“You smell like horse shit.”

“I told you I was going riding. I’m gonna take a shower.”

As much as she smelled like shit, she looked as tart as a lemon in sunshine. “I’ll join you.”

After making love for an hour or so, I took the Boston Market cherry pie out of the fridge and Betsy squirted circles of whipped cream all over it. We sat across from each other and ate pie and drank Heineken. I didn’t know why or how I knew, but I knew Betsy’s heart was not with me. She ate her pie coolly and leaned back, where as before she had always leaned over tables keeping her breasts close to me.

She kissed me at the door and called me when she got home later that night. “I love you,” she said and hung up. I wondered.

In the morning I awoke panicked, thinking of everything at once as well as feeling lonely. Steve was quickly back on my mind and I imagined he was having coffee alone in his room with toast and scrambled eggs. Then, I imagined him here and me laying a plate of eggs and toast in front of him and him eating them like a boy, with no acknowledgment of my existence or anything else for that matter. When he swallowed his last lump of egg, he asked me what I wanted him to do next.

Slowly I come back to reality and remembered Steve is a murderer. I couldn’t believe I was feeling this way! I think of those women who get engaged to men on death row; men who have violently killed people in total consciousness and will never get out of prison. These couplings will never lay their hands on each other so why would these women commit themselves to such a hopeless situation? I remembered Greg saying that word, “inevitable.” You meet someone and feel that it’s inevitable you will be together. That is what I feel with Steve, yet along with that inevitability is complete hopelessness.

As I drove up the 405 freeway, I cleared my thoughts of Betsy and Steve and focused on what to do about Mocha Daze. I’d have to talk to Steve about it, but my inkling was to shut Mocha Daze down. I sure as hell didn’t want to run it and by the looks of it, Greg just wanted to paint it. Just then I noticed the red and yellow flash across the interior of my car. He was right on my tail. Damn it. Without realizing it, I had pulled into the car pool lane and when I looked down, my speed was seventy-five. I pulled over.

I knew I was fucked. A car pool lane ticket is three hundred alone. I watched as the lone uniform cop lunged out of his car stretching his legs. His face was strong, but as he got close to me I realized he wasn’t a he at all. It was her almond shaped and colored eyes that gave her away. It was a perfect match I quickly thought, her body was as strong as the Greek God that Greg had painted on the wall in the toilet, but her eyes and face were beautiful and feminine as possible.

“You got a friend hiding in that car somewhere?”

My grin was impossible to hide, “No officer, I didn’t realize I had pulled in to that lane, but I know that’s no excuse.”

“Are you confessing? You know you’re not suppose to do that.”

“I bet you get a lot of confessing...” I looked at her lapel and on a gold plate was her name. “Officer O’Connor,” which I could tell she liked.

She handed me a warning and on the top, scribbled the precinct phone number. She paused and said if I ever needed a confession session, to give her a call. Her tires squealed out around me as she turned off her flashers. I couldn’t believe it! To put it simply, when it rains it pours.