Marla was a loud brassy obnoxious bit of cunt. She was the type that always laughed too loud or busted your balls too hard. If you bragged about making ten hoops in the pickup game we guys sometimes had she'd ask why you weren't man enough to make eleven. If you were proud that you beat your personal best press of one fifty she'd remark that a real man would have lifted one sixty. It was like a constant pissing contest with her.
God I fucking hated Marla.
We'd go out for drinks my workmates and I and invariably Marla would end up inviting herself along. The pub was a dive just down the corner and looked like it was frequented by old drunkards and aging hookers with an alley in the back that smelled of piss and puke. I could imagine a lot of the denizens ended up out there for one reason or another. But the pints were cheap and the food fare decent.
The thing was that Marla always managed to be one of the guys but you couldn't treat her like one. You couldn't say the same things or rap her in her smarmy bitch mouth because at the end of the day, she was a girl. And you just can't hit a girl.
But I wanted to. Every time she squawked out of her putrid sleazy cake hole I wanted to shove my fist in elbow deep and pull out her fucking spine and whip the living shit out of her with it.
Marla had no clue how much I hated her; I managed to chuff along with her and keep her ignorant of the bile in my stomach.
We were all out at the pub one night after work and Jakey was having a hard row with his girl being AWOL. We were all in the cups and offering what pathetic excuse for sympathy we could muster. Except Marla. She was on Jakey about if he were a real man he'd know where his girl was. She was relentlessly caustic on her berations.
We decided to step out the back and have a smoke in the alley since smoking indoors was banned practically every-fucking-where by the health conscious moral regime, even seedy dive bars. Marla didn't smoke but she couldn't pass the opportunity to rag Jakey more about his failings as an upstanding member of the masculine class. As she stepped out the door before me I grabbed her by the arm, turned her toward me and sneered into her face "Shut your stupid whore mouth, cunt" and punctuated the whole microsecond exchange with a feral growl right into her face. I spun her back around and cut her loose to continue through the door which caused her to stumble a bit. I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing and kept rapping Jakey on the shoulder and offering chin up and that stuff. I never looked at Marla again that evening but she had taken the hint and eased up on Jakey. As a matter of fact she turned rather reticent and while still managing to converse she wasn't nearly as abrasive.
It was a few days later when Marla approached me in the office. I'd barely acknowledged her existence since as we hadn't been down to the pub for rounds. She came up and offered an apology for her behavior against Jakey. I gave her a half-hearted dismissal and turned my attention back to my work. She stood where she was until I finally looked at her again. "What?" I demanded.
She cowed just a bit like she'd been slapped. A slight blush crept up her neck. She stammered for a moment then asked in a meek little voice that was completely unlike her "Do you want..I mean..would you like to go to the pub tonight?"