“Sure, lover,” she said softly, trying to sound as happy as she could to help keep him calm.
They both moved to grab their coats. Tommy stopped Mike halfway to the door, pushing his hand against Mike’s chest. “Why ya goin’ so fast, brud? Something I said?”
Mike clenched his fists, ready to strike. Cathy took his hands and the fists uncoiled, entwining in hers reflexively. He loosened up and merely brushed past Tommy and Sud.
“I’ll get our coats,” Cathy said, walking into the coat checkroom. “You boys play nicely.”
She was gone. For the first time in weeks, Mike and Tommy’s eyes met. They both squinted, cracking their knuckles.
“So,” Tommy said, finally breaking the tension of the silence with his shrill, annoying voice. “Do you always do what your bitch tells ya to?”
Mike drew back his fist to hit Tommy.
Tommy winced, closing his eyes tight and snapping his hands up to cover his face. After a moment with no impact, he opened them again.
Mike had lowered his hand and now stared at Tommy, forcing himself not to smirk. He stepped up closer to Tommy until they were nose to nose. “Listen to me, you little freak. One of these days, Cathy’s not going to be around to stop me, okay? And when that day comes, we are going to have a go. You think what that Adam Genblade guy did to Grendel was bad? You ain’t seen the half of it. Then, when you’re all nice and dead, I’ll find a plot of ground for you right next to Grendel. And I’ll have one steaming hot piss on you both,” he spat, his teeth grinding more and more with each word. “Do we understand each other, you motherfucker?”
“Got ‘em!” Cathy said, tossing Mike his coat, who caught it without even looking in her direction, never breaking eye contact with Tommy. “What’s going on?” she added.
Tommy shuffled his feet uncomfortably. Sud did the same, but Mike wasn’t sure if he was actually uncomfortable, or if he was just mimicking Tommy’s movements again.
“Nothing,” Mike said calmly, finally turning away from the boy. He put on his coat and opened the door for Cathy. When she left, he glanced at Tommy before leaving himself. “Another time.”
When Mike and Cathy left, Tommy punched the table with surprising strength, sending splinters everywhere and startling everyone else in the club.
He sat cross-legged on the cold concrete floor, his expression stern and unmoving as he stared down at the floor in front of him, the muscles in his arms twitching violently of their own accord. He’d been naked for roughly an hour, and now sweat glistened off of every inch of his flesh, seeping its putrid stench from every pore.
His palms lay flat against the floor in front of him, its rough texture digging into the tender skin and making it itch. His fingers wriggled at the ends of each hand, forcing the blood to flow through them as he felt the tingle of numbness at their tips. He let out a long sigh through both nostrils, keeping his lips sealed tight as he surveyed what he had done.
On the floor between his two hands was a sketch drawn out in the dirt and dust that lined the bottom of his cell. The lines were jagged and wavy, each one punctuated with grease stained fingerprints dotting along their sides, and yet were clear all the same.
They were men.
Small, simplistic stick men made up of a circle for the head and single line each for the torso and arms. All lined up in a row, one following the other until there were ten all together looking back at him with glazed faces. He reached out with one long nail and scratched over the head of the sixth one in line, making it a little more round before pulling back and clasping his chin in his hand.
He let out a long huff, staring down each of the men he’d created one at a time. His pupils moved from one to the next in short bursts so synchronized that they might have been timed rather than spontaneous.
Bringing a finger to his lips, he squeezed his long, yellowed nails between his sharpened teeth until he heard it crack. When he took it out, the nail had split and was now seeping redness out from between the cartilage. He swished the remainder of the nail around in his mouth for a moment before turning his head to one side and spitting it out, bouncing it off the far wall and onto the floor. Reaching his hand out over the first figure, he squeezed the wound between his thumb and middle finger until two small drops of crimson came out, landing in the middle of the circle. Now it had eyes. Two gaping, red eyes that burned back at him in hate.
Smiling, he sucked the excess blood from the tip of his finger. He turned his attention to the third man from the back then, drawing a small loop on it that remained open at both ends, like a ribbon or an infinity symbol left incomplete. He then drew a quick line through the centre. He smiled a little, then drew a large circle around the next figure to the left.
His grin faded away as he turned his attention back to the second man in line. He ran his hand over his chest and forehead, wiping off the copious amounts of sweat that had accumulated since he’d started his project. He squeezed his fist together over the drawing, dripping the rank-smelling liquid onto the second man. He squinted at it for a moment, then nodded.
Turning his gaze to the third man in line, he let his grin grow so large that it showed off all his sharp, filed teeth. He reached
