Rogue

I should’ve called Claire and told her that Kathleen was picking me up. But, Claire was so damn uptight. How we were going to live in the same house was beyond my comprehension. She talked to me like I was fucking stupid most of the time. Just cause I’d been in the joint.

I wasn’t dumb. Besides, I hadn’t had any pussy for years. It felt like a fucking lifetime. The last thing I wanted to do when I got out was listen to Claire set down the rules on her place while I was as frustrated as hell.

Shit, it made sense to call Kathleen and have her pick me up.

She would feed me.

Not only my stomach, but my cock too.

I just needed to stop at the diner to satisfy one appetite before she satisfied the other. Kathleen had no idea what being in jail for three years meant. I couldn’t jerk off without some guy getting the wrong idea, so guys like me kept themselves to themselves and never thought about sex.

I used to fuck morning, noon, and night, it was hard. It was fucking difficult. One time I nearly forgot myself. I nearly did it and I would have regretted it. I knew that if I did then I would have been gang raped by at least one or two of the groups. That was all it took. A sign of weakness and you were putty in their hands.

That was when I knew that I had sunk too low.

My pride and dignity were hurt the minute I was banged up.

My dad turned his back on me. He said that my drinking, drugs and gambling were getting out of hand. Course it fucking was. I was supposed to be on the basketball team. I had an injury which meant that I would amount to nothing. What else could I do? Since I was fucking born, all I had ever wanted to do was play basketball.

I fucking went to bed dreaming about basketball.

I fucking woke up thinking about playing basketball.

Then, that one fucking game. A jealous player went out of his way to injure me. In a flash, a basketball scholarship was out. Dad didn’t have enough to even think of sending me to an Ivy League college. Sure, I could have gone to community college, but what was the fucking point?

Career choices. I didn’t have a fucking clue. The only thing I had ever thought about doing, was playing basketball.

It was bad enough that my mom left me with him when I was only five years old. I hadn’t spoken to her since that day. She never even tried to get in touch. Maybe if she was around then I would have had someone to talk to about the whole life changing experience that I had to go through. It was like someone put a dagger in my heart when the docs said that my right knee was totally messed up and I could never play again. It fucking hurt so damn bad.

I had just graduated from high school. The injury happened a couple of weeks after my final exam. It was a friendly game that went totally wrong. It was supposed to mark the end of the school year. Maybe if I had never played, my life would be totally different right now.

After that, I went through my “stage,” as Dad liked to call it, he let me go through it because he was hurting too. I acted like a jerk, rebelling all the time. Being moody. Drinking. Smoking.

Games would come on and he would quickly switch the channel the moment I walked in the room. All my trophies, awards, and pictures were taken off the wall and stored. And then he found love. Love with Hannah, Claire’s mom, and then he kind of forgot about me.

He didn’t want to know me, and as old as I was at the time, it cut like a knife.

Fuck him!

That was the way I was feeling. Why he sent Claire to help me out was beyond my comprehension. Dad didn’t even bother coming to the trial. He practically slammed the door in my face when I asked him for help.

“I can’t do for you what you need to do for yourself.”

What the fuck was that supposed to mean?

I didn’t care. The only reason I agreed to put Claire down on my parole form was so that I could get out of the slammer early. Otherwise it would have been another two years in that hellhole. And I wasn’t going back. Not until I had me some pussy, and uptight Claire wasn’t going to get in the way of the one thing that I had been craving for the last thirty months.

“Rogue, what the fuck? You knew that I was coming to the prison…” Claire yelled as she stood by our table.

Why the fuck did she have to shout it out loud? I didn’t want the whole diner knowing that I had just come out of the joint.

How did she manage to track me down to this diner? I couldn't believe it, and her whining was getting on my nerves. I stood up in front of her. Shit, she looked hot in her red suit, but that didn’t take away from the fact that she was ready to blow. Her shining blue eyes were ready to burst through her red face as I stuck my hand in front of her face.

She moved my hand, shouting, “Rogue Rest, if your dad wasn’t sick, believe me, I wouldn’t be doing this.” She sighed, then her eyes shifted away from mine.

What did she just say?

The smirk that was plastered on my face suddenly turned to a frown. She could see the shock in my face.

“Look, can we just start again?” she whispered.

Too late for that. The old man was sick?

No one had bothered to tell me. Yet, Claire yelled it out in the diner. Was I supposed to take her hand and act like a good little boy? Too late for that shit.

I forgot Kathleen was in the diner.

I walked past Claire and out into the parking lot. Now, it was all starting to make sense. Dad was sick. That was why he had asked her for help. He just wanted to do the right thing. The question was, how sick was he?

“I shouldn’t have gone off like that.” I felt Claire’s hand on my shoulder.

About five years ago, my dad had a lump. It was just a cyst so they removed it from his chest. Fear ran down my spine at the idea of it being more than that.

I lit up a smoke, something that had managed to calm my nerves in the joint. A thing I used to frown on when it was my dad’s addiction. “What’s wrong with him?”

She hesitated as she avoided looking at my eyes. In another life, she and I could have been something special if she wasn’t so uptight and I didn’t have a wandering eye. She was petite just like her mom. It was obvious that she didn’t eat much. Whenever we’d managed to sit at the same table for dinner, her plate was practically empty. Her mom said more than once that she worried about her having an eating disorder. Which used to make me laugh, because her mom’s plate always had the same amount of food on it.

“Lung cancer,” Claire mumbled.

I didn’t feel like smoking anymore. I should have known. The old man smoked way too much, which was the reason that I never used to smoke, not until the injury. I flicked my cigarette butt. Thinking that I was no longer in the joint. I no longer had the desire to smoke.

“Shit, all that smoking really came back to haunt him?”

She nodded. “Especially because he hasn’t touched the stuff in the last three years.”

Kathleen came storming out of the diner, waving her fake nails, wearing a wig that she’d probably bought specially for my release and heels that were too high. She tried to compose herself as she nearly stumbled in front of me.

“What you doing out here, hon?” Kathleen purred as she stood in front of me.

Wow, since when did I become ‘hon’?

She ignored Claire, which before would have made me feel better knowing that she was getting under Claire’s skin. But now, she was getting on my nerves. Especially after what I had just found out about the old man.

“We’re talking.” I cut her short and moved to the side. Kathleen was holding on to my arm. I didn’t know if it was for balance or if she wanted me to leave with her. Right now, my appetite in both departments were on hold. I didn’t feel like eating, and I certainly didn't want a fuck. Not with Kathleen anyway. Everything fake about her was on display—her inflated lips, the wig that she shifted from left-to-right, and the heels that she was having trouble balancing on.

“Later, Kathleen. You can check up on me at Claire’s.” I started to head to Claire’s car. It had to be the Mercedes with the license plate LW1 CB. No one else could be that vain.

I could hear Kathleen screaming behind me. I knew she would be pissed and I became numb to the insults that she was throwing at me.

When I reached the door, Claire asked, “How did you know it was my car?” She unlocked the car and we both stepped in.

“With a plate like that, it’s kind of obvious.”