Waxing Love

            I slammed the door of the taxi behind me and fumed for a moment before I could form the words to tell the driver where to take me. Where should he take me? I didn’t have anywhere to go.

            “Just drive somewhere,” I instructed. “Drive around the block for all I care, just get me away from here.”

            The cabbie shrugged and did as I bade. As long as I had the money to pay him, he didn’t mind, and I certainly didn’t look like I was hard up for cash. I was still wearing this skimpy yellow cocktail dress, the emerald necklace Sam had bought me for Christmas, and pencil heels. I should have thrown the necklace back in his face. That, or the heels, maybe they’d have stabbed him in the gut and it would have served him right.

            I shook with rage. After all that low-life had put me through, moaning on about how I wasn’t committed enough, that he didn’t feel that I was invested enough in our relationship, practically forcing me to move in with him, of course in his sly, underhanded way, he then goes and pulls something like this.

            Sam Bogart, the most simpleminded fiend ever to unleash his stupidity on the unsuspecting world. His friends could all rival him for first place, but Sam really took the cake, in my opinion. They’d been the ones stupid enough to start congratulatory reminiscing about all the fun they’d had last month, even when I was right there at the cocktail party with them all. Talking about hot blondes and natural redheads and generally guffawing about the place until I walked out and Sam followed me home. But he’d been the stupidest one of all, who claimed that ‘everyone knows it’s not cheating if it’s at a bachelor party’ when I’d confronted him about what they’d been talking about.

           Surely an intelligent man would deny the charges, regardless of how true they might be, or at least come up with some semi-plausible excuse. Only a certifiable moron would imagine that I’d just take something like that in my stride and agree that sleeping with some strange girl was perfectly acceptable if it happened on the night before his friend got married. And then the idiot, instead of trying to salvage the situation, had managed to get his foot in his mouth and confess that his whole group of friends had gotten hookers at another bachelor party last year, and wasn’t that alright? I really should have stabbed him with my heel. And people entrusted that buffoon to advertise their products for them in exchange for serious money. 

            “Where you want to go, lady?” The cabbie asked yet again, and by the tone of his voice I could tell he was getting increasingly annoyed about our lack of a game plan. Not one of those seize-the-moment type of characters, but I didn’t have the energy at the moment to advise him to go with the flow a bit more and maybe live a bit longer.

            “Just drop me off at the first bar you see,” I relented.

            The next bar was just on the next block, and it was a bit swankier than what I had in mind, but I wasn’t going to quibble with the already put out cabbie over it. I gave him a generous tip, hoping that would soothe his feelings, and stumbled my way into the bar; I never could walk very well in heels, possibly from extreme lack of practice, but I had worn them for Sam tonight. He liked me in heels.

            The bar was dimly lit with lots of dark paneled wood and plush velvet seats and stool coverings and an enormous oak bar on the left side of the room. At least things were relatively dead and I could slide onto a stool at one of the far ends of the bar where I didn’t have to interact with other people. Except the bartender, of course, whom I was desperate to order something from, so when he finally toddled along, I promptly ordered two drinks.

            I was hurt, but mostly I was just angry. I couldn’t believe Sam would betray me so easily and admit to it so straightforwardly. How could I have misjudged him so badly? We had been together for about a year and while I knew he had his faults, as I did mine, I would never have guessed him capable of such deceit.