Kenneth sat at the edge of the bed and wept.
And wept.
And wept.
He wept for the fearful and for the kind and for the wicked.
From the bathroom five feet away, he heard the toilet flush. He quickly wiped his face on the scratchy motel comforter. It smelled like pennies. Why did it smell like pennies? He knew that he needed to stop asking himself questions that has no good answers.
From the doorway of the bathroom emerged a dark, towering figure. He lingered silently fro a moment, his eyes unmoving as they burned in Kenneth’s direction. Still inspecting the metallic fabric, it took Kenneth a moment to notice the transfixed statue staring at him out of the corner of his eye.
“Devin! You know I hate it when you do that. Get over here, you goon.”
Running at full force, Devin flung his six-foot-two, 250 pound body onto the bed, shaking nearly every inch of the room.
He lied down on his back and looked up at the ceiling. The weight of the flattened the smile off of his face as unwelcome thoughts rushed like a broken levy into his mind. He put his arms behind his head and let out a deep sigh.
Kenneth, finally losing interest in the mundane mystery of the sheets, squirreled his way to the head of the bed.
“So…what do you want to do today?”, he smirked.
Abruptly shifting from contemplative to intensely serious, Devin turned his head – but still not quite meeting Kenneth’s gaze – and said, “Ken. Quit screwing around. You know this isn’t funny.”
“Ah shit. I know. I know. I’m sorry. I just thought. Well -” Kenneth sat up “Well, I don’t know what I thought. I’m not really sure what I think about any of this. I’m not really sure how I feel about any of this. You said I can back out whenever I want. But here I am. And here you are. And…I’m not so sure that’s actually true.”
“Ken…of course you don’t have to do this.”
“Okay. How?”, he rebutted, curtly.
“What…what do you mean?”
“I back out and then what? How do I get home? How do you get home? Do you even make it home? Oh god. Do I even make it home? Holy shit. I won’t even make it home. I can’t back out. I can’t back out.”
Kenneth put his head between his knees and took three deep breaths, fighting off every instinct in his body to start hyperventilating.
Devin, still lying on his back, had returned to staring at the ceiling. He extended a semi-sincere arm and began patting Kenneth’s back.
“Shhhh. Just take a deep breath. If we need to figure that out, we’ll figure that out.”, he said, calmly.
“And of course you can still back out. You can walk right out that door. You can walk right out that door and head across the street to that little shit hole diner that’s there. What’s it called? Peggy’s?”
“Paula’s”
“You can head right on over to Paula’s and get yourself a nice tuna melt and a milkshake.”
Kenneth looked up and chuckled.
“A tuna melt with a milkshake? Ptomaine too?”
“Sure, if you’d like! And a nice waitress named Shirley will bring it all out to you and she’ll call you Sug’ or Hun‘.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad, minus the ptomaine.”
“Yeah. Minus the ptomaine, whatever the hell that is.”
Kenneth dropped his head once again and started howling. Once he was done after a dramatic thirty seconds, he looked back up towards Devin.
“I…I mean, I don’t think I want to back out.”, he said earnestly.
Devin finally sat up and looked at him with a smile that grazed both of his ears.
“That’s the spirit!” he said, slapping him on the back, “plus, it’d be kind of a dick move for you to back out now anyway considering this whole thing was your idea any way!”
As quickly as it has started to reappear, the smile vanished from Kenneth’s face.
“I think I must have imagined you saying that because there’s no way in HELL you just said that to me.”
“No…it’s just that…this whole thing, you know this whole plan, it was…your idea”, Devin said, as he began to retreat to his corner of the bed.
Kenneth jumped off of the bed and began pacing around the room. Every five steps or so, he would stop and look towards Devin as if he were going to say something, and then would return pacing. This went on for a couple of minutes.
With one man pacing and the other staring into nothing, they loudly killed time in silence – both fully aware that they were going through with what Kenneth had schemed up for them. There was just too much pride, money, and intrigue to be lost if either of them backed out now and they knew it.
They just needed to wait until it got dark.
–
Devin opened his eyes unaware that they had even closed. The room swirled and swayed in a way that indicated to him that he had just fallen asleep. The red 2:00pm burning from the clock on the bedside table indicated that he had been sleeping for 10 hours . He rolled over to feel for Kenneth but was met with an empty bed and a sharp pain on the ride side of his back. He winced as he took a deep breath. He felt a dull burning as he rubbed his eyes and saw minced meat where his knuckles used to be.
Rolling over in the opposite direction, he forced himself out of bed, ensuring that gravity did most of the heavy lifting. His legs felt heavy as he dragged himself to the bathroom, each step acting as its own impressive feat in him mind. As he approached the bathroom, he stopped in the doorway for a moment and stared at Kenneth, who was laying facedown in the bathtub. Devin dragged himself towards the sink and draped his massive torso in front of the mirror. He looked up at himself in the mirror, through a jungle of greasy, dangling, jet black hair. He turned on the water and let it run for a moment. The sink began to fill. There must be a clog. He thought to himself.
Devin plunged his head into frigid, grimy water, shocking his system just enough to allow him to see clearly for the first time that day. With his head still submerged, he opened his eyes and let out a panicked screamed, the brown water bubbling around his face. He flung his head up and flopped his sopping hair out of his face. He looked towards the tub once again and started to back away out of the bathroom. Suddenly, he tripped over a large, leather duffle bag that was haphazardly tossed in front of the door, causing him to stumble onto the floor, his back slamming against the side of the bed.
Devin sat there.
Silently.