Authors note: This story was supposed to just be a one hitter quitter, but it ended up being a bit more than that! It was just one of those stories that would not leave me alone until I wrote it all down. so here it is! Let me know what you think! vote! comment! all that good stuff!
C8ER2U
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"The hurricane came and took my Louisiana home, and all I got in return was a darn country song." --Weezy .F Baby
"You're mine you know that?"
"Heard you twice the first time."
"And I'm yours."
Sean stirred and re-stirred her pre mixed drink. She stared down into her drug of choice; rum and coke. She could feel his dark eyes staring intensely at her. She didn't want to be here at all. Not with him staring at her like that anyway. Especially not with the direction her thoughts were swirling.
"Did you hear me?"
She swivelled on her bar stool and looked at him; the Spaniard. That's what she called him to everyone else. He was just too good to be true and she was completely taken aback when he'd hit on her a few weeks after Katrina hit. She'd fooled herself into thinking it was love at first sight, which happens to be the absolute scariest thing that ever happened to her. Naturally she ran from him like a bat outta hell but he wore her down with his charm and his Spanish. Not to mention he was the type of gorgeous you couldn't keep to yourself, you had to share him with the world. Maybe that was the problem. He was too much! Too beautiful, too charming, too everything she'd ever wanted in a man.
"Yes Alexander I heard you," she said with as much sarcasm as she could muster.
"I fucking hate when you do that, ay dios mio, my name is Alejandro! How would you feel if I called you... Bob?"
She gave him a face. "And just why would anyone call me Bob?"
He gave her the same look right back. "I don't know Sean!"
Sean turned away again and clenched her jaw angrily.
"Why is everything a fight with you? Since the second we met it's been a constant argument!"
"I ain't gonna apologize to you for who I am!"
Sean grabbed her purse and threw a handful of cash on the bar.
"I ain't changed one bit! I'm still the same damn Creole girl from Shreveport you fell in love with five years ago!"
She was standing now, dressed in her usual black cocktail dress, ready to walk the fuck out of this place and leave his ass there. He reached out for her and held her back.
"Please, don't go," he pleaded. His dark gaze fixed upon her and for a moment she was glued to the hard wood floor beneath her.
"I don't want to fight with you mi amour. I just want whatever this is between us, this thing that has begun to come between us to go. And never come back. I just want you; I want to be with you, without all this animosity between us."
His plea was earnest and so damn true. There definitely was something between them and she was tired of it too. They'd lost a closeness they'd once shared. Their love seemed to grow out of nowhere, the perpetual rose that grew out of swirling wind and rain, floods, waterlines, and mold. He sincerely loved her, and she without a doubt loved him from the very beginning, if only things had stayed that easy.
"Lee I know how you feel; I mean you don't think I feel the same way?"
Sean yawned and grabbed her coat off the back of her bar stool.
"Can we not have this conversation here?" she whispered to him.
Alejandro gave Sean a curt nod and signalled to the bartender to pay his tab. He stood and helped Sean into her jacket and they headed for the door where they bumped into a co-worker of Lee's. One that Sean particularly hated.
"Hey now! Where y'all goin the party's just startin!"
Sean rolled her eyes heavenward at his failed attempt for a Louisiana accent.
"Hey, lemmie ask you a question," he slurred to Sean, and she knew immediately what the question was. The same damn thing he's always asking. She could feel her temples pulsing in time with her clenching jaw.
"Why is it you're always wearin black? You look like a funeral director! Are you gonna embalm somebody?" he laughed.
Sean abruptly walked away and left Alejandro to deal with his 'friend' because she just had zero patience for idiocy. She knew people wondered why she was always dressed in the color of death. Come Christmas or her birthday she could count on her family to buy her beautiful, colorful clothing but she just couldn't bring herself to wear any of it.
It began when the hurricane hit. They'd lost everything, the house she'd lived in since her family moved to New Orleans at the age of nine. They lost family photographs, heirlooms passed down through generations, and countless other things that were just priceless, but what left a larger mark on her was all the death. After Katrina hit all she had was the clothes on her back; an old pair of faded black jeans and a black tank top. She had nothing else. And she vowed then that she'd wear black every day from then on to honor the dead, family and friends she'd lost to the storm. But she also wore it for New Orleans. The city that had its spirit broken, its heart ripped out by the gnashing winds of a natural disaster and then drowned when the levees broke.
Now some five years later, she had a closet full of black dresses, and black shoes and she just couldn't explain that to someone who'd never seen the destruction, someone who never saw the floating bodies, the homes underwater, the violence, the starvation, the anger. How do you sum that up in a few sentences?
