Many thanks to LSEiland for first editing and improving this story.
Imagine an editor who is disgusted by the plot of a story and puts aside repugnance to not only correct errors but also inspire the author to make it much better than it deserves to be. If someone like that existed, it could only be Dowageroftwo.
Immense gratitude to BeautifulStorm, the hardest working editor on this site, whose talent and expertise helped improve it.
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If Randy had realized how hot Carmen's temper was, he would never have gotten involved with her.
Not that he hadn't been warned.
She had first captivated him at a party, and they had spent the evening in deep conversation. An ex-girlfriend had pulled him aside before he left to take Carmen home.
"Be careful with Carmen," she cautioned. "I've heard stories about what she does to men who trifle with her. Since you are a player, you'd be wise to stay away from her."
"Thanks," he said.
He didn't take advice from ex-girlfriends. If he had seen the twinkle in her eye and the smile on her face as she walked away, he might have realized she knew that and had been playing him.
Randy had a lot of ex-girlfriends. He was nice looking and, although mostly into himself, he was fun to be with. He fell hard for a pretty face and a hot body. For a few months, he couldn't get enough, especially if she kept up with his insatiable sex drive. Some of his girlfriends even moved in with him.
He wasn't mean and didn't intentionally humiliate them. It was just that as time wore on, another pretty face or amazing body caught his eye and pulled him away. He couldn't help it.
"It's just the way I am," he would explain to the woman he was dumping.
They didn't like being discarded like old garbage. Some of them were angry for a while, but most of them got over his callousness because he was always friendly and courteous whenever he ran into them. The more sensitive ones didn't forgive him that easily. The felt demeaned because he was treating them as a radom acquaintance who had never meant anything to him.
What he liked about Carmen was not only her striking beauty and her lithe, well-proportioned body, but also her fire and passion. She was a professional dancer and dance instructor. When he went to see her perform, she often danced roles where she was the jealous woman who either killed herself when she lost her man or took violent revenge on him.
She would throw her whole body into the role, and watching her turned Randy on. When they came home from one of her shows, both of them were highly charged, and their energetic sex didn't stop until they fell asleep from sheer exhaustion.
She moved in with him, and their intense relationship burned brightly for more than four months. After that, she noticed that he wasn't as eager for her as he had been at the start. Whenever she asked him about it, he would explain that it was normal for a relationship to go through different stages.
She didn't like his explanations, but she put up with them until the night she and some fellow dancers were rehearsing at a theater on the other side of town and went to a nearby bar afterwards. When she saw him across the room giving his attention to a good-looking woman, she was furious.
She got home ahead of him, and when he walked in the door, she screamed at him. He realized immediately that she knew and tried to calm her down with his "That's the way I am" speech. She was having none of it and kept on cursing him, calling him a disgusting animal whose brain was in his prick.
As she continued yelling at him, she got more graphic. She began threatening him and saying she would get a knife and cut off his balls. He saw that talking to her was useless and decided the best thing to do was leave and talk to her later when she had calmed down.
She screamed, "Come back here, you bastard!," as he got up and moved toward the front door. He heard her start to open drawers in the kitchen and felt something heavy hit him in the back as he ducked out.
He didn't return until the next night, when he knew she would be at another rehearsal. He dumped all of his stuff into the boxes he had brought and left in a hurry.
She called him a few days later, and her voice was calm
"Randy," she said, "we need to straighten out a few bills. I'm moving out of the apartment because it's too expensive for me to be there alone. Can you come over?"
"How about if we meet at Denny's?" he offered. "I can be there in five minutes."
There was a pause at her end.
"Fine. I'll see you there."
The conversation started as all business. They went through the bills and divided things up fairly. Then Carmen swept the papers into her purse and looked up at him.
"You know you aren't going to get away with this, Randy," she said. There was an edge in her voice.
"Get away with what?" he asked. "I thought you were satisfied with the way we split the bills."
"I mean get away with humiliating me the way you did. You could have told me you wanted to break up. I would have been angry, sure, but at least I could have held my head high.
"But you lied to cheated with your whore. It was humiliating for my friends to see you with her at that bar. You disrespected me, and I'm not going to forget it. You're going to pay for what you did."
"Listen to yourself, Carmen," he said. "First of all, she's not a whore, she's a nice girl. The reason I didn't say anything was because I was worried you'd react like this, and I was trying to think of the best way to tell you. I love your passion, and I'll remember the wonderful times we had and try to forget this ugliness."
"So you loved my passion," she snorted. "You're going to love it even more when I figure out what to do to you. Enjoy your nice girl while you can. Goodbye."
She got up from the table and rushed out before he had a chance to say another word.
He was worried about his safety and put a double lock on the door of his new apartment. But after a few months of looking behind him, he gave up the paranoia and settled into his normal life. The new girlfriend gave way to another new girl a few months later, and Carmen was not showing up at any of the bars or parties he went to, so he put her out of his mind until the night he went to a charity benefit.
He didn't know she was doing a dance in the show. When he saw her performing one of her typical roles and stabbing her false lover to death, he shivered, and when the show ended, he left the theater quickly.
He spent some time at his girlfriend's apartment and arrived home around one a.m. As he turned the key in the door, two figures came from the darkness on either side of the porch and grabbed him. One put a handkerchief over his mouth and pressed hard. He tried to yell, but only a muffled sound came out.
Two big men held him and pushed and dragged him down the steps to a car parked in front of his apartment complex. They shoved him into the back, and one man pushed in next to him while the other man went got behind the wheel. Almost before the doors were slammed shut, the car's tires screeched as it took off and drove quickly through the dark streets.