Chapter 1: The Imaginary Girlfriend
The air in The Rusty Nail was thick enough to chew. Stale beer, old fries, and the ghost of a thousand spilled shots clung to everything, especially the sticky vinyl of the booth where Marcus was slowly dissolving into his seat.
“Come on, man. A year?” Derek’s voice cut through the din of the jukebox, a blunt instrument of skepticism. He leaned across the chipped table, his stocky frame blocking the flickering neon sign that read ‘BUD’ in a dying amber sputter. “A whole year, and not one of us has met her? Not a photo that isn’t suspiciously cropped? She doesn’t do social media? In this century?” He scoffed, taking a long pull from his bottle. “Your girlfriend is a Tamagotchi. You feed her with button presses when you’re lonely.”
Sam, swirling the ice in his glass with a quiet precision, adjusted his glasses. His dry contribution was a sniper shot. “The circumstantial evidence is damning. You’re never unavailable on Friday nights, but you’re always free Saturday morning. It’s the schedule of a man with a very compelling video game habit, not a relationship.”
Marcus just smiled, a slow, easy thing. He traced a watermark on the wood. “She works nights. Chef at Le Soleil. You know, that place you can’t afford. And she values her privacy. She thinks you’re a bad influence.” He nodded at Derek.
“A bad influence!” Derek barked a laugh. “I’m a reality influence. I’m the friend who stops you from paying for a year of a streaming service for a girlfriend who, and I cannot stress this enough, does not exist.”
“She exists,” Marcus said, his tone light but final.
“Fifty bucks says she doesn’t.” Derek slapped a crumpled bill on the sticky table. “Right now. Show us a current, uncropped photo of this mythical Lily. Not a landscape with a tiny blurry figure in the distance. A real, person photo.”
Sam leaned in, interest piqued. “The discovery phase begins.”
Marcus sighed, a performative sigh of long-suffering patience, and pulled his phone from his pocket. He swiped and tapped, his thumb hovering. “You’re forcing me to objectify my partner for your crude monetary gain, you realize that? It’s demeaning.”
“Just show us the ghost, Casper,” Derek muttered.
Marcus’s smirk deepened. His love language was acts of service—making Lily breakfast, fixing her stubborn drawer, sorting her recycling—but he also loved a good, erotic prank. He found the image. “Fine. You asked for it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you about her… intensity.”
He turned the screen around.
The photo was intimate, casual, devastating. Lily was on her side in their rumpled bed, morning light cutting across the planes of her back. She was looking over her shoulder at the camera, a sleepy, secret smile on her lips. And she was, unquestionably, topless. The sheets pooled just below the curve of her waist. Her skin was pale olive, dotted with a few faint freckles across her shoulders. And there, glinting with small, delicate silver hoops, were her pierced nipples.
The air left the booth.
Derek’s jaw unhinged. Sam’s eyebrows disappeared into his hairline.
“See?” Marcus said mildly, pulling the phone back. “Lily. She exists. She also has a metal allergy, so those are surgical steel.” He pocketed the phone and plucked the fifty from the table. “Thanks for the drinks, guys.”
Derek was still sputtering, a fish out of water. “You—that’s—you can’t just—!”
“I believe the burden of proof has been satisfied,” Sam said, recovering first, a newfound respect in his voice. “Though the evidentiary method was… audacious.”
The bar door swung open with a groan of protesting hinges.
A new current cut through the room’s stale energy. Conversations dipped. Heads turned, subtly, not wanting to be caught staring but unable to help it.
She filled the doorway, then the space around her. She was a solid six-foot-eight in chunky platform boots, a silhouette of impossible height and presence. A goth goddess woven from shadow and intention. Her hair was a cascade of ink-black, streaked with violent magenta, framing a face with sharp cheekbones and eyes lined in kohl. She wore a leather harness over a mesh top, and black cargo pants hung low on her hips. Chains jingled softly with her movement.
She scanned the room, her gaze a lighthouse beam sweeping over the dingy bar. It passed over the pool table, the worn dartboard, the clusters of patrons, and then stopped. Locked.
On Marcus.
Marcus, who had just taken a victorious sip of beer, felt the weight of the stare like a physical tap on the shoulder. He looked up. His easy smile faded into a mask of pure, unadulterated shock.
She began to move. The crowd seemed to part for her, not out of courtesy but out of a primal instinct to avoid a force of nature. The clack of her platforms on the linoleum was a death knell to the previous moment’s victory.
Derek followed Marcus’s gaze. His eyes went wide. “Oh, shit,” he whispered, all the mockery drained from his voice. “Who is that? Did Lily send a hitwoman?”
Sam simply pushed his glasses up, observing the trajectory with academic fascination.
She reached the booth. She loomed. Marcus had to crane his neck to look up at her. The scents of leather, incense, and cold night air wafted down.
Her voice, when it came, was lower than he expected, a raspy contralto that bypassed his ears and vibrated straight into his sternum. “Marcus Finch?”
He managed a nod, his throat dry.
She didn’t smile. Her eyes, a dark, impossibly deep brown, flicked to Derek and Sam, then back to him. “We need to talk. Outside. Now.”
It wasn’t a request. It was a tectonic shift, an irrevocable change in the atmosphere of his entire life, delivered in four words.
Marcus looked at his friends. Derek’s face was a masterpiece of bewildered panic. Sam’s was carefully, critically blank.
He slid out of the booth, his mind racing through a thousand impossible scenarios, none of them good. The fifty-dollar bill felt like ash in his pocket. As he followed the vast, black-clad form toward the door, the last thing he heard was Derek’s hissed whisper to Sam.
“Okay, so Lily exists. But what the hell did he do to her?”