Beauty and the Dark

“McDonalds?”

He pulls a face. “You do realize that I’m a doctor and cannot condone eating stuff that is molecularly closer to plastic than food?”

I grin. “I’d still like to try it.”

“You’ve never been to a McDonalds?” he asks incredulously.

“No.” I don’t tell him that most of my life I was locked up in a brothel. “My sister and her husband always seem to end up in nice restaurants so I’ve never had the opportunity to try it.”

He stares at me oddly.

“What?” I ask defensively.

He shakes his head. “Nothing. I’ve a better idea though. A friend of mine has a no nonsense burger place. I’ll take you there and if after your first bite you don’t like it, we’ll walk to the McDonalds down the road and order one of their unhappy meals for you.”

“Deal,” I say with a big smile.

“Come on,” he says, lightly laying his hand on the small of my back. He leads me towards a monster of a black Lamborghini.

I laugh. “Are you sure this thing won’t bite?”

He holds the door open for me. “The car doesn’t bite, I do,” he teases, glancing sideways at me.

I feel my face flaming. He’s flirting with me. No one has ever flirted with me. Ever. I don’t even know what to do. I slip into the car, he closes the door, and goes around the back towards the driver’s seat. I look around me curiously. I’m in Jack’s car.

The interior is all leather and black trim. The coldness of the leather seat seeps through my jeans and bites into my skin. Once he gets in the air becomes charged with a crackling tension. A whiff of his cologne hits my nostrils. Clean and fresh with a hint of spice, maybe cloves or saffron. I breathe it in and feel my chest tighten. I don’t know why he has this effect on me. It is extremely unsettling.

The car roars into life and my eyes slide over to watch his hands. They are large and rough. There are scars on his knuckles. They are not how I imagined the hands of a plastic surgeon would be, but a working man.

I let my eyes slide up his arm and towards his neck, to where his straight black hair lies, as if inviting a woman to rake her hands through it. Before he catches me staring I turn away from the sight. I gaze blindly out of the window. I don’t know what is wrong with me. I know I can never have a man like him so I should stop fantasizing about him. It is pointless and I’ll just end up getting my heart broken.

It is only a short drive before we arrive at our destination. He parks the car on a single yellow.

“Won’t you get a ticket?”

He winks. “Nobody around here would dare give me a ticket.”

“Why not?”

“They all come to my free surgery day, and they know I’ll ruin their health forever, if they do.”

“You’d do that?”

“I don’t know. My car is very precious to me,” he teases.

We walk to a small burger bar called Earl’s Burgers.

Even before Jack has closed the door a gruff voice bellows from the open kitchen, “In the name of Jaysus it’s Jackfuckin’Irish.” Seconds later a grinning man with close cropped bright red hair and tattoos crawling up his skinny neck vaults over the serving counter and comes over to us. He claps Jack on the back enthusiastically. “Hey dude.”

“Alright there, bud,” Jack says.

The man’s pale blue eyes slide over to me. “And who’s this beauty, Junior?”

“Sofia, Paddy. Paddy, Sofia,” Jack introduces.

He leans forward and takes my hand in his. His hands are rough and hot. “And how come she’s hanging out with the likes of you?”

“She’s helping out at Kids Rule,” Jack explains shortly.

Paddy’s eyes warm up. “Aww … you’re a darling, sweetheart.”

“Watch it, mate,” Jack warns, and there is an underlying ring of steel to his voice that causes even Paddy to jump dramatically.

He raises both hands and takes a long step back.

“Ach, Jack. Don’t bite my head off just because your bachelor days are numbered.”

I flush to the roots of my hair.

“Jesus, will you leave it?” Jack swears.

Paddy laughs, hits him heartily on the back, and leads us to our table.

“Don’t mind him,” Jack says tightly. “He drank his IQ down to room temperature.”

Unconcerned with the insult, Paddy laughs garrulously. “He wants three babies,” he calls out, holding up three fingers while walking backwards. Then, he jumps back over the counter and lands back in the kitchen.

“Well. He’s a fun guy,” I say casually.

Jack scowls. “God knows what’s got into him. He’s not usually so … fun.”

I grin. “I like him.”

He loses the scowl. “Paddy’s all right, I guess.”

A curvy waitress in a tight pink T-shirt and a pair of pink stretch-jeans comes to our table. She hands me a menu.

“All right Jack?” she says, giving him a bright pink smile.

His lips twitch in greeting. “Hello, Shannon.”

I order the Bacon Cheese Big Murphy Burger with chips and a Coke.

“The usual with a side of coleslaw and sweet potato fries,” Jack tells the girl.

“Right you are,” Shannon says and, taking the menu from me, sashays away.

I pull my eyes away from her departing back, she really does have an amazing figure, and find Jack staring at me. His look is so intense it practically takes my breath away.

“So you’re a plastic surgeon,” I say nervously.

“Guilty as charged.”

“It must be fun playing God with other people’s faces and bodies.”

He shrugs. “It’s just a job.”

“Just a job? Don’t you like it?”

“Not particularly.”

“Really? So why did you become one?”

“It’s less hypocritical.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a long story, Sofia.”

I lean forward. “I like long stories.”

The waitress comes back with two cans of Coke and two glass tumblers.

“Well, I didn’t start off wanting to suck fat out of people who are too lazy to get on a treadmill and inject fat into self-obsessed celebrities’ faces. When I was young I was an idealist. I wanted to cure the world. I was going to do big things, you know, make a difference.”

He stops and frowns.

“Anyway, something happened in my life, and I didn’t want to live in England anymore so I joined Doctors Without Borders and they sent me to Africa.”

“Oh, wow, Africa!” I interrupt.

For a second he looks bleak. “Yeah, Africa.”

“It must have been amazing.”

He looks at me expressionlessly. “Africa destroyed me.”

“Why?’ I ask, shocked.

He drinks his Coke straight from the can. “I realized that there was no way to change the world. Not only is the whole damn system parasitical in nature, it’s been deliberately set up to be that way, and little ole me was not going to change it. In fact, my very existence was making the system run. I was actually a cog in a well-oiled machine that was ruthlessly exploiting the poor and the oppressed so that some over-fed capitalist somewhere in the West could make another buck he didn’t need.”

I gaze at him curiously. “What do you mean?”

He sighs. I can see this is a topic that depresses him. “As a doctor you become the unwitting tool of Big Pharma manufacturers who are busy offloading their out-of-date vaccines and medicines at cut prices. They wanted me to inject poison into those kids.”

“Could you not complain to someone?” I ask, aghast.

“The politicians are bought so they turn a blind eye, and the think tanks and government officials stay silent to further their own agendas.”