Angie was, as the men would often remark, unusually pale and plump for a woman who lived in such a sun-baked and starving place. She was all wrapped in pale skin and pale eyes and pale hair, with a fine strong voice, and built like a mother to many despite being a mother to none at all.
Angie's home stood on the outskirts of the dusty, worn and cracked town at the edge of the desert, her purpose marked by a sign out front that advertised her only service: Companion to Men. Not prostitution, no, though a few had come and gone looking for that, strolling in with their coin in hand and that hand in their pocket, seeking an hour or so of her time. Angie turned them away, always, the men who came for that and nothing more. She was no simple fuck. Time and effort and love had gone into her craft, no sheet warmer she, but an artist. Conversation, music and time were what she offered, but more too, friendship and gentle hands and home cooked food among them. Their problems she would take and fix, their nightmares and demons she would soothe away, things they feared to tell their wives and their priests she would hear and fan away like smoke. She loved them each and every, all differently and desperately.
Of course, they could not love her in turn. It was the way of things, and she knew that well, and that no amount of wailing or fretting or trying could change that, nor the way it would be fixed into reality again and again with each new caller.
She had taken to calling it pre-emptive rejection. What else was there to call it, when it came before she had even opened her mouth on such a subject? Always, a performance on how uninterested they were, these men she talked with, with no such thoughts on her mind to begin with and no need for such a cruel and senseless song and dance. If she knew them long enough, and too often she did, they would say it, the words bursting out of them like they couldn't hold it back even a second longer.
It eventually became as much an understood burden to her as anything else. They would tell her how disgusted they were at the thought of her shorn of her clothing, horrified at the concept of her intimately engaged, and she would smile and laugh, paying it as the price of companionship.
"I'd never recover Angie, I'd have to leave town," they'd laugh, eyes bright as if they hadn't cut her along the bone with such a phrase, hadn't crippled her heartstrings as she brought them the food and drink and gentle affections they'd sought her out for.
"Aye, I'm a horror." The words often tasted like blood in her mouth and she spit them out like such, through teeth clenched into an almost natural grin. Most times, the words didn't even wobble in her mouth, steady as they poured down her chin like sick while she laughed, a hearty and insincere sound that bounced and rolled off the walls of her drawing room.
She got used to it. It became ingrained in her: "there is something disgusting about you", a thought baked into her understanding of herself.
By and by, it became attraction to her which was registered as a performance; some sly and shifty joke played on her, she was sure, some game to amuse the men and occupy their time when her charms did not quite satiate. She let them have their fun. After all, if she let them have theirs, they may let her have hers, carrying their joke to its endpoint and going on their way with her left satisfied if self loathing, all the while chuckling to themselves that she was far too shy for such a pretty gal.
She knew they were all liars to the teeth.
Except...except. Sometimes, once in a blue moon, there came a broken one. What, exactly, was broken about him, she couldn't guess; some defect in his mind that made him unable to see the rot in her, that left him with the impression that her shell was the whole of her and hid nothing horrible within, no twisting monstrous wrongness.
She would know the Broken Men by their eyes. It would always startle her, the way those eyes looked at her, as if she were water in the dessert, whiskey on a heartache, salve on a burn. As if they had been
looking
for her.
She would find reason on those nights to douse the lights early, to draw these men up to her room, guilt coiled in her throat and chest like some great and venomous snake for taking advantage of their blindness and their sweetly nature to satisfy her selfish, grasping wants.
She knows him by his eyes, as ever, when he walks through the doors to her open parlor. His boots shed dust on her floor, his black pants and shirt marred with it, but she can't find it in her to mind, certainly not to mind enough to scold.
Instead, Angie straightens, setting aside her instrument as he enters and smiling a grateful smile. it's been months since she's seen one of the Broken Men. She gestures him to a seat and he takes it, sitting alongside the other men who have come today to be entertained by her, his eyes on her abandoned fiddle for a moment before sliding to her.
"Welcome, stranger," she opens, inclining her head towards him. "Might I know your name?"
"Jack, usually," the man responds, and that pulls a ripple of laughter from the assorted men. Angie only smiles.
