It was raining hard when Lance got off work. It was like buckets of water being dropped from the sky. It had started out as a light drizzle the morning of his twenty fifth birthday and it had just rained harder and harder as the day progressed. It was fitting weather. It matched his increasingly black mood as it became more and more obvious that nobody was going to wish him a happy birthday. Not his coworkers, not his friends, not even his family. He was going to spend his birthday alone. It was a tradition he hadn't broken once since moving out of his Dads house at seventeen. It was something he'd never really gotten used to and this year it was worse than usual.
His car was parked at the far end of the parking lot, the result of being twenty minutes late to work. The tiny pocket umbrella he kept stored in his desk for emergencies wasn't doing much against the downpour of rain and kept threatening to turn inside out with each violent gust of wind. Halfway to his car Lance let a particularly violent blast take useless device. It wasn't protecting him much for the rain coming at him sideways, nor the rain bouncing up from the asphalt anyway.
When Lance finally reached his car he was completely soaked and freezing cold. "Must be my birthday huh Gruntie?" He turned his head slightly to the blue plush cow he hot glued to his dashboard. He got it while serving in Iraq and it rarely failed to bring a smile to his face. His birthday was one of those rare occasions where it routinely failed. "Let's go get me something to drink and some food and call it a night. The sooner I today ends the better it'll be." He started the car and slowly pulled out of the parking lot.
The drive home was normally about thirty minutes but in the near complete darkness and driving rain it took over an hour before he was able to pull into his apartment complex. The covered parking hadn't seemed so distant from his place in the morning when the rain had been only a slight mist but now that the sidewalks were miniature rivers flowing down towards the parking lot it seemed like it was a mile.
"Tough day?" Lance looked up at his neighbor, Chelsea, staring at her door. She was nearly all the proof a man could ask for of God. She was impossibly built with a fat ass that even her warm parka pants were having a hard time concealing and rack that just didn't quit. To top it off she had a sexy face, not beautiful, sexy. Bee stung lips perpetually pouting, a petite nose, bright blue eyes. Blonde hair with brown streaks that she always let partially cover her right eye.
"You have no idea." Lance responded. Normally he would have taken more time to check her out but the only thing he wanted to do was get drunk and pass out.
"Wanna bet?" Chelsea responded.
"Sure why not. If we want to play who's life is worse I'll win every time." He paused in his open door. "I'll start. I lost my umbrella and I'm soaking wet."
"I locked myself of the apartment." She responded.
"I'm going to spend my birthday alone, again." Lance scowled.
"I got dumped by my boyfriend of six years. Which is why I locked myself out I just had to get out of the house and I forgot the door locks itself." She forced a half smile onto her face.
"That is a good one. I'm a twenty five year old virgin." Lance said dryly.
"You'd win if you weren't lying." Chelsea responded.
"Yeah it'd be funny if it weren't so pathetic. So how you getting back into your place?"
"I called a locksmith. It'll be a while in this weather though."
Lance paused for a moment looking at her and then his place. "You wanna come in, you can see you'll be able to hear when he gets here and I can't just leave you out in the rain." Chelsea paused a moment then nodded and let him lead her into his home.
The inside of Lance's apartment was sparse to the point of being empty. A small table had a single chair arranged beside a table partially covered in school materials, partially covered in maps, dice and other gaming paraphernalia. The center of the table set the stage of a partially painted coach pulled by skeletal horses. Lance closed the door and noticed that Chelsea was staring at his gaming supplies. His legs tried to bolt forward to conceal them but his mind battled them back. "Yeah, if you didn't already know I'm a geek. Video games, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, Warhammer. . .both versions. No wonder I'm still a fuckin virgin right?"
At first Chelsea didn't say a word. She just stepped closer to the table careful not to drip water onto the pages. "Did you draw these yourself?" She pulled her wet hair back behind her ears. "And the wagon?"
"It's a Black Coach, well that one is a custom for a friend who wanted white and blue but yeah I painted it. Some of the maps I drew myself, some of them I found on the internet, they are a lot more work than they are worth sometimes." It was hard to decide if he was flattered or insulted. Chelsea seemed genuinely interested. She hadn't looked at him or anything else in the apartment since she'd spotted it and now she was respectfully circling the table not touching a single thing.
Experience had been a harsh teacher over the years though. She wasn't some girl he'd meet at Pegasus or a friend of a friend who was ready for the shock of meeting a nerd. A real nerd, not the current batch of wannabes that thought that having sat through Lord of the Rings once qualified or that owning a Playstation3 wasn't mainstream. He'd seen that look before and heard that tone of voice and knew she was just waiting for him to lower his guard and when he did she'd twist the knife. The only problem was somehow she seemed different than the others like maybe she really meant it.