Night

He watched quietly from behind his steering wheel at a man licking the corner of his salty lips, listening intently to the hurried voice of the woman next to him who was telling a passionate story. Looking distraught, she dangled a cigarette in her right hand; her lips, slathered in red lipstick, beat against each other violently as she spoke, tiny drops of spit dotting the concrete. He didn't like her mouth, it looked like it knew too much shouting and not enough soft kindness or tender kisses. It knew too much about what pleased men momentarily but not enough to make them stay. Not like Christina's mouth; not like her moist, always cautiously smiling lips lightly buttered with strawberry flavored chapstick. For a moment his mind rolled back into a blissful image behind his eyelids.

He eyed the couple with limited interest as he sat inside his car waiting for his girlfriend to get off of work so he could give her a safe ride home. He didn't trust the evening that hid the danger so well within its shadows. Thinking about his poor Christina blanketed by the dark with a gun to her head, held by a man with a sweating dick in his pants made his breath weaken. He was there every day to ensure that she'd never have to walk alone at night. Even if he couldn't see her through most of the day because of her constant laboring, at least he could guarantee she didn't have to leave her fate to the night.

Christina had to quit school, sell her car, and take multiple jobs around the small city to help her father pay for her mom's hospital bills, one of which was a job working as a cleaning lady, scrubbing floors waxed with cum squirted carelessly on the carpet by patrons of the local prostitutes. He remembered her saying once before she fell to sleep, "Sometimes we're so sick of the smell that rises up from it when we clean, we just leave it there and hope no one notices." He almost smiled thinking about it, but took a drag from his cigarette instead.

She always fell to sleep as he drove her home. He'd put in Ella Fitzgerald on volume one and let her talk her eyes closed. He'd drive slower so as not to stir her, to make the moment last longer. As she crept into the corner between the door and the seat, the collar of her white shirt would lay to the side, revealing the cape of her neck and the beginnings of her quaint breasts. He could faintly smell her breath in the air as it rolled out of her like a ghost. Like a crippled child she lay there, looking innocent and delicate, sometimes on the verge of death. When he looked on her laying there, her legs bent awkwardly toward him, the light accentuating each of her tiny curves, he felt like a father witnessing the blossoming of his own child. Catching himself in his moment of perversion he'd look away and stare at the road.

Just before his own eyes began to close, he saw his sweet baby walking toward the car, her bag dangling from her shoulder, bouncing playfully on her hip. Despite the long day, she smiled toothily at him.