Big Man's Contract

He’s very friendly on the phone until I tell him my name and why I’m in town. Suddenly his tone changes and he tells me he can’t help me. I start to ask why, but he hangs up on me before I can get the words out. I hold my phone in front of my face, looking at it, confused, and wonder what the hell? I try to call back several times, but it just keeps ringing. What an asshole! That’s not the kind of hospitality one expects from a small town. What do I do now?

I try calling around to other stores and ask who in the world might be able to help me, but they have no answers and seem just as rude. This town is so different than I remember. Everything has changed, and yet it seems exactly the same. I start to wonder if people are just rude or if it’s me. Replaying old memories, I try to figure out if there’s a reason people might be mad at me. Unfortunately, I can think of a few things. I wasn’t exactly an angel and I ran with the meanest crew in town: a bunch of girls with a superiority complex.

I wander around the building, looking for a way in. Finally, I contemplate, once again, about breaking the window. It’s been a half hour since my call to the locksmith when a large black truck with a lumber rack on the back of it finally pulls into the parking lot.

It’s not the locksmith as I hoped it would be. Instead I watch an incredibly tall, incredibly beautiful man step out of the vehicle. He has a head of thick dark hair, mussed up from driving with the windows down, but it looks good on him. He walks toward me with a sexy swagger. There’s a grim look in his eyes, but at the same time there’s something almost amused in the way he looks at me. I start to fidget under his dark gaze. The features of his face aren’t technically perfect; his nose is slightly crooked, possibly bent from an old fight; he looks like the type who wouldn’t shy away from a fight, and he certainly seems like he could hold his own. When he opens his mouth, his white teeth are slightly overlapped in the front, but those tiny imperfections do nothing to change the fact that he is fucking hot. If anything, they make him that much more fun to look like. They give him character. There’s nothing typical or generic about him.

His toned arms are covered in sleeves of intricate tattoos. When he stands right in front of me, I can see that the tattoos are a scene from Greek mythology. Zeus is in the clouds, holding his lightning bolt amidst a roiling storm, while Poseidon is in the sea below with his trident and merman tail. The man looks just as chiseled as the gods depicted on his tattoo. I realize I’ve been holding my breath and let it out slowly with a quiver.

“Welcome back, Linny,” he says in a honey-thick voice.

I look at him, shocked. He didn’t call me Lina, my name, but Linny, the nickname I had growing up in this town. In fact, as soon as I left town I made sure no one ever called me that again except my mom. It was a nickname my dad gave me when I was young and everyone in town picked it up because of him. No one has called me that in a long time. It’s strange to hear. Especially coming from this handsome stranger. It’s also unnerving.

“Do I know you?” I ask him, hating the quiver in my voice. It gives away just how nervous I feel right now. It makes me feel exposed, vulnerable.

He gets close enough for me to smell the delicious scent of his cologne. It’s a masculine scent that sends my head spinning.

He chuckles. “How easily you forgot the boy you tormented.”

I snap out of the reverie the scent of him has me in and focus on his perfect face yet again. I stare at him until my eyes cross, but nothing about him looks familiar. I could never forget a face like that. The fact that he says I tormented him doesn’t come as a surprise. That doesn’t narrow things down. I tormented plenty of people during my reign.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He laughs and rolls his eyes. “So that means you also don’t remember the promise you never fulfilled.”

I shake my head, utterly confused … and then it comes to me in a flash of memories. Madden Trek. He was the skinny boy next door that my friends and I used to torment. He’d moved into the house next door when we were both in the third grade. He developed a crush on me after our parents introduced us and we got stuck in a class together at school. Every day there was some sort of little gift or sweet note waiting on the front porch for me when I would go out to play after finishing my homework.