Page 31 of Karma

“Just try not to drink too much,” he says. “I need you.”

“I haven’t even been drinking that much,” I tell him. And it’s the truth. I just didn’t need it after Karma showed up at the lake.

Karma and now Grim is another secret I’m gonna keep from him for a while yet. At least until I know there’s something to tell.

But there already is something to tell. I haven’t felt this alive and this energized in a very long time. It started with Karma at the cabin and it’s the reason I came with her to LA. Now a new chapter has opened up with Grim. I just gotta see how itends before my own ends in that final battle with the Devils. And I don’t have much time to do that. I’m sure Joker would understand that if his head wasn’t so full of plans for that battle.

The bar is even louder and rowdier than it was when I left. It’s mostly because up on stage, some band is giving it their all and it ain’t much. Just more noise to add to all the rest of it, only this noise is amplified. But people are dancing and head-banging to it like there’s no tomorrow regardless.

Grim isn’t here anymore. It took me a while of elbowing my way through the crowd to realize that. Now I’m standing at the corner of the bar, ordering my second bourbon and still not thinking straight. It’s not like I wanted to find him here so we could have a conversation. And it’s not like I don’t know where to find him. He’s most likely in the hotel across the street, in the room I had to rent for him, in addition to the one I got for Karma and myself, because being fugitives and all, they don’t like to leave a trail. Not that the clerk did more than glance at my driver’s license, which is as fake as the one Karma and, I suppose, Grim are carrying around.

Before I had my first drink, I figured it would keep me from going to find him in the hotel. Because doing that might be sticking my head too far into the lion’s mouth, or however that saying goes. By the second one, that idea was growing fainter. And by the time I ordered the third, it started seeming like going to his hotel room is the only thing I can do.

I just can’t seem to get the guy, his hard cock or his manhandling ways, off my mind. Not that I’m particularly interested in getting manhandled. But damn it, I can’t even remember the last time anyone could get my mind off the war,vengeance and Joker’s schemes quite as well as first Karma, and now Grim, can. I owe it to myself to see it through. I’m enjoying this vacation way too much to just end it right as it got even better and go back to sitting around, waiting to die in the brutal battle that’s coming.

That third drink’s what did it. So now I’m standing at the door of room 54, across the hall from room number 52, which is the one I’m sharing with Karma. Or had been. Because I don’t know which she’ll choose when she gets back.

So maybe I’m about to knock because of that too. Because I don’t want her to not choose me. But that’s entirely too much thinking.

The door to his room is solid wood, but the depressing grey paint is chipped and peeling all over and a section looks like someone took an axe to it at some point. And quite possibly at whoever was on the other side of it at the time too. This whole hallway sure smells like someone died here and wasn’t found for a while.

Grim could very well take his knife to me.

And then I’ll have to stab him. Or shoot him. And Karma won’t like that. Maybe I should just let her make her choice and be done with this.

I’m nervous. Jittery like before a first date. Not that I’ve gone on enough of those to know. But I’m sure that’s where this overthinking indecisiveness is coming from. I haven’t been nervous or jittery, or indecisive for that matter, in so long I’d forgotten what it felt like. It makes me feel like an idiot.

So I bang on the door before it gets any worse. The door shakes, but doesn’t come off its hinges like I half expected it might.

“Who is it?” Grim asks from the other side of the door. He doesn’t sound in the best of moods.

“It’s me. Scorpio.”

He opens the door immediately. I’d expected him to ask more questions.

He’s still wearing his riding attire, complete with the riding pants, but minus the jacket he wouldn’t take off all the while we were at the bar earlier. The t-shirt he’s wearing is a little tight over his biceps and across the chest too, come to think of it. In a good way. I feel his eyes on me, the same blue lasers from before and I’m having trouble looking directly at them.

“What do you want?”

It’s a simple enough question. Wish I was sure I want to tell him the truth.

The room smells like that mixture of being on the road, riding hard, and whiskey. I find it very familiar and comforting.

“I thought we could finish what we started,” I say, opting for a middle of the road approach, one between the truth and staying on the safe side.

He laughs, a booming, warm kind of sound and it too somehow sounds familiar and comforting. He also opens the door wide and steps aside so I can enter. I don’t hesitate. Inside, it smells even more like home, despite the smell of dirt and that watered down, unscented bleach they always use to push that dirt around when they clean rooms like this one. It reminds me of my childhood with Honey. That’s why it seems so familiar. I guess. But one glance at his eyes still burning holes into me tells me the source of that familiarity is much closer in both space and time.

“Which part do you want to finish?” he asks. “The part where you almost stabbed me? Or something else?”

That intensity of his is like a cloud around him. And I’m sure it’ll burn just as bad as his eyes if I touch it.

“Something else,” I say and finally look him in the eyes, because fuck it. That’s why I came here. For the burn. “I figured I could suck your cock and then fuck you. How’s that sound?”

I shocked him. I can feel it in the ripple that passes over that tension around him. It’s like a jolt of electricity. I came here for that too.

“And you figured I’d just go along with that plan?”

His eyes are telling me something all on their own. But I’m not sure it’s ayes.

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