Submissive Beauty Wants to be Used IV

   David, has had a devastating year, for someone who gets away with so much reckless shit. David's lost most of his jobs, wrecked one of my best cars, he usually goes through an average of one old hooptie a year, but this was one of my favorites. It was a car I drove, kept for seven years, and put an indecent amount of money into, fixing it up to last. When I bought it for $1,100, it was ten years old. It had 110,000 miles on it. I replaced everything broken or original; in the suspension, and the engine, piece by piece. Really loved that car. She was a little egg-shell blue '98 Escort ZX2 the kids and I lovingly named Crystal. The passenger’s side door and rear panel was smashed in from the 18 year-old previous owner. I didn't even care, since the door and window were still functional.  When David wrecked the car, it had over 380,000 miles on it. I felt it could have ran forever.
It was a cold cloudy Sunday in the middle of March when it happened. The kids were gone with their grandma at the Plymouth Ice festival.  Sitting in my room, blowing clouds with my friend Sarah, it wasn’t a bad day. Considering I had spent every weekday that month so far at a doctor’s office, hospital or other medical institution. A couple Saturdays too. David wasn’t having such a great day.
 
Attention! Your computer has a virus. Your computer has a virus. Please call this number…David’s computer had been repeating the chant for about a half hour.
   “Fuck Dean, why did you tell me to do that streaming shit to my computer to watch movies? My shit’s bricked up now. It won’t even work.” We could hear David in my room even with the door shut and locked. Attention! Your computer has a virus…..
   “I don’t know man, it works on my computer all the time. I don’t like to steal movies like you do.” Dean’s deep dopey voice was loud too. I think that’s why they are friends. They both spend hours together drinking and hollering at each other like two old deaf men.
   Sarah was staring at me this whole time. I was staring back at her too, and we both busted out laughing like it’s the funniest thing in the world listening to these two morons argue. David was banging on the door again. He was drunk already, and it was not even two PM. Attention! Your computer has a virus…
   “Vicki, I need your laptop! Dean just fried mine!” David always expected a bailout to be ready for him.
   “Did not! You download so much shit- it could be anything.” Dean countered from the other room. Attention! Your computer has a virus…..
   Listening to these two wasn’t so funny anymore. Went to the door, but I didn’t open it.
   “I’m sorry, but we’re using it in here, Sarah was showing me something for our homework.” I lied. I’d never let David touch my computer before- that’s why it had never crashed. His on the other hand had crashed more times than I could remember. Attention! Your computer has a virus. Your computer has a virus…..
   “Well hurry up! I wanna watch this new Avengers movie.” We heard David go back to his friend. Your computer has a virus…
   Sitting back down in my little blue love seat with Sarah- she passed the bowl. I lifted it to my lips and fired. Passed it back to Sarah. Held it until I breathed out clear. Sarah blew the biggest cloud I’d seen all day and promptly began choking. Attention! Your computer…
   “Ah, I think we’re down to the resin now.” I said. Picking the glass pipe up, it wasn’t just warm, it was hot enough to singe in the bowl part where the weed gets packed. Sticking it back in my mouth, I held the neck while torching it one last time. The resin hits made the biggest clouds. As the fire went in the resin at the bottom catches again, and it made a fiery starburst of light flare up between the blue rings within the glass. During this time Sarah had caught her breath.
   “Dude, all I got in my head now is, ‘Your computer has a virus…” Sarah complained. She pointed at the stereo lighting up in all of the colors of the rainbow. “C’mon, let’s listen to my Ed Sheeran CD again.”
   “I don’t wanna listen to that anymore today, it just depresses me. How about some speed metal instead?” Tapping the commands on my phone to pull the music up, a second later all space was filled with fast beats and screaming guitars. Sarah gave me a look of relief.
   “So much better. I don’t hear a thing out there now. Let’s go put the blue streaks in your hair now before it gets too late. I have to pick up Brian so we can have dinner with my parents.” Sarah went into the bathroom and started to mix the noxious bleach that took all of the red out of my hair in thick streaks. Cherry auburn in the top layers, and the deep purple in the bottom layers really popped once we added the bright blue highlights.
   “Pretty serious huh? I thought you didn’t want to bring him around your parents since he’s not Jewish?” Brushing and sectioning my hair on top while she tied a towel around my shoulders.
   “Yeah, well, we did just get engaged, it’s better if they find out now-“Sarah was cut off by banging on the door again. Going to the door I hit the remote to turn Slayer down.
   “Yeah- what’s up?” I yelled at the door, still not wanting to open it. Attention your computer has a virus…
   “I’m going to take Dean home. He has to work early tomorrow.” David said on the other side.
   “Don’t you have to work early too?” I yelled back. Sarah started painting the bleach onto the strips of hair I separated for her. Your computer has a virus…
“Yeah, I have to work early too. I’m coming straight back. Open the door, Jeff is here to see you guys.” Jeff is a twenty year old who grew up here in the park. Sometimes he brings trees over, sometimes he wants to blow mine. I don’t care- he has always given more than he takes. Besides that- he had been reading with the kids and I at times, and he would always stay to talk long after the kids were gone, learning as much as he could.
   “Okay, I’m unlocking the door now.” Throwing the new lock back and opening the door, Geoffrey walked in and David pokes his head in.
   “How come you always lock this door?” Davis demanded. Sarah and Jeff both seemed to find interesting patterns in the carpet to study.
   “Because you never knock unless I use it. You just walk in. Sarah and I were burning just now. What if the kids came home? I don’t want them to just walk in.” Holding the door, I looked at him expectantly. David usually behaved around company, but he had to be a little difficult.
  “Well at least keep the fucking music down, I can’t even hear-“, cutting him off I mimicked the female voice,
   “Your computer has a fucking virus dumbass. Yeah I know, good stuff. Don’t wanna miss that.” Sarah, Geoffrey, and Dean in the other room all cracked up. David turned a shade darker than his normal high-blood-pressure-red.
   “Yeah, that’s alright dumb fuck, I’ll deal with you later. I gotta go.” David slammed the light and hollow door shut. Geoffrey and Sarah sober, looking at me with wide eyes, Sarah with a hand over her mouth.
   “Don’t forget to turn your girlfriend off! We don’t wanna listen to her the whole time you are gone!” Sarah said as her and Jeff are packing the bowl again giggling. Sarah gave Jeff the first toke. We all heard the front door slam.
   Touching the warm tinfoil in my hair, and looking at the clock, I decided my hair had another ten minutes to fry. Sarah passed me the bowl.
   “He’s bitchier than ever today. What is going on with him?” Sarah asked digging through her sack. She pulled out a nice nugget and set it on my overturned tin lid. I passed the bowl back to Jeff. He wouldn’t say a word until it was just him, me, and the book we were reading, Choke. Sarah and I were used to his characteristic silence. I turned some Eminem on then, and sat back to enjoy the cloud. All the kids had gone now, even David.
   “He’s having a bad day. You know how he acts when he can’t get his way. I’m glad the kids are gone. I hate when he gets like this.” We continued to pass the weed around like a game of baseball. Done before Sarah could pack it a second time, I lit a cigarette. “I don’t know, I can’t shake this feeling I have. Things never end well for any of us, when David gets a bug in his ass like this.”
   “I think it’s so fucked up how he keeps you here against your will just so you can see your kids. I think I would kill him if I were you.” Sarah peeked inside the foil to check my hair again. “Nope. Almost done.” Jeff’s head popped up.
   “How can he keep you here? Just leave him.” He offered. Sarah laughed.
   “That’s what I said. “Sarah returned. “It’s not so simple. When Vicki met David she was still married to her ex. Vicki and this guy smoked dope back then, do you mind me telling him this?” Sarah asked me with the pipe halfway to her lips. Sitting there with my legs crossed I shook my head and took another drag off of my cigarette. Sarah continued.
   “Well Vicki had to work with David and train him. Somehow she ended up burning with him.” Sarah looked at me to fill in the blanks.
  I exhaled hard. “Yeah, I was stupid and smoked with him every day for a while since we had to take our breaks together.” Looking at both of them in turn, “David can be very charming when he wants to be, I had never seen his bad side yet. He gave me a lot of attention. He was intelligent and I liked that.” I knocked the ash off my cigarette and continued.
   “The closer he got to me the more I thought he might be a better role model for the kids. He didn’t have any habits I was aware of, and I was terrified that Isabelle and Oliver would grow up to be smokers. Since all Steven did was sleep anyway, I let him come over late one night after work. Really stupid.” Shaking my head, I got up and began to pace.
  Jeff scrunched up his face. “But Steven didn’t notice how close you guys were getting at work? I thought you guys used to work together.” He lit his own cigarette.
   I smiled and scoffed at him, “Steven didn’t notice much. His own twin had been trying to sleep with me for seven years, he never seemed to notice that. Norman worked there too. Hell, half the guys in that place wanted to bang me. Norman was the one who kept them all away.” As I blew more smoke out, Jeff wanted to speak.
   “That is so fucked up yo. I would be so pissed if anyone hit on my wife. I would kill my brother.” Sarah agreed with him.
“Yeah, that is a really long time for it to go on too. It must have really sucked.” I didn’t want to elaborate about Norman that day so I went on with the story.
   “Anyway, I had only known David a couple of weeks, and he’s at my door. His uncle had given me a ride once so he knew where I lived. He’d ridden a bike over after work. I let him in and he’s already stinking drunk on tequila, with what’s left of the fifth in his coat. He said to me, ‘Can I stay here tonight? My uncle and I had a fight.’ Me, I’m like ‘Sure’. That was my second big mistake. I should never have let him in, or let him stay.”
  “But why? He was drunk and needed a place to go, so what?” Jeff asked me. I put my cigarette out.
“I have to wash my hair to get this crap out. I’ll tell you if you’re still here when I get back.” I grabbed my clothes I had sitting on the bench by the bathroom door, went inside and shut it.
When I came out of the bathroom, Sarah and Jeff were staring off into cloud space. I laughed and snapped my fingers.
  “Are you guys awake out here? I thought you would’ve had some great conversation going by the time I got out.” Brushing out my crazy looking hair and Sarah was digging in her bag for the blue hair dye. Jeff laughed.
   “I would’ve left already, but I wanted you to finish your story.” Jeff said as he was packing another bowl. Sarah sat me down in my desk chair and started applying the blue stuff. We only used organics from her grandfather’s store where I used to work, so there was a strong smell of blueberries in the room to compliment the smoke. I looked at Jeff and spoke.
   “I let David in, and he is on ten. He’s screaming and yelling about his uncle, saying the same shit over and over. He woke Isabelle up, and she came out of her room. At first he’s all like, ‘Aw. She’s so cute.’ She was only five. But when she gets up after a few minutes and starts touching his long coat, probably found the fabric interesting or something- he slaps her!” I stopped for a minute and hit the bowl again.
   “No way! If he did that to my daughter, man I would kick his ass.” Jeff’s skin was turning pink from anger, from his ginger eyebrows to the roots of his red coarse curly hair. He was the same age as Isabelle, and they grew up together. He was more Oliver’s friend than Izzy’s, but he was still pissed.
   “So I’m angry,” I went on, “and I’m telling him he needs to leave. Then he says it. My life has been a train wreck ever since. He says, ‘If you call the police to try and get me out, I will make sure CPS finds out how much dope you have in this house, and I’ll be sure to tell them how much I’ve seen you smoke. I’m not leaving. Tomorrow you can take me to get my stuff. My uncle’s a crackhead and I can’t deal with it anymore.’”
   “Dude, that’s terrible. But why didn’t you just go get your weed card?” Jeff asked me.
   “They didn’t have weed cards back then dumb ass!” Sarah stopped fussing with my hair a moment, shaking her head so her straight brown hair swayed over her shoulders. “Weed was still highly illegal. Between her and Steven, the kids would have gone to the state. Everyone knows once they’re in the system bad things happen to them, and it’s almost impossible to get them back.” I nodded my head.
   “That’s right, I wasn’t willing to risk it. The next day When David went to the liquor store, I asked Steven if we could just quit for a while, you know, get clean after all. We could stand together against him and get him out of our house. And you know what he says to me- he says he won’t give up dope for anyone- not even me and the kids. That was the end of it with him. He just washed his hands of us. Fucker.” I was lighting another cigarette and Sarah had finished putting the highlights in. Another thirty minutes. The room was silent besides the little portable heater buzzing. Taking a deep breath I continued.
   “At this point, my brother-in-law takes notice, he had already taken measures to separate us at work, which I was grateful for. But when he comes to talk to David, it lasts about five minutes. David tells Norman that if he tries to remove him, he will find his wife and tell her he’s seen Norman and me screwing around at work, which Kathy had been suspecting anyway. Norman drove off after that and I never saw him again. Long story short- David never left. The following month Steven did. I had never even slept with David yet, but he owned me just like that.” I snapped my fingers. “All because I was stupid and burned with this fucker on our work break.”
   “I can see David doing that.” Jeff said nodding his head slowly.
   “Well you’re smarter than I was at that age. I thought everybody was as nice as I was. My dad tried to warn me, but you know, when you are young you know everything already.” Shaking my head I laughed bitterly. “Even though I have my card now, it doesn’t matter. His mother has even warned me that if I try to leave she’ll lawyer up and spend as much money as she needs to take my kids. She says I’m too sick to take good care of them.” The bitterness then won out and two tears ran out of my left eye.
   “Bull shit. You’re the best mom I know. You made fresh juice for them since they were babies, taught them to read before school even started.” She held her hand to her chest. “I remember coming over during your lessons. You even live in this shitty old trailer for the sake of their education!” Sarah stopped, blushed. “Sorry.”
   “It’s okay Sarah, I know I live in a shitty tin can.” I said smiling again. It took everything to tell this story.
   “Well I wanna beat his ass.” Jeff said. “I wanted to before, but now I really do.
   “That’ll just get you in trouble, and unless you kill him on accident, it won’t help a thing.” I crushed out my cigarette. “I think it’s time to wash again. You leaving Sarah?”
    Sarah looked at her phone. “Yeah, sorry, I can’t stick around to see how it turned out, I have to go now.” She was already standing there with her coat on and bag packed. “I’ll call ya later, love you Vick.” I gave her a hug and she left.
   “I’m gonna go down and see what Kenny is doing.” Jeff said as he got up rubbing his hands on his jeans.
   “Okay, sounds good, I’ll see you later.” Jeff left. I made sure the front door was unlocked in case the kids came back, and took a shower.
   After I got out, and blew out my hair- it was so glam- the kids were home, and getting ready for school the next day. I started making some lentil stew for dinner, with fresh bread. I was in pain, but the steady work kept my mind off of it.
   The front door opened and in walked David with Big Mike! I had just gotten rid of this guy, and David brought him right in the front door with the kids home and everything. Dinner was almost done.
   Mike was a crackhead from next door that David liked to drink with. I still wonder about what other partying they might have done together.
   Jeff walked in too at this time. “Hey Vicki, I know the kids are here and everything, but can we read now? I can come back tomorrow if you want.”
   My heart swelled at this. “Of course we can, just go on in there and wait for me.” Jeff went back to my room and plugged in my white Christmas lights strung around the room. I got the lights since they made me feel better during the long winter. They gave a beautiful candlelight glow at night.
“Hey Taylor, keep an eye on dinner, the bread’s almost done.” I called to him in his room.
  “Okay ma,” Taylor returned distractedly. Probably was on his game.
   I got back into my room and sat down at my desk. I got out my book and opened it back to where we left off. Mainly Jeff reads with my assistance, except when he gets really tired, but still wants to go on- then I’ll read. Not having to read that night, I just sat back and enjoyed the sound of his voice and the rhythm of the story. We were interrupted once by Mike and David, but I handled that and Jeff still stayed for another chapter. He did well that night.
   “Okay Vicki, I gotta go. I promised my sister I would read with her tonight, I just wanted to go over it with you first.” Jeff was putting his coat on.
   “Jeff you hardly need me to read ahead if you want to. You could always be more prepared for our readings.” I shrugged my shoulders at him. He smiled big, showing off his perfect twenty-year-old teeth.
   “Thanks again, I’ll see you around.”
   After dinner the kids had their showers and Mike and David were still going strong in the living room.
   I was exhausted and wanted my bed, but just then Jeff came back. He didn’t want to see me. David had told him if he wanted he could come back to drink. I shook my head and drug myself to bed. Washing my face, turning on Linkin Park the bed felt so good I hoped death would be as sweet.