Free The Dart League King by Keith Lee Morris

the doctors’ offices dressed perfectly every time, perfectly in control of himself. The CAT scans were negative. He passed all the standard tests. At times Kelly Ashton suspected that it was all a performance of some sort, and it was only when she remembered the look on his face that first time when he stood at the door in his boxer shorts that she could put aside the suspicion.
    Then there had been the Saturday when he left the house to go to work, his suit pressed, his tie perfectly even and tight, his socks chosen carefully from the lined-up pairs in the drawer, and did not come home. A Forest Service employee found his car parked along the High Drive, far up in the Cabinet Mountains, and he was never seen again.
    Russell Harmon could disappear that way. Or not exactly that way, not in a way that was so complicated and sudden, was
more mundane and predictable and slow, but it was something to keep in mind. So she smiled at him only slightly, no matter the feeling she had all of a sudden, the same one she always had when she first laid eyes on Russell, that he needed her protection, no matter the feeling all of a sudden that his simplicity could be a way of protecting her, that what she saw as Russell’s simple good nature might be a way out, a way to reconcile herself to living in this town, with Russell and Hayley, forming a pleasant little family that would let her leave behind thoughts of big things and deep things. But she was here now to meet Tristan Mackey, who represented something entirely different, which was genius, which was possibility, which was the stretching of her life beyond the confines of this town out into the greater world, a world in which she had not been very often or for any length of time, but which promised the chance of recognition, of being able to find the self you dreamed of and make the dreamed self and the actual self one and the same. That couldn’t happen for her in this town. And so she held out some hope—based on the fact, she knew, that he had been pretty crazy about her at one time—that despite his recent indifference there was still a way to hitch a ride out of here with Tristan Mackey. He was going places, and she could too.
    And yet this was nothing more than “dart night.” She swore to God, men had no imagination sometimes, not even the smart ones. You couldn’t help but be an underling if you didn’t even know, or weren’t able to keep in mind, that you had any stars. So tonight would be to remind him.
    And so after sitting at the bar for just a while, really not long enough for Russell to be going to the bathroom twice—Was he doing it to get a look at her? Was he drunk this early? Did
he have some sort of medical problem?—she took her glass of merlot and headed to the back, past the Red Hook sign and the framed photos of Garnet Lake in the old days, the muddy streets, the towers of felled timber at the old landing along the lakeshore, the old schoolhouse that had been razed to make room for the commerce park, and she liked the warm glow from the overhead lights hung from the high ceiling and the sound her heels made on the hardwood floor and the view of Sand Creek out the window, and she was glad to discover, because she’d never been in here before, because she’d hardly been to any bars in town, having been saddled by the time of her twenty-first birthday with a baby to nurse and then a full-time job to pay for rent and child care afterward, that at least the place wasn’t a total dump. She could forgive Tristan Mackey a little bit.
    And there he was, sitting alone with a glass of beer at a little table surrounded by wooden chairs. And there was a moment—too short, but definitely there—between them in which she could tell he was glad to see her. He leaned back in his chair, his eyebrows went up, and a slight grin spread across his face. His eyes went for a second from her tight shirt to her bare legs, but then just as quickly back up to her face, he