TROUBLE

 

Hot. Sure it was hot. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out. Still the voice on the radio was saying “It’s hot out there.” I knew it. I could feel it in the sweltering office I was stuck in. The ceiling fan was whipping around as fast as it could go, but really it was pointless. I mopped the sweat off my forehead with the back of my already damp sleeve. The door to my office swung open, and there she stood. Trouble. I knew it from the nametag she wore. T-R-O-U-B-L-E spelled out in nice neat block letters.I nearly let out a laugh as I looked around my office. What could bring Trouble to me? I felt like some new-aged hero of a classic pulp fiction novel. This couldn’t really be my life.

“Hello Handsome.” She said in a low sultry voice. “Could I have a few minutes of your time?”

“Uh – Sure” I responded. Curious about what she wanted but knowing it would not take much for me to get sucked, unsuspectingly, into her torrid affairs. “C’mon in.”

 She started to walk into the office, but stopped suddenly. “Let’s go outside where less people can hear us.” she said in that husky voice of hers. Each syllable was like an arrow designed to pierce the heart of any man who heard her. I had no choice, I stood up to follow her out.

It must have been a hundred degrees in the shade, but as she unraveled her story, it was hard to notice anything but her words. I even forgot, for a moment, about the ice cold glass of Pepsi-Cola I held in my hand. That is, until she reached out and picked a piece of ice out of it, and started to roll the ice around on the back of her neck. Still she continued to tell her story. I don’t think she realized what she was doing to me, I was all jumbled up inside. Then again, maybe she knew exactly what she was doing, because when she asked for help, I just had to say “Yes.”

She smiled at me “I just knew I could count on you Handsome.” And with that she stood up, swinging her hips, and walked away. I returned to my heat infested office, and started flipping through the papers on my desk. I knew there would be no more work for me that day though, so I stood up and roamed through the hallways. All I could think of was her. Trouble was a beautiful woman all right. She had long reddish hair, and a figure that could stop a train. The green dress she had been wearing was cut low and high in all the right places. Everything was left to the imagination, and nothing was. Trouble. I knew where she got that name from, and that was just what I was in.

I didn’t even know where to begin preparing for Trouble’s request. It’s not every day that a beautiful woman just walks into your office, and asks for your help. And such a request it was. I knew I was out of my league. I wanted to call in reinforcements, but who could I trust. With a woman like her trouble followed you around. No pun intended. I was compiling a mental list of those who could help in this new little endeveaour of mine when I ran smack into Hugh McMillon. Dirty rat bastard that he was.

“Mark Handsome,” he said in his weasely voice. “Was that Trouble Peyton I saw you with?” He was fishing for information already. I could see it in his eyes.

“In the flesh” I replied, thinking “oh what flesh it was.”

I didn’t give him any more details, so he started to press. “And what brought her to this end of the building?”

“I don’t know, maybe she wanted to get out of the heat.”

“Ha” he laughed. “everyone knows the air conditioning on this end of the building has been broken for a week. Tell me, what were you really up to?” I just gave him a sly smile, and started to walk away. Let him imagine what he will was my thought. But, he started to trudge up along behind me.

“I hear she’s got something going on?” Sure she did, had he not seen that body of hers. I nodded. “She’s up to something, I know it?” I kept on walking, but he grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back. “Handsome, you gotta let me know what’s going on.”

I turned to him. “Hugh,” I said, as calmly as possible, “If she wanted you to know her little secret, then perhaps she would have told you. As it is, I’m sworn to secrecy.” I had promised no such thing, and her request wasn’t such a big secret but there was no way I was going to tell this little slime-ball of a lawyer just what was going on.

A disappointed look crossed Hugh’s pointed face. As he turned to walk away he said “fine, if you wanna be that way.”  I shrugged my shoulders as if to say ‘what can you do?’ and walked away. Hugh was definitely not on my list of co-conspiritors in what I was beginning to think of as “The Trouble Affair”