The Girl Who Sleeps With a Knife

"Hm?" asked Joan, mostly asleep.
"What'd Steven do to make you quiet like that?"
"Please, if you wanna worry about it can you wait til morning?"she asked,"I'm so tired from today, especially the sex. How did you know that position would work? "
He shrugged,"I didn't, I improvised. That actually could've been a catastrophe."
****
The next morning, Joan awoke wrapped in Rocko's arms and soft white sheets. The mattress, she thought, didn't feel like a mattress, it felt like cotton wrapped around a cloud. The rhythm of Rocko's breath was the most beautiful song she ever thought she would hear;she turned over to face him, and just looked at him, with a confused look on her face.
She whispered, "I know what I'm feeling towards you, but I don't want to feel it, it'll just bite me in the ass."
She got out of bed and grabbed her clothes from the chair that sat next to the window. She hurriedly put them on before Rocko woke up but only made it to her shirt when she heard,"So you weren't even gonna say good bye to me."
"No, I was...gonna leave a note." Which was a lie. Joan felt a pain in her stomach that made it impossible for her to feel her usual apathetic self.
"So that's all I meant to you, you were gonna leave me a note, you weren't even gonna let me take you home?"
"Rocko, it's not that you don't mean anything to me, it's that you're not supposed to mean much to me. We met two days ago: not two weeks, not two months, two days. Most people don't have sex with each other until at least a week later."
"Well, obviously you haven't figured out that we are not like most people, Joan."Rocko stood, still naked,"I'm not saying you're wrong, we both got into this way too fast, but I'm almost thirty years old, there's no such thing as taking it slow for me. If you do wanna go steady, then I'll do that."
She scoffed,"Two days ago, I was serving you whiskey, and now I'm looking at your junk, I think we already shot that whole 'taking-it-slow' horse in the face."
He laughed pretty hard,"I'm sorry, you're young and you seem like you haven't taken it slow in a while, from this time on we will go as slow as you like."
She sat down on the bed,"Why do you wanna know about Steven?"
He sat on the bed side next to her, but at a safe enough distance that she wouldn't smell his morning breath,"The way you shutdown when I brought him up, that was the only time I had ever seen you quiet."
"You know when I think about it, I've served you whiskey everyday for a year , so you aren't like, a stranger," she thought out loud,"but anyway, yeah. Steven he's not a good man at all, but he pays tremendously, like I said, financial stability is the only kind that matters. When I first started working there, the first time he paid me, everything was normal; the look of the check was amazing, so I just he was baddest mama-jama to have as a boss." She shook her head,"For the second check, he told me I needed to do something for him." She clung to herself,"C'mere, love, I only want to touch you." She imitated his voice,"He groped my boobs and my ass, for the first couple of times it was a short moment. Then gropes got longer and rougher, then he started demanding blowjobs and and now it's just penetration." Her eyes were widened with fear, as Steven's hands haunted her, feeling them on her body as she spoke. "If I back talked him, he'd smack me...like he'd smack the shit out of me."
When Rocko leaned in to hug her, she flinched, violently,"I'll go make some coffee." He said as he got up.
"He's jealous of you, you know,"she said,"He knows I like you."
"And you didn't want me to get concerned about this."
"I can handle myself, Rock, that Irish prick has been doing this shit to me for five years, I know what I'm doing."
"So you are staying."
"For the time being, I start my shift at around two in the afternoon. "
"Well, I have some grinned coffee beans, do you want some?"
"Some ground coffee beans?" she asked, smiling.
"Coffee? Do you want some coffee?"
She just nodded, she couldn't stop smiling; she had just delivered the most traumatic experience of her young life, and Joan refused to look at Rocko without a smile.
He went into the kitchen and Joan followed, holding his naked waist from behind as he poured water into a copper tea pot and placed it on a hot stove,"Can I confess something to you?" she asked
"Anything." He said as he poured the ground beans into the filter that was placed inside a container with a funnel-opening.
"I thought you were lying about your back scars," she mumbled, "I thought it was too crazy to be the truth."
"So you took the jacket because it was cold."
'Well, yeah," she rested her small, soft body on his tall, firm one,"but also because it was yours and it looked cool."
He smiled,"I can't believe you like an old man." The whistle of the heated tea pot sounded in the background.
"Dude, you're not even old, you're like 28."
"Sometimes I forget, I forget that I'm not a 67-year old man," he smiled,"Sometimes I wake up bitter, because I used to think that nothing interested me, that I've seen everything the world had to offer. Then I went to your bar, and stuff changed."
"Wow," she said,"you really know how to make a girl swoon, huh? You're Italian, aren'cha, Rock?"
"Mhm."
"Well, don't Italian men only mess with virgins, because of their virtue or somethin'?"
He stepped over to take the hot water of the stove and gently poured it into the filtered beans,"Most of the time."
"Well then, what are you doing foolin around with me; isn't that against your tradition?"
"You know, it's also traditional to go to church, but I haven't done a hail Mary since I was thirteen." he smiled, but she couldn't see it,"Besides, I like you, Rockett."