MISS RIGHT AND THE WRONG GUY

By

Ryan Lee

***************

"Danny?"

Alec barely heard the woman's voice above the noise - it was Saturday night and Cool Catz was throbbing - and he naturally assumed she was speaking to someone else until she touched his elbow. He looked around and saw a young woman smiling expectantly. She was tall and slim and possessed the kind of long, silky golden hair that made Alec think longingly of Harmony Hairspray commercials and the towering, unobtainable girlfriends of school football captains.

"It's Danny isn't it?"

There was nothing hesitent in that smile, no beginings of doubt. Whoever she was she was utterly convinced that Alec was someone else.

"Remember me?" she asked. She stepped back and opened her arms, as if presenting herself to an audience. "Samantha - from the first aid course!"

Alec laughed, a touch regretfully. He was about to explain that she had made a mistake when she suddenly threw her arms around his neck and hugged him fiercly. Her smell was sweet and dark and intoxicating, the closeness of her a moment of abrupt and urgent excitement.

"It's great to see you again," she whispered, her moist lips brushing against his earlobes. She drew her head back and smiled into his eyes, her fingers dovetailed around the back of his neck. "Bet you thought you'd seen the last of me, eh?"

"Well…"

"Are you still with that girl, that Julie girl?"

"No," Alec said. This was true. Alec did not have a girlfriend called Julie.

Samantha's manner became coy and kittenish. A subtle change in her eyes, her smile, her posture, and suddenly two old mates from a first aid course were thinking about more than the recovery position. Alec qucikly reminded himself that he wasn't the man she thought he was, and neither did he have the nerve or the experience to carry off an elaborate deception. He knew blokes that could and would and often did, but suicidal honesty had always been his downfall when it came to women. He was twenty eight years old, and in the fifteen years since puberty he had slept with just three wome. All three encounters had been marked with anxiety, nerve-racking anticipation, and a brief flurry of furious activity at the end, much like his O levels and his only fight. Samantha was the kind of woman he wouldn't even dare to approach in a wet dream.

"You don't remember me do you?" Samantha said. It was a gentle accusation. Her eyes were glistening with some secret womanly amusement. "I'm not surprised really. I only spoke to you twice. I think I muttered hello and something else you ignored."

"Did I?" Alec was surprised at Danny's arrogance. Maybe he was gay. "It seems like such a long time ago now." He held his breath for a moment, certain she would looked shocked and say that it was only a fortnight ago. He was alert to the fact that he had to keep any references to their shared past as vague as possible. Realising that, he was also aware that any opportunity to confess that he wasn't this Danny character had passed for tonight.

"I was a bit of an ugly duckling in those days," Samantha pouted deliberately and gazed deep into Alec's eyes. "What do you think of me now?"

"I think you're a very fine swan indeed," Alec said, and Samantha giggled in a way that made Alec think of the bubbles in a bottle of lemomade.

"That's funny," she said, breaking away from him. Alec's heart dipped with dissapointment. He didn't want her to leave. He was getting all kinds of mad notions about fate and syncronisity and forces beyond the control of mortal beings. "Can I give you my number?" She found a pen in her purse and wrote her number on the back of a damp bar receipt. "You will call me won't you?"

Alec was strangely moved by the brief show of insecurity. He took the recepit with her number on it and tucked it safely into his shirt pocket. "You bet."

Samantha kissed him warmly and softly on the lips. "Don't leave it six more years, Danny. I can't wait that long."

Alec went to find his friend, Salmon, who's real name was Michael Fish, like the weatherman. The dancefloor was like a martial arts ring featuring a display of alarmingly realistic simulated combat. In the centre of it all, Salmon was lurching around in a tight circle like an insect with a few crippled legs. It was only a matter of seconds before he was violently sick or violently attacked, or both, and so Alec dragged him outside.

Alec was in such a bouyant mood that he decided to treat his friend to a kebab. "I've just met the girl of my dreams," he said, just as Salmon was tentatively testing the strength of his chilli sauce with the tip of his tongue. "I think I believe in love at first sight."

Salmon gazed at him with the friendly, uncomprehending smile of a particularly simple sheep. "It's all 'ead meat, this," he said.

Alec slept soundly that night and woke just after nine the next morning with dragon's breath and a head the size of a prize pumpkin. After a few cups of coffee and a long, cool shower to wake his senses, he took the bar reciept with Samantha's telephone number on it and sat on the bed next to the telephone.

The question now was how to proceed from here? He was going to call her, no doubt about that, but what would he say? More importantly, who would he be? Samantha thought he was some guy called Danny, and to allow her to continue believing that seemed in Alec's mind to be nothing short of devious. Then again, if he told her the truth she would probably be angry and not wish to see him again. No date, no opportunity to explain face-to-face that his actions were completely out of character, and deffinately no hope of oral sex. Not that his motives for seeing Samantha again were purely laddish. In fact he was being sweetly naïve in his desire to see her again, oddly compelled by a mysterious and powerful call to romance this girl.

After half an hour of internal wrangling, his heart galloping and butterflies swooping in his stomach, Alec picked up the phone and dialled Samantha's number. He almost hung up the moment the call was answered.

"Hello, Fox and Saddle?"

"What?"

"What?"

Start again. Alec took a deep breath. "Is Samantha there please?"

"No Samantha here," the man said. "This is the Fox and Saddle. Have you got the right number?"

Alec read the number and the man hummed curiously.

"My number alright, but I don't know any…hold on! Is she a guest here?"

"I don't know," Alec said. "She might be. She's about twenty-five or so, tall, long blond hair and eyes that could jump start a flat battery."

"Ah, the biker chick," the man said archly. "Samantha."

"Yes. Is she there?"

"Nope. But I could go knock on her room door. Who shall I say is calling?"

"Tell her it's Ale - Danny!"

"Alidanny?"

"Danny, just Danny," Alec jabbered. "Just tell her it's Danny from the first aid course. She'll know who you mean."

The phone went clunk. Alec collapsed onto his back. Never had a conversation so exhausted and rattled him.

"Hello?"

It was her. Alec experienced a moment of joy so pure and intense it ached. "Samantha, is that you?"

"Danny!" she cried, obviously delighted to hear his voice. "I didn't think you'd call so soon."

Alec needn't have worried about what he was going to say because Samantha was a natural chatterbox. He was happy just to sit and listen to her voice, occasionally plugging the gaps with all the right noises. When she suggested that he take a taxi to the Fox and Saddle and meet her for lunch, Alec naturally agreed, but at the back of his mind he couldn't quite convince himself that for once his luck was in. He wasn't a pessimist by nature but when it came to the mating game he had long ago accepted that rugs were only placed under his feet for the sole purpose of being pulled away again by some diety with a clownish sense of humour. If they made a film of Alec's life the starring role would be split jointly between Woody Allen and Norman Wisdom, and his miserable few ex-girlfriends would be played by plain, bored-looking girls with no lines to speak. Alec just wasn't the leading man type, and he certianly wasn't the type who attracted beautiful, vivacious blonds.

No, but the erstwhile Danny obviously was that type. Evidently Danny had a lot going for him. Stuff worth borrowing.

A couple of hours later Alec was at the Fox and Saddle, which was packed with Sunday Dales trippers, a couple of pub football teams in various stages of undress, and a knot of grumpy, beleagured old men who had to be locals. He couldn't see Samantha in the bar, so he bought a glass of orange and took it out to the beer garden, where he found her waiting for him at one of the tables.

She didn't see him at first. Alec watched her for a while, a hypnotised voyer, until she sensed she was being observed and looked his way. Smiling with bashful guilt, Alec went and sat beside her. She smelled of flowers and Radion.

"How long were you watching me?"

Alec just shrugged, unable to shift the shy, affected smile from his face.

Samantha took a sip of her drink, eyeing him coyly over the rim of her glass. "What did you see, Danny?"

"I thought you looked liked a swan," he said, and she laughed kindly.

"Do you fancy going for a ride?"

"No car," Alec reminded her. "I came by taxi."

Samantha seemed to find this amusing. "Don't worry, Danny boy. Meet me out front in ten minutes and I'll give you the ride of your life."

Intrugued, Alec left the beer garden and waited on the pavement outside the pub's front doors. A short time later Samantha rode up on the bike from hell, a muscular, brutish machine that was all attitude and hot, growling temper. Polished chrome caught the sunlight and threw it back like daggers froma knife-thrower's hand. She could not have done anything more to arouse him. She had roared straight out of his secret library of poems and perversions, the bitch on the bike, the dragon's mistress, beauty and the beast. He wanted to do it to her on the open road, ton-up, spear her from behind as second by second their tenuous grip on life was slipping.

As if reading his thoughts, Samantha turned her head towards him. Alec saw only his own face reflected in her helmet's black visor. There was something disturbingly insect-like about her now, something chilling and predatory; yet the fear he felt, a distant, enigmatic terror, merely intensified his desire for her.

Worldlessly she passed him the spare helmet, which he put on. It made him feel strangely mean and invulnerable, as if he had a gun in his hand. Then he swung his leg over the seat and mounted the bike. Samantha greeted his groin with her backside. She was wearing black leather trousers, boots with polished buckles, and a loose leather jacket over a white tee shirt. Alec slipped his hands around her waist, under her jacket, and let them rest firmly against her stomach. He could feel her breathing, urgent, racy, impatient.

She revved the engine. The bike prowled to a nearby set of traffic lights, hungry, restless. The light went green and Alec felt himself being catapulted forward; at the same time part of him was left suspended in the air. Before that sensation had fully registered it was replaced by others, first that of streaking between two lines of cars like an arrow down a hosepipe, and then a burst of screaming, electrifying panic as she opened up the throttle to beat the next set of lights.

Samantha took a sharp right turn across the path of an oncoming van, then charged recklessly up and over a frighteningly pointy hill. Alec's stomach leapt to the top of his helmet and then took the kind of plunge normally associated with elevator accidents. He could have sworn he heard a bell ring.

A narrow country lane unfurled before them. The bike responded with the mechanical equivilent of a drool, accelarating cheetah-like. Alec clung on for his life as stone walls zipped by without deffinaition, only to rear with menacing clarity as Samantha dragged the bike around the tight bends. It was a ride of alternating terror and relief, a roller coaster train powered by its own devilish spirit.

Samantha stopped the bike by a track that led into some woods. She twisted her head around but didn't lift the visor of her helmet. "You wanna play in the woods, Danny?"

Alec lifted the visor on his own helmet. Sunlight burned his eyes. "Depends what you want to play. Cowboys and indians?"

Samantha laughed huskily. Hi-ho, Silver, and away they went.

The track to the woods was bumpy enough to launch the bike into a series of spectacular wheelie-jumps. They finally stopped by a stone post which bore an inscription too faded and moss-covered to be read. They left the bike and helmets and strolled hand in hand along the woodland path, silently enjoying the cool contentment of nature. Alec found it impossible not to daydream. In his mind it was three months down the line. He and Samantha were inseperable, Yorkshire's answer to John and Yoko. By now she knew he wasn't Danny and the whole thing was a big joke to them, especially when any of their friends asked for a sticking plaster.

"Danny? Are you listening?"

"Of course," Alec said, wiping the vacant smile from his face. "Just remind me what it was you said though."

Samantha gave him a withered look and tugged his hand insistently. "Down here, come on."

She led him off the main path and down a crooked little trail that wound its way sinsiterly into the heart of the woods. There was a gloomy sense of the ancient down here.

"What happens how?" Alec asked when they had stopped.

"This," she said, and kissed him forcefully on the lips. She pushed him back against a tree trunk and pressed her weight against him. When he tried to put his arms around her waist she reached behind her and gripped his wrists hard. "You have to beg before I let you touch," she whispered. She sounded like the bike, hungry, lascivious.

They were playing a game, one where she was the biker bitch from hell and he was her slave. The reality of it made Alec tingle all over.

She forced his arms behind him and around the tree trunk, securing them by holding his wrists so tightly it began to hurt. Her knee was planted firmly in his groin. Alec felt a kind of unutterably orgamsic sense of helplessness that physically weakened him. He supposed, in theory, that he could easily overpower her if he wanted to. But he didn't want to. He didn't even want to think about it because it invaded the game like a draught in a warm room. Instead he gave in, yeilded, bowed to her strength and superiority.

Something closed around his wrists with a pinching, shocking snap. Samantha instantly stepped away from him. She seemed as remote and passionless as those about to take aim and fire at a condemnded man.

"I don't want this," Alec said, testing the strength of the handcuffs. They were locked solid. These were real, not play-things. He was no longer turned on, just frightened and acutely aware of his vulnerabilty.

Samantha continued to gaze at him with cold, pityless indifference, as one might gaze upon a fly trapped in a spider's web or a pig's head hanging in a butcher's shop.

"Samantha!" Alec bellowed, thrusting his body as far forward as the cuffs would allow him to go. "This is not funny! Not funny anymore!"

"Not funny," she agreed tonelessly. "But then I have no sense of humour. This is just business, Danny, that's all. Nothing personal." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small pistol. It was so small it could only have been a toy. Or so small it could only have been real. Alec felt dread set in his stomach like instant cement.

"I've got a message from Donna Hammond. Do you remember her, Danny? She's that girl you raped at a party in Wakefield. She just wanted you to know what it feels like to be pinned down and fucked."

"Wer-wait!" Alec screamed. "You've got the wrong-"

A shot rang out. The woods fell silent again.

END