Melvin never had much luck with the ladies.
Everyone had been surprised by his marriage, but no one was surprised when his wife was caught being hammered to multiple screaming orgasms by the barely legal teen they paid to come over and mow the lawn. It seemed the front and back yards weren’t the only lawns the kid had been mowing since he’d turned old enough to vote. The towheaded beach bum thought he’d died and gone to heaven when given the opportunity for afternoon delights a day every three weeks or so with a horny housewife, and if Melvin had been a more violent man, the kid may HAVE died and gone to heaven... literally... by way of the shotgun.
But Melvin was far from a violent man and not much more than a scrawny, stick-limbed individual with glasses, a timid nature, and a nose for money. He’d found success in accounting, enough so that he was in never in want of money and always carried a few extra bills to pass to the outstretched hand of a beggar or drop into the hat of a street musician.
Melvin had slowly climbed his way up the ladder of the financial world, working his way to the very top, and then rammed up against a cold-hearted bitch of a boss who liked to see him squirm for her own twisted benefit. By now he should have been a partner in his firm. Instead, Mrs. Olivia Crabapple (recently divorced, she kept the last name as she liked the sound of it) loomed over him, devouring him with her shadow and stalling his career with her greed. Why not take credit for the miracles that Melvin worked when he allowed you so readily?
It was common knowledge you could walk all over Melvin, and he’d simply stand up, wipe the grime off his suit, and apologize for standing in your way. Too many people took advantage of this. His wife, the screaming cream queen of lawn boys, got half of everything. Crabapple rode his wave to wealth. Melvin, he hated to admit, had become something of a joke.
And here he sat, staring dreamily at the form of the redheaded pretty waitress at his favorite outdoor cafe, wondering what her hair would feel like if he ran his fingers through it and watching the dimples form at the corner of her mouth as she smiled and took the orders of a table of laughing customers. This cafe was his favorite, he knew, only because she worked there.
She began to turn, and he looked quickly away before she could catch him staring. It had happened once before, and at the time, Melvin thought he was going to vomit. His body had wanted to reject his chef salad like women rejected him: with a huge, retching gag. Rejection had been his middle name since elementary school, but he still wasn’t used to it. He knew that his ex wife had only married him because she smelled his money the way monkeys smelled bananas. He had been her money tree, and she had been more than happy to pluck the green right off of him. Then she’d peeled the shorts right off of the lawn boy and got a good taste of THAT particular banana.
Melvin didn’t think his waitress had the capability of sniffing the dollar signs on him. She looked too pure, too innocent, and therefor, had no reason to be attracted to him because he knew the only thing he had to offer was money. Her dimples clued him in to her innocence. No woman with dimples and a smile so bright and disarming could have an evil or manipulative bone her in perfect body.
“Anything else, Mr. MacMuffin?” his waitress asked. She must have walked over after finishing the the orders at the table of guffawing fat men. He hated the way his name sounded coming out of her mouth in her sweet musical voice; his last name had been the butt of so many jokes, he could only remember a third of them and the third had to number in the hundreds of thousands. He turned to face her, his throat tightening as he gazed upon her smiling beauty.
“N... nothing. Thank you. Just the check,” he stammered and gave her a weak smile in return. She winked.
“Ok, be right back with the check, sweetie.”
Dammit. He frowned as he watched her walk away in her cute green apron, her hair tied in a ponytail with a green ribbon to match. Why did he always have to be such a goddamn loser? He sighed. One day, he told himself, one day he’d gather up the courage to ask her out. And then he’d have the courage to not spew his meal all over her when she told him nope, no thanks, maybe some other time.
What he needed, he thought, was Dorothy to come skipping along the yellow brick road (probably yellow with urine as this was the city) and bring him to the Wizard, so he could ask for some courage. Then his problems would be solved. He glanced up and down the street from his table. No Dorothy. Not even Toto. He was shit out of luck yet again.
His waitress brought him the bill, told him to have a nice day, and was quickly waved over to the table of fat guys, still laughing over some lame joke, needing more beer. Melvin didn’t even get the chance to say goodbye. Frowning, he left the cash on the table with a healthy tip for his waitress and made his way into the afternoon.
***
The afternoon gave way to evening. Mrs. Crabapple left for the night after ranting at Melvin, calling him names until she was red in the face, grabbing the new financial graphs for their biggest client out of his hands, and demanding that he start from scratch tomorrow. Melvin knew that she was merely going to take the graphs and claim them as her own, taking more credit for his work during her meeting with the Board of Directors. To hell with it. He didn’t care.
He turned off his computer and stared at the blank screen for a few moments. At times like this, depression threatened to swell upon him and crush him with one devastating blow to the skull. BAM! And that would be the end of it. He almost wished it would come. He listened to the seconds ticking away on his Rolex. How many seconds of his life had been wasted away at times like this, sitting and feeling sorry for himself, for his sorry state of affairs, and doing nothing about it?
Too much.
He decided it was time to go book hunting. As a hobby, he liked to search for rare or unique books; they didn’t even have to be worth anything as long as they offered some kind of interesting jewel for him to unearth in the pages between their worn and dusty covers. The last book he’d found was a diary of a man who claimed to be a werewolf, and that had proved to be some interesting reading, especially as the man went into graphic detail of his animalistic sexual encounters. He recalled his eyes burning through the words, flipping from one page to the next, a pleasurable throbbing coming from the crotch of his pants as his arousal became evident, and then disgust at the accounts of the man’s eating of his victims, sometimes right after he’d coupled with them. Melvin doubted he’d find anything as page-turning as that, but half the fun was searching for the books anyway.
Someone had told him of a rare book store, tucked away and relatively unknown by even the city’s most ardent rare book seekers, and this is where Melvin headed in his BMW, aware that he’d be driving in a part of the city where a BMW would stick out like a sore thumb. He figured he wouldn’t be there long enough to get it stolen. Anyway, no time like now to start working up that courage he so desperately needed.
He pulled to the curb at the address he’d been given. All the buildings looked seedy, dark and foreboding. A look of decay hung over them, staining the bricks and casting a murky light over the dusty windows in the darkening night. He looked at the writing on his notepad, double checking that he was in the right place. Satisfied that he was, he stepped out of his car into the brisk night. He locked the BMW behind him with a push on his keypad, the car uttering an electronic beep.
