Promise

There was a chill in the air tonight. I sat on the far end of the bar as she stepped through the door. I marveled at her presence and knew that I must keep the promise that I made. Her face was perfect; an artist couldn’t render her any better.  She was here, right when he said she would be. I glanced down to my watch that hugged my wrist. 11:27 PM. She took a seat a few stools away from me, draping her beige raincoat over it. Her sleeves dangled inches from the beige tiled floor.

I couldn’t help but to admire her absolute beauty. Her hair hung down to her shoulders, resting on her navy blue sweater.  I remarked of her eye color. “Brown eyes, huh? Does that mean you’re full of shit like the rest of ‘em?”  She laughed and said, “That’s a good one.” I played with my beard, it had become a habit to casually stroke it.

The bartender approached her and asked what she’d be drinking tonight. She cracked a smile that reaffirmed everything that I’ve ever questioned. She was an angel, she had to be. The fact that she was here now was a blessing in itself. She’d been through so much.

The torment that comes with possessing a tortured soul haunted her on a daily basis.  To be a prisoner within the crumbling walls of your mind, to know that you try your best and it’s not enough . . . yet here she sits, with a smile and laughter emanating from it. How could she appear so happy on the exterior when she housed those evils deep within her, in a treasure chest begging to be pried open?  She desperately yearns for the one who desires to open it.

I tried before. I didn’t expect her to remember me. After all, it was so long ago. She placed her ten dollar bill on the counter, but before the barkeep could collect, my hand hovered the paper and waved off his advances. I told him I’d take care of it and he offered me a shot on the house. He turned his back to pour me a shot of Jameson and I stood behind him and removed the .357 from the back of my jeans. He was dead after the first shot but I continued to empty the clip into the bottles of top shelf liquor. His body hit the floor with dead weight. He cracked his skull on the counter top, so if the initial shot didn’t kill him, this would.

The woman tried to scamper away but I told her to stay put and she did just that. I asked for her name and told her she would need to follow my every instruction if she wanted to make it out of this alive. When she questioned what all of this was about, I shook my head and told her that she’d rather not know the details.

I dug into my jacket pocket to cease the vibrations from my iPhone. I had two texts and seven notifications. I realized that time was ticking away and put the device back where it once rested. I sat back down at the bar and invited her to join me.

“May as well. Free drinks, right?”

She appeared skittish, but eventually came to her better (or worse) senses. She sat next to me at the bar, closer than before and wanted me to tell her what all of this meant.

“What do you think it means? We’re having drinks at a murder scene. The body is still there.” He pointed to the slain bartender. “Time is important at this stage of the game, but never important enough to ignore the act of sharing a drink.”

“This is a game to you? My life is a joke? Who are you?”

“Who I am is not important. I just need you to trust me. Do you?”

“I’m supposed to?”

“Yeah, I think you are. If you only knew, if only I had the time to tell you.”

“Don’t give me that. If you can take a few minutes to have a drink with me, in front of a corpse no less, then you can sure as hell spare a minute to explain why my life is in danger.”

“I can’t do that. Time is everything and it’s running out.”

“Yet you sit here and sip away at that fucking poison.”

“You down me for the same thing you came in here for. Even if I did tell you, you wouldn’t believe it. You’d think I was crazy. This whole thing is meaningless.”

“Nothing is meaningless. You have to know that I can accept whatever this… is.”

“Then so is everything.  No matter what you do or say in this moment, it doesn’t change the outcome.”

“What if it did?”

“Don’t throw rhetoricals at me. Finish your drink. We have to go.”

“No, I’m not going with you until you give me a valid fucking reason. I don’t even know your name and you want me to put my life in your hands?”

“You used to know my name. You used to know everything about me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course not, I knew you wouldn’t. Do you want to?”

“Want to what?”

“Understand. Do you want to understand?”

She thought about it for a moment. I looked at her and picked up on a sense of anticipation filling the room. She was leaning towards trusting me. She nodded her head, giving me the green light on letting her know the truth about us.

“What if I told you that in a past life we were married? Please know the reason I had to tell you this. You’re going to die within minutes. You have a brain aneurysm that will kill you where you sit in exactly seven minutes. I wrestled with the idea of seeking you out. The truth came to me after I was in a coma last winter. I got hit by a drunk driver and was left to die in the windshield. It was hours before anybody helped me. I couldn’t believe it the day that I woke up in the hospital to a nurse wiping my chin after being spoon fed apple sauce. Enough about this, your last moments shouldn’t be about me.”

She knew that she losing grip of her life with each passing second. She recognized the cold reality that she didn’t have a chance to gather her thoughts. She needed to speak now.

“Why did you tell me this? Why would someone want to know this? Where were you going to take me? I deserve to get these answers. End it right.”

“You deserved to know this time. You’ve been taken from me in this way two times before. I couldn’t let it be a surprise this time. I was going to take you across the street to lay in that field and just look at the night sky. I guess it was silly of me to think that it could’ve happened. I’m surprised you didn’t ask why I killed him.”

“Why did you?”

“To show you this was important.” I rose up and my hand graced her shoulder. I bent my head over and kissed her on the cheek as I walked away. “Until next time, my love.”

Before I reached the door I heard her body drop from the stool and onto the floor. I didn’t look back, I couldn’t. Pushing open the door, there was a man waiting for me outside. He came to me and extended his hand. I shook it firmly, regret in my eyes.

“See you in twenty years, bud. I’ll be in touch.”

“You always are.”