Poor Girl: Victor, Part 2
Image from unsplash, by Elliott Blair
The first time is always messy.
Victor had spent the last ten years trying to find the woman from the funeral. He didn’t dare ask his mother, not like she would’ve known. After that incident in the kitchen, they were basically like strangers living under the same roof. Throughout high school, his mother would cook meals for the both of them, made sure he had clean clothes, and would give him an allowance every Sunday, but that was basically it. Once he had graduated, she allowed him to still live with her but she no longer made sure his needs were met. She was too afraid to try and mend what had been broken that night, as well as asking for him to chip in on the bills, and Victor loved that he had total control over the situation.
But, that made his task of finding the woman harder. His father’s friends pretty much stopped coming around, stopped calling, and most even stopped sending the annual obligatory Christmas card. Even Robert had ceased all communication. Victor didn’t blame them, besides, they were his father’s friends, not his mother’s. So, once the phone calls and cards stopped showing up, Victor knew he couldn’t even ask his father’s former friends.
His only means of trying to find her was to scour the internet. A bunch of his father’s friends had social media accounts, so he would look through all of their profiles, look at business connections, look at the company website of the accounting firm his father had been working for, but nothing ever turned up.
After a couple of years of deep dives and dead ends, Victor started to feel like he would never find the woman. Then, quite suddenly, she appeared. Victor was out with work friends one night at a bar. Through the haze of cheap whiskey and even cheaper conversation, there she was.
His adrenaline immediately kicked in. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do. One of his friends noticed Victor staring at her and said, “Who the fuck are you looking at?”
“Oh, just that lady by the bar.”
“Which one? The one in green?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn, you’re into cougars! Someone has mommy issues!”
Victor gave his friend a furious look and said, “Shut up, man.”
“Hey, we’re all into what we’re into. So, what? You like older chicks, so go talk to her. But, I bet you’re gonna wimpout like you always do.”
His friend wasn’t wrong. Victor wasn’t the type to approach anyone; he always froze up. So many times he had seen women he was attracted to and had never been able to build up the courage to talk to them. But he knew he was going to have to get over this if he was going to make sure that the woman didn’t get away.
Victor scooted out of the booth, grabbed his glass, and woozily walked towards her. He could hear his friends behind him laughing and cheering him on. If they only knew what Victor’s motives were.
She was sitting there with her back to him. She looked the same as when Victor had first seen her at his father’s funeral, but only slightly older. Victor bet people told her she looked young for her age, and he also assumed she relished in that compliment. She was wearing a tight green top, jeans, and heeled boots. Her hair was different, longer, but there was no mistaking that it was her.
As Victor approached the bar, he downed the last gulps in his glass. His mind was racing with thoughts of what his next move would be. Should he sit down next to her and start talking? Maybe he needed to order another drink to make it look like he wasn’t intentionally trying to talk to her. Her eyes glimmered from the neon light above the bar. Victor almost lost his courage, but he was determined to bridge the gap.
The bartender looked at Victor, pointed at his empty glass and said, “Another one?” Victor nodded and sat down next to the lady. As the bartender was making his drink, Victor shifted his seat towards the woman. The woman flipped her hair over her shoulder, and her perfume hit him like a ton of bricks.
That fucking perfume. Victor could feel the anger creeping up from his gut. His senses were dulled, so he had to fight to keep control of himself. His fists were clenching and unclenching in his jacket pocket. He needed to say something now, or he would lose his nerve.
He tapped the woman on her shoulder and said, “Hey, you look familiar.”
She only slightly turned her head towards him, but he could tell she was on her way from drunk to totally drunk. “Oh, yeah? Well you don’t look familiar at all.” Her voice was softer than he remembered, but then again, the last time he saw this woman she was hysterically crying at his father’s funeral.
“I like your shirt. Where did you get it?” Jesus, Victor was terrible at this. He had no clue what to say to this woman, and now she was just looking at him like he was a joke. “My name’s Matt. What’s yours?”
He held out his hand. She looked down at it, and slowly placed hers in his. “Mayra.”
Victor pretended to be someone else. He remembered this movie he had seen a couple of years ago where the main character was a pick-up artist. He tried to channel this character as he was speaking with Mayra.
“I’ve never seen you in here before. I’m sure I would’ve remembered seeing you,” Victor coyly said to her.
She shrugged and took a sip from her drink. “Yeah, I moved away years ago. I’m here visiting for a week.”
“Oh, well, I guess it’s some sort of sign that we were supposed to meet.” Victor was dying inside hearing the cheesy lines coming from his mouth, but it was working. Mayra seemed to be eating up every word he said; it probably helped that he had a similar resemblance to his father.
Victor got lucky when his friends left without saying goodbye. As he was trying to sloppily flirt with Mayra, his friends had finished their rounds. He looked over at them as they were grabbing their jackets, locked eyes with one of them, and he threw a cocky nod his way. Victor had been sweating bullets thinking one of them would call out, “Victor, see ya later, man,” and blow his Matt persona away, but none of them did.
He had been slowly inching towards Mayra, trying to make her think that he was interested in her. Victor had slowed down his drinking because he needed to make sure he could focus, but he was making sure to keep a steady supply for Mayra flowing. The bartender was busy with the crowd and didn’t seem to notice that he was primarily serving drinks to her.
“So, Mayra, tell me something. If I were to ask you a favor, would you do it for me?” He gave her a sly smile and put his hand on her knee. He could see a vein in her neck throbbing, her pupils dilated, and he knew she was his.
Mayra looked down at his hand and slurred, “What’s that?”
“Come outside with me?”
Mayra snorted as she laughed, “That’s not a favor!” She leaned way back on her barstool and almost fell over, but Victor grabbed her by the arms, pulling her upwards and close to his chest. There was that god awful perfume again.
“Come on, come outside with me.” He led Mayra out into the night.
The next thing Victor remembered was retching in the gas station bathroom, dried blood on his hands and under his fingernails, and a throbbing pain in his abdomen from where Mayra had kicked him in her attempt to escape.
He immediately started washing his hands, frantically at first, then more methodically to get the blood completely washed off. He needed to be careful not to make a mess. He thought about his father, wondered if he could see him, see what his affair had made him do.
Then he thought about Mayra’s darting eyes, desperately trying to find something to use to get out from under Victor’s weight. At one point, a single tear fell from her cheek and dropped onto his hand. It made him almost release his grip, but then that perfume wafted up to his nostrils, so he squeezed tighter.
After the blood was all washed off, Victor took a paper towel to wipe down the sink, and another to wipe the toilet seat clean of his vomit. It was then that Victor realized something, something that he’d been aware of for many years but had never done until tonight- he liked killing, and he wanted to do it as many times as he could.
When the blood was all washed off, Victor looked around the bathroom to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. He placed his hands on the sink edge, and it was then that he finally looked in the mirror. What did he see? What was in those eyes now that he had taken that final, yet first step?
He grinned, smoothed his hair back, took a deep breath, and exited the bathroom.