Bad Guy until proven Good

Tabby says she is having an abortion and her troubled blue eyes instantly start to search my face for signs of aggression from beneath a lock of recently dyed-from-blonde-to-auburn hair.

It is beautiful. All of it. The whole package. Her. She sings to me while I play the guitar and flashes come-hither smiles while I am in the middle of a phone conversation. A certified massage therapist, she can rub a mean shoulder, and she doesn't mind me cooking dinner.

Her actual words are 'I can't have this baby.' And she has told me that before. Her friend Layce tells me that she is trying to push me away before I have a chance to dump her in a mighty heap. A defensive self-preservation thing. She has very low self-esteem. She tells me to go to Texas, find the three most beautiful women on base and fuck my brains out for two months and then if I still had any feelings for her at all, she would consider my proposal. She tells me about her ex-husband and how much he begged her to get pregnant and then to marry him. How he used to pin her to the floor and spit in her face, how it ran down her cheeks into her ears. How he drove her to the verge of suicide, making her believe that she was losing her mind, non-stop mental abuse, brainwashing. How he got her pregnant and then ran off with another man on Memorial Day. She tells me that this is the ultimate deja vu- she is pregnant again, and I am leaving on Memorial Day. She starts to cry a little and tells me how he wished for her to die giving birth to her daughter, hissing at her over the phone after she had called to tell him her water had broken.

The baby, I think, would be devilishly handsome. Tabby is a tall, beautiful woman, built like one of Frank Frazetta's lush heroines - a real good-looking woman. The epitome of healthy femininity.

So I get up from the table and leave the kitchen, glancing over my shoulder once to make sure my belongings are somewhat together and ready to go.

"Where are you going?"

"To write some shit down, then home." I push through the door into her room and lock it behind me, I know she is watching me through the sliding glass door in the kitchen through her bedroom window as I pull the shades, but I don't allow myself a glance to make sure.

I proceed to write her a letter along the lines of:

The Good Guy never squirms, never balks, never cheats his compadre. The Good Guy has the advantage because he shoots straight and doesn't talk shit. The Good Guy might not know how to dance real well, but he knows who he should and shouldn't be dancing with. The Good Guy never crawls on his belly, and he never begs.

It's a shame that this life has been so cruel, that the people you thought you could trust turned rotten, and that you are going to live the rest of your life hanging your head, tail between your legs, like a beaten old dog - kicked once too many times.

So, the self proclaimed Good Guy will ride off into the sunset with his guitar slung over his shoulder and the whispered memory of come-hither smiles crawling under the covers with him at the tattered edges of sleep.

I don't know if this is appropriate material for a Daylog or what not, but, fuck it - I am not going to make an excuse for it.