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STAGE TWO - TOP-DOWN PROCESSING
Perceptual processes in which information from an individual's past experience, knowledge, expectations, motivations, and background influence the way a perceived object is interpreted and classified.
His eyes enraptured her first and foremost. Cobalt, they were cobalt, and utterly deranged. Convoluted. A band of royal blue surrounded the cobalt shade, just as intricate as its lighter hue, and she was perfectly, wholly, fascinated. So many things were going on in those eyes, so many emotions and words and other descriptions she couldn't begin to decipher. Some say the eyes are the windows to the soul. If that were true, she decided, locked in a staring contest that possibly carried vicious and deviant consequences, then this man's soul was buried in barbaric and inhuman turmoil. She'd never seen eyes like these before, so maybe her diagnoses were wrong, but she really didn't think so. He wasn't attempting to hide what was going on inside of him, the storm that was clearly raging behind closed doors—if anything, he was broadcasting it for anyone to see, if they looked for it, or if they knew what to look for. Like she did. She'd been trained to notice these things, and in spite of the crumbling currently taking place inside her own head, her psychiatric instinct remained intact. For now. The rest of him was just the same up close as she'd perceived from far away; dingy clothing, grimy skin, and he smelled awful, too; like nothing she'd ever inhaled before.
On the other hand—and this was the newborn side of her thinking, the one birthed from the raw animal deep within every human that never found its way out of most of the population (murderers, rapists, molesters being the exceptions)—she was able to find an enticing man beneath the sleaze. He could be handsome if maybe he cleaned himself up, got some clothes that hadn't gone weeks without seeing a washing machine, but then again, none of this mattered. Those motley eyes were still staring at her, pulling her in like two tiny, ultramarine magnets, and she gasped for air when her brain began screaming from suffocation. He'd taken her breath away. Johnny hadn't even done that when they'd first met; although, her breath was missing for a different reason. A reason she couldn't quite figure out yet. His thin lips formed a hard line beneath a light brown goatee and the beginnings of a beard on his cheeks, and his hair was nearly black, mussed, something he probably didn't ever care about. His shoulders were wonderfully broad, something easily grabbed onto, chest and stomach appeared flat, legs were long. Yes, he could have been attractive. If he wasn't already, according to her turbulent thoughts.
"What?" she finally asked when it became apparent that this enigmatic man was not going to speak first. His eyes narrowed at her words as if he were insulted by her brash greeting, but she could tell he wasn't insulted so much as he was intrigued. Was he one of those men that did not tolerate such insolence from women? Of course he was. They all were.
"You're pretty," he said softly, chin rising on the last word. His voice—for the love of God—was so soft and underwhelming. It wasn't harsh or cold like his eyes suggested it might be. The tone was misleading—was he manipulating her with the ease with which he spoke or did he mean what he said? Probably the former. She didn't want to read too much into it, either. How long had it been since someone, no matter who, had called her pretty?
"Thanks," she replied flatly, glancing back to the parking lot. But the last thing she wanted to do right now, at this very moment, was look away from this alluringly detrimental man. There was still Johnny to think about in spite of the fact that she'd virtually forgotten about him. Her fragile mind had been consumed by aggressive azure.
"You don't look like you're having a good time," he observed, volume still quiet and controlled, a bit strained.
"I'm not," she answered honestly. "And it'll be even worse if you don't leave me alone."
The jukebox music cut and she heard the stranger inhale deeply through his nostrils, decidedly infuriated. She felt his heat suddenly as he leaned toward her, his wrist skating across the tabletop toward the ashtray, and she noticed the cigarette between his fingers. He was tempting her in more ways than she cared to realize. He flicked the ashes, and her obsidian eyes watched the smoking tobacco raise to his mouth for another hit. His cheeks hollowed out, and her head tilted as she examined a pair of cheekbones that were incredibly sculpted and so high on his face that it seemed inhuman.
Yes, beneath the sediment he was a good looking man, but beneath the man? Something fierce stirred within him, something restless, something raging. He was placid and still, and yet his body thrummed with frenzied hysteria. And the fact that he could so easily center his entire attention on one thing, on her, was equivocal. He could be one thing at the same time he was being something completely different. He was something she'd never seen before, someone she'd never encountered before … a human being she thought impossible to exist in the first place. And because of all of this she was altogether instantly infatuated with him.
"Should I be afraid of your boyfriend over there?" he nonchalantly asked, jerking his head in Johnny's general direction.
"No," she answered faintly.
"Should you be?" he pressed. One last drag on the cigarette and he snuffed it in the ashtray. She didn't justify that with a response, electing instead to wrap her arms around herself and limit the closeness of their bodies. However, it resulted in this strange man reaching out to touch her face, the backs of his fingers brushing tenderly over the welt on her cheek from when her boyfriend's knuckles had met her skin. "He the one that tried messin' up the pretty?" he asked just before she jerked away from his contact. His hand hung in the air between them for a moment before it dropped into his lap.
Incapable of ignoring the burning on her cheek his fingers had ignited, she tried haphazardly touching the flaming skin with the tips of her own fingers to reacquaint it with normalcy. Mission unaccomplished. His fingers were still there. They were resting on his thigh now, but they were on her face, too—apparitions whispering across her flesh. To make herself less obvious, she pretended to scratch at her cheek, consequently causing pain inflicted by her nails scraping all across the welt, and she winced.
"Did he do that?" the man prompted, clearly knowing and recognizing his boundaries, choosing to ignore them, intentionally antagonizing the situation.
"Is it that you want me to have a matching one on this cheek?" she angrily asked, no longer feeling the fear of the consequences of her attitude. She was curious as to whether or not that was his intention; to make her give him lip so he could cut her down to size. Or tell Johnny his girlfriend was getting out of line and have him handle her. "I mean, what's your plan here?" But she couldn't stop herself. Literally, she couldn't prevent the words from coming out of her mouth, she couldn't think about them before she spoke, and she was only competent enough at this point to consciously ignore doing something that would absolutely result in physical harm.
The stranger grabbed the chair he was seated on between his legs and yanked it forward, effectively closing the space between them. The chair legs landing back on the floor were loud enough to rattle the walls, and the fact that the music had stopped gave all the patrons the opportunity to hear it. Knowing that Johnny could be one of them did not deter her, or it did, but her eyes, her body, her entire being, at present, were held hostage by this avant-garde, devilishly manipulative man before her. If he was a man at all. As far as she was concerned, he could be the Devil himself.
"He fuck up your face?" he provoked. In spite of his need to bypass proper grammar—the English language—she knew he had intelligence within the crisscrossed, backward brain nestled in his skull. He knew what he was doing, what he was saying; there was a reason, a method to his madness, a means to an end, behind everything.
"How is that any of your business?" she demanded, once the swelling of her tongue and the dryness of her mouth abated.
"You like that?" he went on like he hadn't heard her speak. He probably hadn't. She was a woman and therefore had nothing important to say. "You like havin' your ass handed to you every day?"
"What the hell kind of question is that?" she snapped, spinning around to face him. "And who the fuck do you think you are?"
He was close now, so close. She could smell the smoke on his clothes and the whiskey on his breath. The cerulean in his eyes was that much more lucid, so much more … engaging. Spellbinding. A narcotic. He was someone new, she resolved, someone not Johnny. The first man who'd spoken to her in months. But still she noticed his eyes, still she noticed the round tip of his nose, still she noticed the deep red tinge to his lips, and still she noticed, far past the beryl of his eyes, the gluttony devouring him from the inside out. He starved for something as yet unknown, and if she was reading him correctly, he felt as though she could quell that hunger for him. She knew one thing for sure: she did not want to know what exactly he lusted after.
"So you do have some fight in you," he smirked condescendingly, pulling a cigarette from behind his ear, lighting it with a Zippo from his pocket. "I like that." The used smoke he exhaled out of his lungs blew across her face.
"I bet you do," she spat, inconspicuously inhaling the second-hand smoke.
"Mmm!" he mumbled, shoulders wiggling, masquerading as a shiver.
She was so puzzled, so perplexed and rattled by this man she knew had bad intentions toward … everything, but it was the befuddlement that kept her glued to her chair, her eyes never leaving his face, every retort out of her mouth entertaining him further. Something strange had happened when their eyes met the first time—something strange and cataclysmic. The planets seemed to have aligned in a ruinous way, not unlike the way predicted by prophets with regards to the end of the world. She had a peculiar sensation worming through her insides that she and him were supposed to meet.
But why?
"Who are you?" she questioned prudently, whispered words floating through the air between them, riding the curling smoke from his cigarette.
"Who the fuck are you?" he retaliated sharply.
Inherently arrested, she intuitively answered with not but a secret message: "Caroline."
"Caroline." A shudder wracked her body at the way he said her name. Those three syllables were saturated with unmitigated torridity and they took the breath right out of her. She struggled for air again, inhaling more smoke than oxygen. "I like that. Caroline." His eyes narrowed, predatory. "Caroline." Her name rolled off his tongue with sexual flavors garnished with indecency. He wasn't trying to hide what exactly was on his mind when he looked at her, his eyes raking down her body, pausing longingly at her crossed legs.
"Stop saying my name," she requested breathlessly.
"Or what?" he rumbled meanly, forcing his face into her personal space. His nose was less than an inch from hers, the sour scent wafting off of him pierced her nose and caused it to crinkle. "You gonna give me a dirty look?"
He had a point—she wouldn't do anything to stop him. In fact, it hadn't been much of a demand as it was a request. The way he said her name—the lecherous tone to his easygoing voice, the lewd glint in his eyes—sent a thrill through her body; one not completely unwanted, but solely foreign, as Johnny hadn't spoken to her like that since the first time he'd swung at her. Granted, she was aware of why he was speaking this way to her, what he was trying to get from her, but she'd be lying if she said she wasn't flattered by his wicked eyes and how he said her name. His filthy appearance was unorthodox, but that did not erase the fact that he was male, and she was female, and hormones would always win in the end. Just being near another man who was clearly sexually attracted to her was enough to make her heart race, send her temperature through the roof.
"Just don't," she repeated, absolutely no self-confidence left in her, though it had originally been stolen by Johnny. If, by some very slim chance she had any left, it now belonged to this saturnine man sitting before her.
"Tell me what you're gonna do about it, Caroline," he rasped, hitting the cigarette, cheeks collapsing, eyes constricting to slits as he stared her down, challenging her to threaten him in any way.
"I'm gonna—" she stammered "—I'm … I'm gonna go to the bathroom."
She started to stand hurriedly, but slowed her rise as the stranger joined her. They rose together slowly, eyes linked in a battle that would eventually lead to a war she would almost certainly lose. Or surrender without a fight. Her ascension stopped once she reached full height, but the local continued growing to nearly six feet, his shoulder meeting her eye line. If she wasn't unnerved before, she was now according to the knocking in her knees and the tremors in her hands and fingers. His stony gaze was paralyzing, and she had to relearn how to walk before she extracted herself from this meeting of minds on different, but slowly converging, levels, to go to the bathroom across the hall from the one she'd been thrown into by her boyfriend.
He followed her. She never turned back to see if he was there because she didn't have to—she could feel the heat radiating off his chest and bouncing against her back, she could hear him breathing, and his boots thumped so closely behind her that she thought he was taking the exact same steps as she was at the exact same time. Mimicking her. Attempting, she thought, to provoke her into more non-thought out responses, maybe even a physical answer to his onslaught. None of which she really saw herself doing, but she never assumed she'd mouth off to a complete stranger, either. Evidently she was capable of anything.
Anything?
Upon arriving at the door, she contemplated quickly how to go about closing it behind her. Push it closed with her arm, keeping her back to him? Turn and slam the door in his face, hoping he would relent and leave her alone? She chose the former as she entered the tiny ladies' room identical to the men's and she tried to put the door between them, but he forced himself inside with her. He closed the door, slamming it shut with a scuffed black boot. Reluctantly, though entirely impulsively, she spun around, putting them face to face once more. He was somehow taller, so much closer than she'd expected him to be, and he was glowering down at her, jaw muscles tightening as his teeth clenched behind paper thin lips. His facial expression said he wanted to put her through a wall, but his eyes smoldered, unadulterated thirst as clear as the sky was blue. And there was that flattery again. Johnny never looked at her like that. Sex for him was meaningless and he only got it from her when he couldn't find it elsewhere and he never cared whether she got anything out of it or not. This man probably wouldn't concern himself with her pleasure, either, but she didn't deny or ignore the rush of warmth that started between her legs and flowed through her veins, circulating throughout her entire body. He could force himself on her at any moment, bend her into position his heart desired, taking from her what Johnny liked to steal, but it would be different. Somehow it would be different.
She would not fight this man.
"What are you starin' at?" he asked. "Hmm?"
His lips. She was staring at his lips as he spoke, for the first time noticing the mole on the left side of his mouth just above his upper lip. She was almost able to taste the bitter flavor she knew his mouth would have following the whiskey he'd ingested, also the state his teeth were in suggested he had no sense of dental hygiene. So why the hell was she aroused by him? Why did she want him to put her on her back and spread her legs?
Finding her voice, she finally said, without much conviction, "Leave me alone."
"Huh," he chuckled, disregarding her appeal, eyes locked on her midsection, and she glanced down to see just what exactly fascinated him so. Her frayed shorts that had once fit perfectly—before Johnny had ordered her to lose some fucking weight, and she'd dropped from one hundred thirty pounds to one hundred ten pounds in less than two weeks—now hung slackly off her hips and the thin t-shirt she'd worn in lieu of the Utah heat was stuck to her skin a couple of inches above her belly button. A rather large chunk of her tanned—another Johnny request—skin was visible, and this outlandish, daunting man towering over her was drooling for a taste. A taste she wasn't entirely opposed to giving him.
His hand was hot as it grabbed at her side, the nail on his smallest finger scraping against a hipbone that would be rather noticeable if she were lying down and stretching out. She gasped and smacked at the offending appendage, squeaking out words that might have been get away from me, but her lips were numb and her tongue had committed suicide at some point, so the sentence was jumbled, and then she wasn't wholly positive she'd said anything at all. His eyes were bleak and maniacal—black—as he snatched her arm and spun her around to face the wall, bending her limb in ways it wasn't meant to be, and he was all over her then. He imprisoned her arm against her back, threatening to break it with the strength he used, and his chest met with her shoulder blades, hips against her backside, knees arching into her thighs as he reduced his height.
"You're makin' me hard," he happily divulged, hips thrusting forward so that she could feel said excitement, know that he wasn't lying, and know what she did to him. Her eyes closed as she imagined what it could do for her, how it would feel, how it could potentially make her feel (if he allowed it), and her hips rolled back into his. "Oh, yeah!" he exclaimed, pulling her hair away from her neck so he could crush his face into her skin and breathe in her scent. "I like that." He bit her flesh and her body jolted, spine straightening, bringing the front of her body flush against the wall before she threw her hips backward again, directly into the stranger's. "Found me a good one," he praised, hands all over her now, coarse skin bringing to life the tissue on her flat belly all the way up to and passed her prominent ribcage.
His presence momentarily disappeared … until he spun her around to face him, crowding her into the wall once more. But now their eyes were linked, matched in desire, on their way to equivalency in madness. She welcomed it—she let loose of all worries and cares and fears of Johnny, drowning in the stranger's feral eyes, once more forgetting to breathe. He was what she'd been looking for all her life; the one who could give her back any shred of humanity, no matter how basic. And from the look in his eyes, the bit of humanity he was capable of giving her was probably somewhere less than fundamental.
"You want it, don't you?" he panted, hand sliding down her side to her hip and back to her ass where he squeezed, hard, and a groan narrowly escaped the back of her throat. "Yeah … you want it." His nose met hers, then his forehead, and he gave her face a light shove with his own. "Give me a kiss," he requested softly, but she knew he wasn't asking, nor was he gently imploring; he was commanding with a calculating tone.
"No," she whispered, eyes following his, obsessive, never blinking. She kept tabs on every single move he made, though not really for her benefit—she was more interested in whathe did and how he did it. He rocked side to side, shifting his weight from one foot to the other, ferocious eyes carving through her, leaving what she knew would be a lasting lesion on her psyche.
"Come on, give me a kiss," he coaxed, bringing both hands to her behind now, molding their bodies together, and she had no choice—no, she had lots of choices—but to place her hands on his chest. Her fingers traced the patch sewn into his shirt with a name embroidered on it. Mac. Nickname? Real name? Someone else's shirt? Why did it matter? His pectoral muscles were so solid beneath her palms, and his hands were massaging her ass, and there were so many things going on at that moment that his connivance snuck right past her deteriorating intellect, and she licked her lips in anticipation of the kiss she was about to gift him.
But he beat her to it. His sight had locked on her mouth mere seconds before her tongue swept over them, and when that happened, his mouth attacked hers. He did taste like whiskey and what she assumed to be the pungent flavor of rotting teeth, but the fact that he was trying to lick the back of her neck through her mouth, and his hips were thrusting into hers, and his hands were all over her, trumped what would normally be quite a repelling essence. His virile body was doing wonders to her feminine, hormonal needs, causing her to groan into his mouth as she threw her arms around his neck in a sudden desperate need to cement herself to this strange man.
The bathroom door abruptly flew open, slamming against the wall, and she and—Mac?—the local separated. Mostly she was the one to disengage their embrace; Mac's hand remained on her backside, floating to her hip as the space she tried to put between them increased. They both looked at Johnny—Caroline with an expression of horror, Mac with a look of entertainment and boldness. I'm fuckin' with your girl, do somethin' about it, he said without the use of words. And Johnny was more than happy to teach women lessons in the way of disrespecting their significant others, but men were a completely different story. She had it on good authority that he was afraid of getting his ass annihilated in a fight with another male. Women, including herself, were too terrified to give it back to him.
"What the fuck?" Johnny screamed, eyes searing holes right through his girlfriend.
She lost control of her breathing and her heart battered in her chest at a rate likely undetected by any hospital monitor. She'd subconsciously known that she would get caught, but the stranger's eyes and puzzling demeanor had reeled her in and in the process of doing so, he'd killed her. She was dead where she stood. Johnny wouldn't let her get by with broken bones and a mangled face. Not this time. The macabre in his eyes was simple to read—as soon as he got her to a place where there were no witnesses, he was going to kill her. And maybe that wouldn't be so bad. He'd kill her, and she'd no longer have to endure this terrible hand she'd been dealt, this undeserving life she'd been given. She would be free.
"Caroline," he growled, extending his hand toward her in a chilling, gentlemanly gesture.
With one last glimpse at Freedom—she wished she knew if his name was actually Mac—she placed one dainty hand into her executioner's, locked eyes with Mac's, and she allowed Johnny to yank her away from the bathroom, nearly pulling her arm out of its socket. The entire establishment had heard Johnny's scream and they now turned to watch the scene unfold, none of them in any hurry to put a stop to what they all assumed was going to happen to the much-too-skinny blonde woman with the petrified brown eyes. They simply watched; watched the damned woman walk her last walk, look with her eyes for the last time, feel her hip bump into the corner of a table. And they did nothing. Not even the bartender, who'd seemed the most interested in her quandary—he watched, too, but his eyes conveyed different emotions. He felt sorry for her, but at the same time, he felt as though he'd done all he could for her. And somehow, she decided, glancing at him over her shoulder as Mac made his presence known once more and leaned against the bar beside the older man, she knew he'd pinned his hopes to the man she'd kissed. The bartender had counted on Mac to help her out in some way. It didn't make sense, of course, but she read that in his eyes. There had been a plan in place involving herself and the guy in the scuffed boots.
Since they didn't help her, since no one in that bar lifted a finger for her, she smirked at them, eyes panning over every customer she could before falling on the bartender and Mac. For those two she had something special planned; after the smirk, her eyes hardened, darkened, and she lifted her middle finger in their direction—a final goodbye to the both of them. Mac grinned at the gesture and then turned and leaned over the bar to whisper something into the bartender's ear. She saw the older man with the ponytail reach behind the bar just as the door slammed after her, and Johnny jerked her toward the Mustang.
Her last ride.