The parlor was empty.
Nine-thirty on a Tuesday, the last appointment cancelled, the receptionist already gone.
The lights were dimmed to the after-hours setting, casting long shadows across the waiting area.
A stack of magazines sat untouched on the coffee table, issues of People and Sports Illustrated that no one had opened.
The fish tank in the corner bubbled softly, its fluorescent glow the only real light, casting blue-green ripples across the ceiling.
The place smelled of scented candles and cleaning solution, the particular odor of a business scrubbed clean at the end of a shift.
Tony B.
sat in the front office, a beer in his hand, his feet up on the desk.
His hands looked like they had run out of things to do.
The bottle turned between his fingers, the liquid shifting inside it, catching the light.
His eyes were on the window, but he wasn’t seeing the street.
He was seeing something else: the inside of a cell, maybe, or the faces of men he had known in a life that felt like it belonged to someone else.
Christopher came in through the back door.
The lock clicked behind him.
“Slow night?”
“Slow week.” Tony B.
did not look at him.
“Slow month.
Slow life.”
“It is a massage parlor.
They are all slow on Tuesdays.”
“Yeah?” Tony B.
finally turned his head.
He looked tired in the dim light.
“When do they get fast?”
“You are doing fine.
The books are good.
The clients are regulars.
You are earning.”
Tony B.
set the beer down.
He looked at Christopher, and there was something in his eyes that Christopher recognized: the exact energy that, in the original path, had found an outlet in violence.
It was not anger.
It was the hollow restlessness of eighteen years in a cage, discovering that freedom was just another form of waiting.
The walls were different, but the feeling was the same.
“Joey Peeps is at the Social Club tonight.”
Christopher’s heart stopped for a beat.
He kept his face still.
“So?”
“So I heard he has been talking about me.
Running his mouth about the old days.
Making jokes about the time I went away.”
“That is what Joey does.
He talks.”
“Talking gets noticed.” Tony B.
picked up the beer again.
Did not drink.
Just held it.
“People hear Joey running his mouth, they start thinking maybe there is something to it.
Maybe Tony B.
is a joke.”
“Nobody thinks that.”
“You do not know what people think.” Tony B.’s voice was flat, tired.
“You have been in this life how long?
And you still do not know what people think.”
Christopher sat down across from him.
The window was open.
The old path was right there: a word of encouragement, a nod, and the chain would start.
Joey Peeps would be found in an alley.
The heat would come down.
“Here is what I think.” Christopher leaned forward.
“I think Joey is a nobody who talks too much because talking is all he has.
I think you are a man who owns a business, has money in his pocket, and does not need to explain himself to anyone.
And I think that if you go anywhere near Joey Peeps tonight, you are giving him something he does not deserve.”
Tony B.
looked at him.
“Since when do you talk like a therapist?”
“Since I started reading business books.” Christopher smiled.
“They are full of shit like that.
But some of it makes sense.”
The joke landed.
The Gauge registered the shift in Tony B.’s shoulders, the tension loosening by a fraction.
The window was still open, but the breeze was dying.
“Joey Peeps.” Tony B.
said the name as if tasting it.
“If I had wanted to hit him, I would have done it the day I got out.”
“I know.”
“I did not want to hit him.”
“I know.”
The fish tank bubbled.
A car passed on the street, its headlights sweeping across the window and gone.
The room went still again.
Tony B.
put the beer down.
“You got any more of that business book shit?
I am going to need it to get through this week.”
“I got plenty.”
“Good.” Tony B.
stood and stretched, the joints in his back popping.
“Then buy me a real drink.
I am tired of this beer.”
They went to a bar two blocks away, a quiet place with a neon shamrock in the window and a door that had been painted over so many times the grain was gone.
Regulars didn’t ask questions here.
They had their own problems, worse than anything a stranger could bring through the door.
The floor was sticky with decades of spilled beer and the air smelled like cigarettes that had been smoked years ago and never quite left the walls.
A payphone hung near the bathroom, its cord dangling, the receiver gone.
A clock on the wall was stopped at 4:12 and no one had bothered to fix it.
The bartender was a heavy woman in her sixties who wiped the same spot on the counter for ten minutes at a time.
They took a booth in the back, away from the television that was playing a game neither of them was watching.
They drank — one beer each, slow — and talked about nothing important.
Fishing.
The Yankees.
The time Tony B.
had caught a bass the size of his arm in a lake in Pennsylvania, years before he went away.
The story took ten minutes to tell and another five to elaborate on, and Christopher let him take every minute of it.
He nodded in the right places.
He laughed when the story called for it.
The conversation filled time without costing anything, and that was the whole point.
“Thanks,” Tony B.
said at one point, not looking at him.
“For what?”
“For not being a pain in my ass tonight.” Tony B.
turned his beer in his hands.
“I got a lot of people telling me what to do.
You are the only one who makes it sound like I got a choice.”
Christopher didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing.
They finished their beers in the comfortable silence of men who had run out of words and found that the words they had used were enough.
The window for Joey Peeps passed, unlatched, unopened, unused.
The night ended quietly.
The catastrophe had no fuel.
Christopher drove home at midnight with the taste of cheap beer on his tongue and a small, quiet victory lodged somewhere under his ribs: a win that existed only in the space between what was supposed to happen and what didn’t.
hey — quick one before you close the tab.
if the cliffhanger is killing you, the future already exists.
you just need a ticket through.
every chapter the second i finish writing it.
see you in the next loop.
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P.S.
— in a parallel timeline, the rest of this story runs completely free on unwrittenrealm.com.
just saying.
that timeline also has more chapters.