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Impulse

Posted on June 8, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

She was the sweetest thing anyone had ever seen. Completely unlike most girls in every respect. Where they played dumb or coy for as long as it took for them to get what they wanted, she killed with niceness. There wasn’t a man in her orbit who looked at her in any way other than with the instinct to be protective. When she smiled, he felt a warmth rise up in his chest in a way the sun on a cool day never could.

He was her complete opposite in nearly every respect. They called him surly to his face and ‘that big lunk of bad news’ when he wasn’t listening. He had also been called bastard, son-of-a-bitch, fucking cunt, cocksucker and any other name an antagonist could remember or bring herself to say out loud. It was not because he was some sort of megalomaniacal evildoer or anything but simply because he rubbed people up the wrong way and didn’t care who knew it. He could be single-minded in his mission to achieve accomplishment and people didn’t like that he elbowed others out of the way to get to the front of the line.

Most of the people they knew separately didn’t understand what one saw in the other. His friends and acquaintances thought he would be better served by turning up anywhere with a bombshell on his arm, someone who drew attention with her smoking body so that he could swoop in while their prey was distracted and sell whatever he was selling at the time. Her friends thought that the evil that always seemed to bubble below his surface would someday engulf and corrupt her. Regardless of what they thought, most people were surprised at how good the two of them looked together. While on each other’s arm they looked like the most perfect picture in the world.

Unfortunately for them pictures lied. The fact that his career was not progressing at anywhere near the speed he wanted for it made him moody and an unpleasant person to be around. He was not small built and so there was every indication that if he resorted to violence, the attack would cause significant damage. He was aware of the impact of his size and was not above using it to get what he wanted. Unfortunately for him, the position he found himself in, there was no place for violence or its implication. He needed the people in power to go for his artistic take. He was at their mercy and he knew it. So he resorted to playing mind games with the people he could get away with messing around. His mother took the brunt of it and sometimes, perhaps for variety rather than anything else, he unleashed his bad temper on the woman he loved.

She went very still and silent when he flew into one of his rages and he always sobbed at her waist and begged forgiveness for all the bad things he had said when the fog or rage had lifted. She always forgave him and never held a grudge.

Perhaps it was that lack of any apparent consequence that caused him to repeat his bad actions because he got progressively worse the more his career ambitions were thwarted. Things came to head when a potential investor who had bought into his vision, danced the dance with him for several months and even begun talking numbers bowed out without any explanation.

He worried it in his head for days that became weeks.

Was it something he said? An off-colour joke perhaps…

Was it something he did? Bad table manners (he felt angry that she hadn’t corrected any bad habits he might have picked up) or the way he sat or chewed or drank wine…

Was it someone? He didn’t think he’d looked at any of the women in the investor’s coterie in a way that might have been misconstrued as inappropriate but he didn’t know.

And the not knowing killed him every day and made him meaner than he had ever been.

He started fantasizing about hurting her in completely bizarre ways and the images came to him at the most inappropriate times.

While waiting for her to climb out of a cab he felt like slamming the door in her face.

When she linked her arm in his he felt like shoving her away. Sometimes the mental image of her teetering and falling brought involuntary giggles.

The most common image he carried with himself was of him breaking her arm. For no real reason other than that he was hurting and he needed someone to truly understand how bad the pain felt.

He wasn’t an alcoholic or a drug abuser but there was definitely something wrong with the chemical balance in his brain because he was in a bad temper almost all of the time. Even when he wasn’t there was no telling what could set him off. He repressed so much anger in the presence of potential investors or friends (who might know other potential investors) that, in private, he was a volcano ready to erupt at any given time.

One morning, after another frustrating email confirmed that he had missed the shortlist for another grant, he picked a fight with her. She reacted in the same way she always did which infuriated him more. He went for her, grabbed her hair and twisted her arm and hissed in her ear, “Does that hurt?”

She was breathless in her shock as she whispered back, “Yes.”

He shoved her and she fell face forward onto the bed and hit her leg against the frame in the process, “Good. Because now you have a small clue of how I feel.”

Her leg was bleeding. He blinked and the monster in his chest eased its grip on his heart. He lumbered towards her, his mind racing for the words that would make this latest apology sound sincere. He got to his knees in front of her and she punched him right in the nose.

The recoil raced down his spine and stung him in the tailbone. His eyes went wide and welled up and the tears rushed down his face to mingle with the blood. He looked at her in surprise but all he saw was her fist making the return trip. And then…

Nothing.

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