Not PG rated
She didn’t talk very much, but she always said thank you with a smile. Every Tuesday and Thursday night, after the late-night shift, he would go to the diner, sit at the counter and order the Midnight Menu that was made almost entirely out of fat and cholesterol. It tasted heavenly.
Oliver, or Oil as his colleagues called him – it was that one lunch break where he listed reasons why extra virgin olive oil was healthy that did it. He couldn’t help it, it was the kind of trivia he knew. So, he would walk into the diner at sometime past 2 a.m., sit down at the red-leather stool and start off with a coffee to wake him up, then continue with some nuts or crackers in the small dish someone always set before him, and finally go for the Midnight Menu, greasy and heavy in his stomach, the perfect thing to carry him home and send him to sleep the moment he undressed and hit the pillows.
Sometimes he didn’t undress at all. It all got into a muddle once he passed his door. Somnolence thickened his fatigue halfway up the five floors, and by the time he opened the door, he was sleep-walking. Every now and then he woke up in his shirt and tie, his pants unzipped. He somehow always remembered to remove his shoes, the fruits of rigorous childhood training where one step into the house with muddy shoes was accompanied with the siren-like shriek from his mother. And he always had muddy shoes. Since then it had become almost a reflex to remove his shoes the moment he closed the door. The rest, however… Oliver couldn’t say how often he’d woken up drooling on his jacket, but only ever on Wednesday and Friday mornings, after the late-night shift and endless jokes about olive oil.
 *
There was no reason why he went to the diner so religiously. It had nothing to do with the interior, which looked like a bad copy of a 50s’ family eatery. It wasn’t the music which was always this side of mediocre, let alone the clientele that looked just as half-dead as he usually felt. It was the food at first, greasy and delicious and so unhealthy he ate up with glee. And when she suddenly turned up, he had another reason as well. She wasn’t exactly pretty, but she had a nice face, the kind you could watch and watch and watch and not get tired, unless you were drifting off into the land of nowhere like he often was. She moved gracefully, like a dancer, never talked louder than necessary and always said thank you with a smile. He liked her, though all the conversation they had was a hello and goodbye, except his usual order and how she jotted everything down as if she’d heard it for the first time.
He at first thought she was a little slow. He never changed his order, so why all this writing? Then he saw her reading that French woman they’d had in school and changed his mind. He got a little cautious too. She was working the night shift at a slightly seedy dig, looking prim and proper like a neatly trimmed garden, without any sign of unease. The moment he realized this, Oliver got curious. Very quietly, over the space of weeks of Tuesday and Thursday late-night shifts he started wanting to know who she was, why she read that French book on the graveyard shift, and what the rest of her life looked like. She had to have something of a rest of her life. He had a rest of his life, though it didn’t amount to much. If he wasn’t sleeping he was working, if he wasn’t working he was sleeping. Weekends just drifted by, and there was Terry who insisted on drinks on Friday night, usually spent listening to Terry talk about his boring life. He’d had a girl once, ages ago. Pretty thing, bright, with plans for her life that did not entail the likes of him. Oliver didn’t mind. Thinking about her and them and us and everything else had proven to be unnecessarily complicated, he kept on messing up the one steady thing in his life, his job. So he wasn’t too shocked when she called it quits. He hadn’t seriously seen a woman in… years.
There was Stella from down the hall though. He’d found her crying on the stairs one day, crying so hard she could hardly move, so he helped her up, opened her door for her and made her some chamomile tea, why did women always have camomile tea? Then he listened to how she walked in on her boyfriend fucking another woman, got her box of Kleenex for her and hugged her awkwardly across the corner of her kitchen counter. He tucked her into bed fully dressed, except her shoes of course, slipped a tacky white teddy into the crook of her arm, a gift from the man she just fled from. Oliver made sure she was ok, Stella told him twice she was all right, so he left.
A week later, some drab Sunday night, the doorbell rang. Oliver opened it and saw Stella standing there with a bottle of wine, saying she wanted to say thank you. They drank the wine in his kitchen and fucked on his couch, and since then it was kind of an arrangement that he turned up at her place on Sunday evening with a bottle of wine. They rarely drank any of it because Stella was a riot in bed.
She knew some surprising things, and liked talking about the men she met while they were fucking. Oliver got to know about a lot of people this way, it was way better than the Sunday night special on TV.
That was his life really, the late-night shift on Tuesday and Thursday, a few drinks with Terry on Friday, maybe a trip to the gym on Saturday, and sex with Stella from down the hall on Sunday evening. It was easy, there were no complications, and Oliver lived rather contentedly this way. He didn’t want anything to change really, though sometimes he did dream of faraway places where he would live a different life altogether, where he might have something close to ambition, but those were just dreams anyway.
© 2014 threegoodwords
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