My Sadist King

It was near the end of finals week when he and I met. My junior year was coming to a close and I was keeping my excitement about senior year to myself as I walked home from the high school. The weather was getting dry and scalding, but I still walked, regardless of the conditions.

On that particular day, I decided that the heat was too much to bear without any water. There was a small shopping plaza down the street, halfway between school and home. It consisted of about ten connected stores that were all painted the same color but varied in size. I rushed into the grocery store and sighed in relief when the cool blast of the air conditioning embraced me.

The store was short-staffed, but there weren’t many customers. The place was almost barren. I passed a woman with a shopping cart filled with frozen foods and two young children that were pulling at each other’s hair and screaming. She hushed her kids as she looked at me, veering her cart to the furthest edge of the aisle while I passed by them.

I grabbed a water from one of the refrigerators near the cash registers and opened it while I waited in line, taking a well needed sip. I looked up at the man in front of me while he dug through his wallet for cash. He stood at a towering height that provoked me and made me feel like an insect. Other than fearing the man, I admired the beat-up leather jacket on his back. It seemed familiar to me--something my dad used to own.

When I glanced at his face, he was staring right at me. “Hi,” he said with a grin. He handed his torn and wrinkled money to the cashier and locked his gaze on me.

I smiled back and placed my water on the conveyer belt as it moved forward. My eyes fell to the floor, catching a glimpse of his black leather boots. They were rugged and looked ages old, but they gave him another level of intrigue. To me, at least.

I shot a quick glance at his face again as he received his change, attempting to guess how old he was. His cheekbones were defined, along with his jawline, and his hairline was slightly receded. His ash brown hair was thin and fixed upward in a spiky style that I was extremely fond of. The mix of gray and blue in his eyes radiated like a shard of glass every time he looked around. He didn’t look any older than forty, but that was still too old for me to even be interested.

He caught my eyes again and smiled as he walked away with a paper bag under his arm. I stepped up to the register, watching him exit the store, and handed the cashier two dollars before I even knew the price of the water. After I received fifty cents back, I rushed out of the store to see where the man had gone.

When I had stepped outside, back into the ridiculous heat, I came to an abrupt stop to see the man kneeling on the ground, picking up the spilled contents of his bag. “Fuckin’ shit,” he whispered.

I opened my mouth to speak but struggled to get the words out. “Do you... need help?” I eventually asked. I shoved my water bottle into my backpack and took a step forward.

He beheld me with surprise as he grabbed a couple of cans and placed them into the torn bag in front of him. “Yeah...” he said. “Actually, yeah, that’d be great.” I kneeled next to him and picked up the rest of the cans. He thanked me as I handed him the last can.

He began to lift the bag awkwardly into his arms, but I stopped him. I paused after he waited for me to speak and regretted having opened my mouth. I didn’t even know why I was speaking to him. “You’re probably going to drop them again,” I said. I held the other end of the bag and said, “I’ll help you to your car.”

The stranger smiled and gave me a nod.

We hurried over to his car--a worn down, black Camry--and hauled the bag into the trunk after he managed to open it. “Thank you so much...” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I just wanted to thank you personally,” he said. “Kind people deserve recognition.”

“It’s Kelly...” I replied.

“Thank you, Kelly.”

“No problem,” I said, turning to leave.

A hand came over my mouth and I was yanked back onto a hard surface, being shoved into the compact space of his trunk like a doll being stuffed into an overfilled backpack. Some sort of cloth was over my mouth, cloaked in a putrid smell. The man stared down at me with a blank expression on his face as I attempted to scream through his hand and fight his hold on me. My throat began to close as my vision blurred and my eyes rolled to the back of my head.

In broad daylight, I disappeared and nobody noticed.