydia and that chick with the beard stubble that turned out not to really be a chick , or whatever. God, Lydia hated that place, he thought. Then he thought a little more, following an inkling in the back of his mind. She may have hated that place, but there was a place that she actually liked - a dirty little bar, in the wee hours of the morning.
Just as the old codger was about to retaliate, Beetle took a long drag from his cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke in his face. "Not now, gramps. I got places to go." he snorted, before disappearing in an instant.
Just as abruptly as he'd vanished from his previous spot, he reappeared in front of a place he'd been all too familiar with. "The Red Rum" stood before him, in all its delapidated, grotesque glory. "Ah, I missed you, old girl..." he drawled, remembering all the booze, broads, and uncountable slaps to the face he'd received there over the years. Ah, good times, he reminisced...