Present-day-ish.

“You look like shit, Zach.”

Romy Park was a tall woman, and leaner than a veal cutlet. She was proud of her muscles. If she could dismember herself and display her biceps in a glass trophy cabinet, she would’ve. She had every quality of a middle-aged-man going through his aptly timed midlife crisis. She drove a candy-apple red Ferrari California (the convertible kind), with a nitrous oxide combustion engine and a silver figurehead of a lion stuck to the bonnet. She drank more beer than most Germans during Oktoberfest, and inside her glovebox was a 2-year-old calendar with 12 red-lit pinups of naked or near-naked women printed on it (Romy had kept the calendar because she couldn’t bear to part with the ‘love of her life’, September Girl).

“No, wait. You look like shit that’s been in the sun for two days, with a shoe print in it.”

She stood outside Zachary’s red-brick apartment, staring up at the second story balcony (made of white-painted, rusty wrought iron, with various patterned shirts hanging over it), leaning on the door of her red metal baby. She wore a tight black singlet and a light blue trucker cap, her ponytail of orange hair slung through the hole in the back.

“Flattering,” Zachary mumbled in response, halfway through clambering down the fire escape. He didn’t look like shit, per se, but Romy wasn’t entirely wrong, either. If I were to describe it, which I am going to, that’s my job, he looked more like a washed-up musician who’d headbanged too much and taken too many lines of cocaine off the stage the night before. He hadn’t shaved in almost a week, his watery eyes were framed by dark circles and the guitar case slung over his shoulder made him feel like Atlas as he carried the globe upon his back. And the shirt. Zachary’s taste in shirts is impeccable, if you’re a blind man. It looked like one of your great-grandmother’s curtains; black, with large red and yellow flowers spattered across it like flicks of paint.

“You’re welcome.” Romy’s lips contorted into a sly smile as she opened the door to the convertible. “Get in, break anything and I’ll shove it up your ass.”

Romy was not the kind to make empty threats, either.

She practically threw herself in the driver’s seat of the Ferrari sideways, like a child onto a couch, annulling all the careful effort Zachary put into making sure the white-leather seats didn’t even squeak underneath him, and dampening the click of his seatbelt. Romy straightened her cap, one arm on the upholstered steering wheel and the other hanging out the window. The car’s engine revved into mechanic life as the Romy breathed it into the accelerator.

Nirvana’s Lounge Act was playing at 100% volume on the stereo.

“So, where to, Zachy-boy?”

Any reply Zachary tried to give her was drowned out by Kurt Cobain screaming in his ears.

‘…in security… I can’t let you smother me… I’d like to but it couldn’t work… trading off and taking tu—’

He reached for the stereo system’s dial and turned, listening to Kurt’s husky voice get overpowered by the equally-as-husky-and-grunge-like wind as it circulated violently throughout the car. “West 32nd Street.”

Romy threw him a Look. A Look that was half surprise that Zachary was going into the business district, a foreign, mysterious land of men in suits and paisley ties and attaché cases, and half annoyance that he’d touched the stereo. Romy didn’t like people, especially haggard-looking men, touching her things. If Zachary were a certain cute, Asian girl with a trim black bob and a peach-colored swimsuit, she might’ve reconsidered that half of her Look. But Zachary was not. She turned the music back up.

‘…this friend you see, who makes me feel, and I wanted more, than I could steal, I’ll arrest myself, and wear a shield, I’ll go out of my way, to prove I still…”

The rest of the drive was spent in silence. Zachary was never much for conversation. Well, almost silence, anyway. Zachary and Romy were both fans of Nirvana, occasionally off-key lyrics would pass between them and fly off into the wind.

Occasionally, Romy would notice the furl in her passenger’s eyebrows, the way his palms were clenched and his gaze continually flittering back and forth between the road and the guitar case at his feet. She would think of a question.

But she wouldn’t ask it.