Chapter 2

I feel like my very own heart is bleeding—or is not it? I can't be late for this interview with Keyshawn. No way. This is something big and more important than I have ever done before. Of course! She is not the highest, top-most celebrity that I have ever interviewed. Not certainly! Whoops! I have to make my leave right now—right away, without any slight or tiny tad bit sort of delay. Yep-yuppy!

It is dark and dreary-like outside here. The sky is all this limitless and boundless. I can feel the cold bite and chew into my flesh as I walk in the early night that is so packed and thronged with so many people huddling and bustling about. I feel kind of bored and very much ill at ease. Thus I fetch my iPod music player, then carefully plug in my earphones, and start playing on some slow but romantic track of music. In this life, can we ever live happily and blissfully without romance? Of course! Easily and painlessly still as a matter of fact. No wonder I have to enjoy being single for this little bit while before I start to belong and be hold in the tender and caring and affectionate arms of someone else. Yuwl!

I am supposed to walk and move faster than I already now am advancing. I hardly and barely don't know why I am going so slowly and unhurriedly. I guess that I am tired. I like my things done fast and brilliantly smart. Before now, I was a tediously slow and laggard person whom someone could hardly yell and snap at—pointing out at how much of a tortoise and less more of a leopard I actually was in getting things done. Oh my! These old, boring, but vigorously exciting memories of mine? I love and cherish them!

It is more dark and dreary still on this narrow street and alley. I barely even notice it. Up till I look behind and think that I saw a cat meow and then rush down the street after me. I stop and peer at it more closely with due attention this time. And I discover that it is not any cat after all. But instead three darkly-seeming men with weird and scary-like looking hats on their heads and some things grasped and clutched in their hands. Shit! They are running and chasing after me. I have to speed my way quickly. I barely don't know what it is that they wielding in their hands and it might be knives or axes or anything that American Chainsaw crappy scary stuff. These things have happened before, and they can easily happen to me as well. Run, Tori, run—my conscious and instincts guide and steer me. I make haste here and straight away.

I am wearing high heels today. I didn't want to put them on. Courtney poked fun at me back at our apartment that I looked funny and silly in a knee-high blue skirt matched with a turquoise colored-like shirt that has lovely purple and green stripes marked and emblazoned all over it. I had first worn flat shoes with this. "Put on those clack-y, feisty, and taddy bit sort of Teddy Bear looking highs of yours, girl," she had snorted out at me while giggling and sniggering out to herself. I agreed with her, and I did like she told and instructed me to.

I try my best to move as fast and charily as I can. I pass my way into the following street, and it is here that I gather and hastily pick up my speed all the more high and nippy. Yes. I must toil and endeavor my best until I leave those strange and frightening-looking men behind me. I quickly and instantaneously sneak my way into another quiet and desolate street. At least it is all quiet and calm here. It sure and definitely is. Once I am here—just so I don't attract the attention and awareness of those gruesome men following me behind, I quicken and step up my pace, gracefully mild and chaste-fully considerate on the other hand. What a relief this definitely must be for me!

Just as I am about to head off into another street; a man, large and muscular-like looking, looms up straight into my view suddenly and abruptly to hit and crash me. I have not seen him or even suspected his presence and being here. What is he looking here at this early hour of the evening? I am thinking this when Mirth, my bothersome and snappy-doggy-sort-of spy-enjoying conscious steps in much to my discomfort and annoyance: What are you also looking for here yourself, Tori, at such an early awful hour of the evening? I don't want to answer her back—or else mine would be angry and disrespectful or even insulting words. I simply tell her: Shut up, you dirty Mirth! If you don't have anything to do, you better seal yourself up in that troubled brain of mine and seek something else better and significant to do.

Honestly speaking, I am shocked. This man here—he is terribly and wonderfully handsome. He reminds me of Charles. Charles was one of the most wonderful and dazzling ever beautiful creations that I have ever met. And so is this man. Wait a minute ... could he be his unquestionable and handsomely brother? I can't tell that for now.

I shrink away from the man. He is holding a small beautiful dog in his hand—a nicely growing up puppy I should rather say clear-cut—and the moment he notices me flinch and recoil away from him, he sets it down carefully and steadily slow so that he walk over to me with his hands thrown high and soaring up into the air. Is this a total surrender from him or what?

"Sorry to frighten you, miss. I want you to know that I am a very trusted man and there is no hell way on earth I could be capable of injuring and hurting you."

All American psychos overuse that to lure in their victims. How so true are his words? I look and examine him again. Yes. He is neatly and impeccably dressed. In a neat and exquisite black suit even. Is he going for some function? With whom precisely? His girlfriend, of course, you silly girl! That must be Mirth. She better behave herself for he own good and benefit. Seriously!

"Who are you?" I ask him quietly and with an icky-echoing tone. I gulp down my throat straight just after this. Has he made out already how nervous and fearful I am?

"I am Rhys Ty Jonas. I want you to know that you can always trust and have faith and confidence in me. I mean no any sort of harm to you—honestly speaking."

"I am Tori Wolf. I am just coming from work now, and I am going to take my leave straight off if you don't mind that."

"Wait ... wait ... please," he begs and entreats me. I stop and turn around to him. At this point in time, a chilly and icing-up breeze of wind gusts past me to hurl and toss away my long, cutely brown hair away from my face. Chestnut brown hair that is! Just so I am concise and spot-on with what I am saying and describing here. "Where are you going please? I would like to take you there personally."

"Don't bother. It isn't all that far even. I will be there in like less than an hour," I say this with an intensely glad and extremely happy smile. Hmmnnnn! That was quite a little bit kind and polite of him. Or should I say very highly generous and angel-hearted? Whatever term it is that you like any better—the man is agreeably kind and compassionate to me.

"These streets have proved out to be dangerous time and again. I know why you were taking flight when I ran into you and you still have that piss-scared and terribly-awed look on your face."

He must be right. These streets are known to be part of the dreaded Bailey-Way Boulevard. They might be perilous and ticklish like that nearby notorious place itself. I might never know. Just two days ago, a teen aged somewhere between 13 and 15 had his expensive phone and thirty dollars cash snagged and grabbed away from him by violence and menacing threats. Following this, the gone-wild-and-satanic gang that thronged and grouped about him stabbed and jabbed him with a sharply knife to his excruciating death. He was discovered and found dead, with blood having depleted and emptied up from his entire body just by bleeding and oozing out helplessly. Shit! Would I like anything of this awful nature to also happen to me? Hell way no! I wonder if even the poor kid wished himself anything that dangerous and life-threatening. Of course, he possibly and truthfully did not.

"Fine," I tell the handsomely and good-looking man before my on-alert eyes. "I will let you take me where I am going." I wonder. Isn't he even afraid of handing over a lift in his vehicle to total strangers that he does not know? Mirth is quick to snap and bark at me for contemplating this. Better you be appreciative and very much thankful of what the good Samaritan here is doing to you, you thoughtless ingrate. Yeah—yeah! I have heard enough already, Mirth-y! Thank you for that sweet-most notification for your very own piece of information.

Once settled and entrenched down inside the car, Rhys has me hold and catch his dog for him. I love dogs and animals, but not then all of them. Ever since I was five or six, I played and stayed with a lot of them such that my bond and attachment to them burgeoned so great and fiercely to describe and relate here. It still now is a tiny mite bit. Only that for the moment, I do not stay and dally about with a handful of pets and animals. Maybe when I am finally in my own house and dwelling, I will think twice about raising such up. Courtney? She detests and abhors the raising of any form of pets in our own apartment. And can you imagine what her horror-most class and variety of household pets are—stinking and freaking awful cockroaches. Whenever she is in the kitchen or toilet, and I hear her scream out so loud and alarming like she has actually been paid to do it for some nameless range of horror flick, say 'Scream With All Your Might and Get 10 Bucks For It', I easily and without much trouble or thinking know and even get convinced that she has in all reality and truth seen a freaking horrible and grisly-like cockroach. They are everywhere, I guess. Even in the White House? I don't expect so.

"So where is it that you work, Tori, huh?"

"The Young's! You have ever heard about us?"

"Of course! I stay and reside here in Las Vegas. I am a Software Developer with Qitera."

"Really? I could not have imagined and thought that all up on my own."

"I know The Young's. You are into advertising and marketing there, I presume."

"You presume or you are very confidently and much certain and positive about it? I mean that is what we are really and obviously into."

"Okay. So what do you do there at The Young's?"

"I am just an ordinary receptionist."

"Ordinary?" He laughs out load at that. Of course! Do you expect anyone to admire and envy your very small job title there at that shitty damn structure called a firm? People kill and bewitch each other for Company Managerial chairs and thrones in big, grand mammoth skyscrapers and here you are, Tori, comfortable and happy about being a Z-paid receptionist? Grow up, silly girl. Then he adds, "You are a professional receptionist, Tori, and not just any ordinary place worker there."

"If you think so," it is all I have to let out to him. Seriously!

"And how do the guys there treat you?" He looks at me as he says this and then quickly glances away from me the instant I scowl and make an astonished face at him. What was that supposed to mean really? I am no V.I.P please ... and I get no any special treatment for simply being myself. I enjoy doing my work for the sole love of it and then go back straight home and relax and play some celebrity interview tapes that I have recorded and taped on in a particular day. That is just my life. Boring, then exciting, then lonesome, then full of people and activity, then ... then ... then...

"Like a human being fellow worker is supposed to be treated and handled. Some people can be really mean and nasty. But they are not worth being on my V.I.P long list either."

"You mean no guy has ever proposed to you there at Young's?"

Is that the way you talk to a stranger, Rhys? I want to shout and yowl out mad at him like I have gone bananas, but then Mirth is quick to act and restrain me from doing so. Damn her! Rhys here better be taught how to talk to a lady ... I mean how to talk to a stranger lady that he doesn't even freaking hell know. If it were not for Mirth being present, I would have exploded and detonated badly fuming like a freaky scary tornado bomb.

"Absolutely; does that surprise you in any way?"

"No. But you are too beautiful to be single and left all on your own just like that. It is like all the men have no eyes to see and sight you. Well, if they don't, you probably have me then." The way he is talking all this to me, he is making it seem like he is merely being playful and jocular with me. I can't tell and decide for sure. Is he really being playful, or is he not being this? I don't know ... I don't even wish to know ... Right now what probably matters most of all things is that I get my way to Sugar Spray Inn and chat and have a word or two with Keyshawn Gibson. I have not more than an hour to spend and relax with her. After that, she will head off to her hotel and then fly off back to Los Angeles where she stays with her boyfriend and three cats. They must be a perfect and very magnificently wonderful family, I am guessing to myself—are they not? They sure and definitely are!

Rhys and I don't talk much either. We just fool around with our relationship status before he drops me off at Badin Way. The highway isn't all that busy and bustling up. There are a few cars speeding here and there, this direction and that opposite other. The traffic lights are all sparkling and blazing up blindingly and dazzlingly. The scene and spectacle itself is just wonderful and heaven-like to look and stare at.

I learn that Rhys is single in the long run. I don't know how true that is. If I were staying that long enough in his presence, I would have checked and verified it myself. Not so just I can become his date and truest love. I just want to know how far he would go on lying if I were with him and for what exact purposes and motives exactly. Duh! Men and their sweetie pie form of white lies! Even women and olden people lie too—are you not aware, Tori? It is Mirth, you are right. Always listening and paying attention to whatever thing it is that I am doing.