Free The Devil You Know by Jenn Farrell

corporate ladder on everyone’s backs. Secretly, she stood close to him during their morning meetings to smell the nicotine on his skin, the smell of her father.
    She accused him of cutting her hours, of shorting her cheques, of stealing her lunch. He raised his palms like a supplicant and asked if they could take their battles to the pool hall. Blonde laughed at him and went with him and hung her cleavage like a dare over the deep green felt. She never got good at the game, but when they played doubles, she created an amusing-enough distraction that was sometimes sufficient for them to win.
    Theirs was an uneasy alliance, filled with defenses and imagined slights. He didn’t want to be her boyfriend because it violated staff policy. Who’d want you for a boyfriend anyway? she asked, tongue out. But she found herself wishing for beauty that would render him defenseless. He could avoid her for an entire shift, then sneak up behind her at the time clock and squeeze her shoulders through her boxy polo shirt. Blonde would never admit that his indifference to her was the greatest aphrodisiac. She began smoking again, found herself borrowing from his crummy collection of old-man music. They sat for hours in his parked car outside her apartment and argued about romance. He kept his hands on the wheel, even then. He told her that his disease was the physical manifestation of an inability to love, but the way he watched her exhale, she thought he was just a good liar. She told him her disease was the physical manifestation of the world being a bad joke. Not sick, exactly, just not quite right. Her hair, impossibly glossy, rested nightly on a metal stand. The holy trinity of Blonde, Brunette, and Redhead completed on a row of styrofoam heads in the closet. You could tell a lot about a man by his colour preference, just like leg men were different from tit men. It didn’t surprise her that Blonde was his favourite. She didn’t like to talk about it, but she would have told him anything if it would break his self-imposed vows. Anything to be the one who had the power to ruin him.
    One night at the pool hall, an enthusiastic drunk chick hugged Blonde off balance and she felt the wig slipping off her head in slo-mo, those perfect honeyed waves sliding down her back and at last to the floor, like a dressing gown in an old movie, or a defrocked superhero’s discarded cape. Drunk herself, Blonde retrieved it like a fumbled football and ran outside. She hid behind a monster truck in the parking lot and plopped the disheveled mess back on her hairless head.
    He found her and held her while she cried and helped her adjust her bangs. She wiped her nose on his shoulder, looked up at him and laughed through her tears when she saw the look of pity and kindness on his face. Let’s go dancing, she said. She walked back through the bar to collect her jacket like nothing could touch her. Later, outside the nightclub, he told her she was the bravest girl he’d ever met. Since she’d now played every card she had, since he’d now seen her more naked than naked, she stood on her toes and kissed him. At last, she thought, as they necked on the sidewalk, his erection pressing against her stomach, I’m the one in charge.
    Weeks later, she stood in the doorway of his bedroom, watching him sleep, and contemplated the contagion of his illness. His inability to love hadn’t interfered during those first nights and days in bed fueled by sex and jazz cassettes on endless loops and smoking. But before the end of the first month, the booze-and-pills cocktails fueled more all-day naps than marathon fucks. He called in sick to the store for days running, pleading flu, and she just stopped showing up. He called her fat. She hated the face he made when he came. She forgot just what it was that had made her want to change him so badly. She never wanted to listen to a Leonard Cohen album again. The bedclothes stank. Whatever