One Eight Six

With the exception of sharing a link to a piece of fiction I recently wrote for another website, it has now been over a year since I last published a post. Because it has been so long, a lot of people have begun to ask whether I still write. And the answer is, absolutely. Over the past twelve months I’ve been just as busy as ever, writing and partially editing a novel, as well as producing a handful of entries for this site that I ultimately decided against posting.

For the most part, my aversion to publishing the entries that I’ve written comes from the fact that they are a lot darker than pieces that I would typically share. They’re posts written by a man who after more than a decade of writing is trying to comprehend what comes next for him in a creative sense. They’re poorly constructed and overflowing with more questions than answers regarding the continued existence of this blog. While they’ll never be shared with the anyone other than myself, they’ve been instrumental in my decision to keep this site alive despite updating it so rarely.

Yet despite the roughshod nature of my recent attempts to create something worth reading, I’ve found myself thinking more and more about updating this site over the past few weeks. So, rather than post something that I will eventually regret publishing, I decided to do something different for entry number 186 on this site and share a draft version of the prologue from the manuscript that I have been working on.

In Brunch, a simple meal shared with a soon to be former flame quickly spirals into a fight for survival. When Mack Trevor, a fast-talking builder from Boston agrees to meet his girlfriend at a cafe in Back Bay, he knows that the meal is going to be uncomfortable. The couple are ill-fitted, have almost nothing in common, and are both aware that their relationship is coming to an end.

What Mack doesn’t know, is that sitting in the same restaurant is Detective Paige Greco; a police officer with a bounty on her head who has relocated from Los Angeles to Boston as part of the witness protection program. Mack and Paige have never met. But by the time their meals and his relationship are over, they’ll both be running for their lives.

I hope that you enjoy the excerpt below…

Mack

When Mack Trevor’s girlfriend asked to meet for brunch at a small café on the edge of Back Bay, he never imagined that the meal would end with him running for his life. Yet just a little more than an hour after he’d ordered coffee and a plate of overpriced eggs, here he was splashing water on his face with trembling hands in a restroom halfway across Boston, wondering how his world had turned to shit so quickly.

He had known that brunch was going to be uncomfortable even before he had agreed to meet Danika. They’d been dating for almost six months and were entering that dreaded phase every new relationship goes through, where the novelty of having a partner starts to fade away and you begin to question what it was that attracted you to the other person in the first place, and if it’s still enough for you to stick around.

What he had initially seen in Danika Mitchell was obvious: the girl was a total smoke-show. Her auburn hair, tanned skin, endlessly-deep hazel eyes and gym-toned body were so damn sexy that his jaw had almost hit the floor the first time that they’d met. Yet despite her drop-dead gorgeous looks, the lack of mutual interests between them and their inability to maintain a conversation were becoming increasingly apparent to him – and even starting to severely dampen her sex appeal.

At twenty-nine years of age, Mack was a builder by day and sports fanatic by night. During football season he sat in the bitter cold and watched the Patriots move a pigskin over an icy field. In basketball season he barracked for the Celtics in TD Garden when he could track down reasonably priced seats. And come baseball season he pulled on his Red Sox cap and cheered until his throat was hoarse.

Danika hated sport – and just about anything else that he was into, which made spending time together tough. Her interests were limited to the world within her smart phone and finding ways to hone the online version of herself that would lure in scores of new followers. He could not care less about his online profile. 

During the first two months of their relationship she’d happily tagged along to a few sporting events despite her disinterest, rapidly stabbing at the screen of her phone with the pads of her thumbs as she posed her way through hundreds of selfies and status updates. But after a while she decided that her followers had grown tired of seeing her hanging out at sports games in her casual wear, and he’d suddenly found himself sucked into a world of café culture and pretentious black-tie events where he didn’t quite fit in.

It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy dressing up – Mack had always considered himself to be a half-way decent-looking guy, and he must have scrubbed up alright: he’d bagged Danika Mitchell after all. It was just that he hated the way that most of the events she dragged him to seemed more centred around having your picture taken to create an illusion of having fun, rather than actually having some fun. 

Most of Danika’s friends were stiffs too, the kind of people who had been spoon-fed opportunities their entire lives. They didn’t know how to talk to a guy that worked with his hands, and they didn’t want to learn how, which meant that he spent a hell of a lot of time at the parties she dragged him to cradling an overpriced beer and standing around while she gossiped with her friends. But he tried to never let on that he was bored – he wasn’t that much of a self-centred asshole that he would ruin her nights. Instead he feigned interest in what little small talk was offered to him, and made his own fun by dancing, pounding a few shots and striking up conversations with bartenders. 

Come on Mack, focus. Why the fuck does any of that matter right now?

There was a woman that he’d never met before today sitting in the passenger seat of his truck, just outside the restroom. The woman had pointed a gun at his head in the alley that ran alongside the café where he’d met Danika, and now they were on the run together. He wasn’t sure who she was, or who or what they were running from. All he knew for certain was that he and Danika had called it quits with a conversation in the café, he’d stepped into the alley outside and a few seconds later a bullet had struck the side of the building just over his shoulder, sending concrete shards and grit into his face.

Danika had taken the break-up well. Her mood had already been upbeat after he’d let her talk him into choosing his meal, one that was light on taste but easy on the eye so that she could post a picture of their plates side by side online before they had the talk. She had nodded when he’d said that he felt like there wasn’t much communication between them, and that they had been growing distant. Then, as if able to read what was coming next, or maybe having already reached a similar conclusion herself, she had cut him off mid-sentence and dropped the hammer on him, suggesting that they break up.

He’d let the words settle into the space between them, pushing the last forkful of eggs into his mouth as he realised that he should have known when she had artfully angled her camera to ensure that there was no part of him present in the photographs of their meals that she had also decided that their relationship had reached its end.

She’d left not long after that, leaving him alone to drain what remained of his coffee from his mug and to pick up the bill. She hadn’t even offered to pay, and he hadn’t asked. He had paid for so many bland yet highly photographable meals throughout the past six months that doing so one last time seemed like a fitting climax to their time together.

He’d fixed up the bill and left, and then everything had gone to hell. Now here he was, staring at his reflection as he dried his hands on a piece of paper towel so thin that it crumbled in his hands, wondering how something as innocent as brunch had led to whatever was waiting for him on the other side of the restroom door.