Number in Wrong Place (first installment)

“What’s the deal with your clocks?” She’s a morning person. Fuck. I have a bitch of a hangover and was not planning on moving or speaking for another couple of hours. Looks like that idea has gone to shit. This whole thing might not work out.
“Wha?” Dazed/best I can manage.
“Well they all read different times, and …” checking her cell, “none of them are accurate.” I suppose I could come up with some tale as to how my notions of time and existential reality differ from that of the consensus. But that’s mostly bullshit. There is no reason for it, like most of the shit in my life, I just felt like it at the moment and haven’t worried about it since.
“Yeah…”
“It’s just that it’s a little weird. Doesn’t it bother you? I mean, not knowing what time it is…” No. Not at all. Does it bother you? They’re just clocks.
“I really don’t notice them.”
“Oh.” And now she'll never call again. Odds that this is the last conversation we will ever have: 20:1.

***

Samantha is a rising star in her law firm. Just a year out of law school and she is already starting to make a name for herself. Or, this is what I hear. While being attracted to powerful, opinionated, driven career women, I couldn’t give a fuck about their actual careers. I met her in a coffee shop and then again in a bar and then again in a bar and then again in a bar and then she decided to ask me out. I still don’t know how she got my number. I don’t remember giving it to her. Of course, there’s always been a fair bit of my life that I can’t remember.

Everything started out fine…

I hadn’t been writing, I was lost. I can’t write if I’m not settled, I’m not settled if I am not writing. I was in a spiral. When Sam bumped into me while I was waiting for my coffee I was spaced as fuck and had she not been startlingly beautiful, controlling the entire room with her presence, her glow, I might not have noticed her at all. She was on the phone, talking into one of those Bluetooth fucking earpieces as if it didn’t make her look like a preposterous fuckwit, as if she was granted an air of importance, nobility simply because she would now always be in the middle of the phone call of her fucking life. I sneered and thought less of her. Fucking drones and their jobs and their notions of “importance.” Fucking who needs it?