Charlie's Angel

You came back with a vengeance that night.
I was terrified that something more would happen, afraid that your
drunken hand would find its way and scar me once again.

I remember cowering in the corner, crying, shaking.

Your eyes blazed with a rage that I had never thought possible of a
human being but maybe only of a dragon. A dragon, red and black and
emerging from the deepest hottest flame of hellfire.

You said that you had seen things, visions. You spat the words into my
face... "You cheated on me"

I shivered in response.

"YES!"

It was not I that said this, but you who hurled the accusation towards
me, wounding me more than if you had hurled a fist at me.

I uttered my defense sotto voce, "No, I would never do such a thing...
Not to you..."

"YES!"
You screamed at the top of your lungs.

Your body was silhouetted against the bright lamp that has always stood
in the opposite corner of the room, your thick heavy shadow towered
over me in a dance of fury.

You spoke again of the things that you had seen, the visions that had
come to you, hand delivered by the demons that lived inside my head,
the demons that had caused me to do it.

I knew that these visions only came to you from looking too deep into a
vodka bottle at that pub on the corner... Charlie's.

I knew that these visions only came to you because you were looking too
long at the lap dancers and table-top-pleasers that laced that pub on
the corner... Charlie's.

You were not in love with me, but with the money that I made. You were
in love with Charlie's. I was just there with the money that enabled
you to visit Charlie's. Just a girl along the way to the many girls
that pleased you day-in day-out.

I was in a quiet rage of my own in the corner.
How dare YOU accuse ME of cheat, when it was you who spent the night
with another while I sat at up until the early hours of the shattering
dawn, waiting.

You would come home, pleased with yourself.

Pleased with yourself, but not with me. I would have to satisfy you, as
if you had not been satisfied enough.

Then... if I did not respond to your demands, you would lift your
drunken fist and scar my emotions once again.

The emotional hurt was ad infinitum, far worse than that of the
physical pain.

The scars on the outside would heal, the bruises would fade and broken
bones can mend themselves. But no doctor can prescribe a drug to heal
the scars that you caused me on the inside, the bruises that you left
on my heart and the broken pieces of my soul that you left
shattered.

But, despite all of this, I was still devastated when you left.

Despite the pain, both physical and emotional, I couldn't stand to see
you leave me.

There's a very thin line between love and hate... and the fact was that
I despised you.
I hated you infinately, not only for harming me, but then for dropping
me like a stone into a bottomless black pool of water, only the water
was now dispair.

Without you, I was free. But without you, I was also lonely.

I don't know why you came back.

Why you came back when I had found him...

He was a friend to me, one of the best I had ever had. He could sit for
hours, just listening. When he did decide to speak, he spoke words that
soothed my pain, eased my tears and almost won over my battered
heart.

Almost...

You had scarred my heart too deep. It was immune to feelings of love
now, but he was on the verge of re-discovering those feelings for me,
even though he knew that those feelings would not be for him.

He was my boss.

He had ordered me around at work for as many years that I could
remember, but it had never occured to me that he could be a real
person, with actual emotions. Emotions as rich for him as they were for
others. He was a compassionate man. How I had never seen this, I did
not know. All I knew was that he cared then, at that moment that he
called me to his office.

He told me that he had seen me crying over the video cameras that
surveyed the offices.

I was afraid to tell him at first. Afraid that if I revealed my
emotions that I was usually so capable of hiding at work, that I would
become vulnerable to more hurt and deception.

But once the first word escaped my mouth, they tumbled forth and I was
unable to stop niether the words, or the tears.

From then on, he visited me at home. Over mug after mug of coffee, he
would listen and console me. He would tell me the nice things that I
always knew about myself, and would over-rule all the hurt and
deception that I had endured.

The night he kissed me was the night that you came home.

It was not a penetrating kiss.

It was not a hungry kiss.

It was not a kiss that showed physical attraction.

It was a kiss that showed such close friendship that it conquered the
boundries that existed between males and females. That boundry that
nature created in order to reproduce.

It was no more than a mere peck that lasted an eternity for me.

But you walked through that door then, and interpreted the whole thing
wrong, your drunken mind twisting it into a deceit against you.

I jumped up to explain, even though I had no need to.

I rushed towards you to make excuses although I knew in my heart that I
should have no need, for it was, after all, you who had walked out on
me.

But you slammed the door in my face.

I knew where you would be. You would be slumped over the sticky wooden
counter, drunk to the point of hallucinating, at that bar on the
corner... Charlie's.

Everything happened in a fog after that. I asked him to leave and I
washed up the mugs and the coffee pot and then I sat in that bucket
chair by the window that overlooked the street to wait for you, hoping,
for some reason unknown to me, that you would return.

And, oh boy, did you return...

You came back with a vengeance that night...