Read Online A Good and Useful Hurt by Aric Davis - Free Book Online Page A

imploding. The young lady, a woman named Lucy, had been the one to end things, and that was the backhanded slap of the thing. Lamar didn’t date long, and Lamar was always the one to choose the terms.
    It hadn’t really been much of a relationship, he’d told Mike a few weeks afterwards—this was just about a month or so after Deb had started working with them. It had mostly been just good sex, but he’d still put himself out there for her. Mike, who knew exactly what it was to put oneself out for a relationship after the hot fires of his marriage had cooled, had just nodded at the younger man. Lamar explained how he’d really wanted everything to end anyways, probably would have done it himself in just a few days, but she’d beaten him to the punch. Again, Mike found it better just to nod.
    The girls who had come after that arrived in rapid spurts of dating; Mike didn’t even bother trying to learn their names after identifying one incorrectly. Deb and Becky had no such trouble, and Mike believed secretly that the two women shared a cheat sheet or black book to help identify the shockingly similar women.
    All were taller than Lamar, which was the first way to tell they were with him. If Lamar had ever dated a girl who was shorter, it had been before Mike’s time, and Mike’s time covered a pretty broad stretch. Lamar was short, but not especially so, so it was an odd sort of accomplishment for him to find so many tall girls to couple with. They all dressed, as Deb politely put it, scandalously. Becky just said, out of Lamar’s earshot of course, that they all dressed like hoochies. Whatever the term for it, they really did dress in a way to expose optimum skin. The last Lamar trait was the oddest, especially considering the other two. While one would expect the Lamar girl archetype to include nothing but the bubbly and stupid, his taste in women in fact required a high level of at least external intelligence. He wasn’t fucking rocket scientists, but he was doing pretty well. Tall, slutty, and book-smart—an odd combo, but one he stuck to with amazing consistency.
    The truth of it was that he wanted a girl who could intimidate him, yet was still easy to discard because there was never much in common besides a mutual lust. He liked them tall because short men typically only date tall women if the man involved has a hard time sitting due to the fatness of his wallet. He liked them dressed the way they were because it was yet another way to throw middle fingers to the world. He liked them smart because he was smart. He read voraciously, and though he’d never completed high school, he could easily have held his own in a high-level history class.
    The mold was so set that Mike, Deb, and Becky weren’t sure what to make of it when Lamar mentioned he had a date and didn’t bring the young lady around. It was common for Lamar to have the women he was dating pick him up and then be paraded around the shop. It was a good chance to show off in front of his coworkers, both male and female, and one he rarely missed out on. That night, during one of those weeks where the days lie of spring and the nights slap that welcome hand away, he finished with his last customer and left quietly on his own.
    Becky could see a car idling in front of the shop, and Lamar hopped in. As it sped off, she said, “What the fuck?”
    Mike peeled a pair of gloves off and left the dirty room where they cleaned tools. He poked his head into the hallway. “What’s going on, Becky?”
    “Lamar mention his date to you?”
    “Barely, why?”
    “He just got in some car and drove off.”
    Deb called from her room, where she was doing a series of small microdermal implants under a customer’s eye, “No show and tell?”
    “Doesn’t look like it.”
    Over the wall of her room Mike and Becky could hear her explaining to her customer what was going on.
    Becky said, “Did he think I wouldn’t notice? I like the girls he brings around. I’m kind