Chapter 10
We dropped Cassie’s cat off back at my place, after a quick pit stop to acquire a new litter box, as we’d neglected to take it in the rush of leaving her old place.
Monica was already waiting for us, and had been blowing up Cassie’s phone the whole way back, no doubt gossiping about our antics with her ex and who knows whatever else.
The speakers of my seven seater SUV had never been pushed so far. Monica’s taste in music emphasized bass, while Cassie’s was just plain loud, with a lot of high end frequencies.
Pop, hip-hop, contemporary, and a bunch of retro throwbacks were the name of the game, and I did my best to suppress the big cheesy grin my face wanted to make.
They didn’t have a care in the world.
Everything was fun, and full of opportunity.
It was an innocence I’d lost touch with, one I’d missed.
On the outside, I was driving with a look of almost stoic amusement, but on the inside, my spirit was dancing. Cassie sat in the front passenger seat, while Monica preferred to stay in the tinted backseat again.
With our guns.
The woman’s attitude was ‘I-ride-you-die’.
And the occasional smiles she flashed me through the rearview mirror were priceless, no doubt hinting at a follow-up coating of her canal the next time we got naked.
We headed out of the southwest suburbs and went further north, to the west side of the city, a touch nicer than Cassie’s east side and nowhere near as dangerous as Monica’s native south end.
If my neck of the woods counted as the outskirts, a suburb of a suburb, then Mimi’s area was the place a lot of folks commuted to the north side from. Several tall apartment towers lined the clean, well paved streets as the sun reflected from their countless bay windows.
“Ooh!” Cassie ceased her sing-along to turn the music down then started swiping on her phone. “She’s on!”
“Who’s on?” asked Monica groused as the music abated.
“Mimi! I texted her that we were coming but she hasn’t answered. Now I know why.”
Cassie turned her torso toward the center console and held her phone in the middle, allowing Monica to lean forward to watch.
I glanced askance to catch a glimpse of a gaming stream, then did a double take when I noticed that a hardcore first person shooter was being played by the cutest fucking goth girl I’d ever seen in my life.
The first thing that got my attention were her eyes. I knew contacts when I saw them, and these weren’t that.
She had a form of heterochromia; a left eye swept with magenta tones and sapphire sky blue for her right. Black hair with bangs and a short ponytail; long hot pink fringes framed her face on either side of her bangs.
Soft cheeks, black lipstick, and pale skin that Morticia Addams would be proud of. Add to that a spiked collar with metal ring in the front, and she had the whole look going for her.
And don’t get me started on the cleavage her spaghetti strap black tank top barely contained. This girl had titties.
From what I could see of the background, her bedroom had blacked out windows and a number of spooky-cute ornaments and props, with neon lights logos and magenta string lights complementing purple ones over dark lavender walls.
Well, that explained how she made her living in this part of the town. Based on the innumerably vibrant chat log with donations coming in, the girl was a successful streamer.
I pulled up in front of her building and got out to put some coins in the meter, choosing not to opt for the parkade for better phone reception.
Monica walked noticeably close to me as we hopped out onto the curb and went inside, while Cassie hovered a slightly further distance off to my right.
We entered the lobby, complete with a little seating area across from a little chrome kiosk with a security guard watching the complementary TV screen angled toward the single-seater guest seats.
One elevator ride up to the tenth floor later, and we were standing outside her door. Cassie knocked three times.
No response. Then she rang the door buzzer. Still nothing.
“Get sniped!” Mimi shouted in the sweetest, most playfully unhinged voice I’d ever heard someone use for such a taunt, giggling afterward before winking her magenta eye.
“This girl isn’t gonna answer,” Monica said while tapping her foot. “She’s balls deep in that game and wearing headphones.”
“Yes, she will,” I said, stepping close beside Cassie while she continued watching the live stream on her phone. “Can you message her on the chat?”
Cassie shook her head. “There’s too many comments. Mine is getting lost in the shuffle.”
“Not for long,” I declared, reached into my pocket and took out one of my debit cards. “Use this. Donate a thousand bucks to put your comment at the top. That oughta get her attention.”
“A thousand?” Monica recoiled. “Can’t we just come back later? One message can’t be worth that much!”
“It’s not, but my time is worth even more,” I stated while handing Cassie the card. “We’re here, I’m here, so let’s get her attention.”
“I didn’t think of it that way, I’m used to waitin’ on people,” Monica shrugged with her palms up and her arms bent at the elbow, acquiescing. “Okay, Daddy, fast life it is!”
Cassie looked in my eye for confirmation, smiled, then nodded as she put the numbers in and then composed a message that said, ‘Answer the door, bitch!’ with a $1000 donation amount.
The second it went through, the number came up on the center of the screen with exploding neon fireworks along with our message.
Mimi’s differently colored eyes nearly bulged out of her pretty head, followed by her taking off the headphones and turning her swivel chair around.
Then she pouted as her character was gunned down and looked back into the camera.
“Sorry, guys. I gotta end the stream early today,” she announced, then the stream ended.
A few seconds later, the door to her apartment cracked open, the darkness within breached by Mimi’s porcelain face. She looked left and right, looking at each of us in turn.
“Cassieeee!”” and then she swung the door open with a big smile and arms outstretched, revealing a pierced belly button and a black schoolgirl skirt, with thick-soled black low-top boots.
And she was way hotter in person.
Holy shit this girl could get it.
She had one of those figures that was extra soft, with thick thighs, but with the facial aesthetics of a thinner girl. A beautiful girl, and her goth aesthetic didn’t get in the way of that. If anything, it may have highlighted it even more.
“Mimiiii!” Cassie squealed in kind, stepping forward to embrace the hot goth, their tits squishing together in a buffet of bombastic bosoms.
But there was something about this goth that was throwing me off, something I couldn’t quite place. It was odd, I’d never met this woman before in my life, but there was this weird feeling of deja vu.
Somehow, she felt… familiar.
They broke the hug, with Mimi stepping back and looking at Monica and I with suspicion. But when her eyes met mine, she held eye contact for a long, awkward pause.
“You’re the guy throwing the party?” she questioned in a subdued, almost mousy voice.
“I’m Jax,” I greeted.
“The big tip was you?”
“It was.”
“…do you have any idea how many Slim Jims I can get with that?”
“That depends. With or without Funyuns?
Mimi’s gorgeous eyes widened slightly, her lips parted, and then she smiled with big pearly whites. “I like you.”
And then she looked at Monica with an unreadable expression, scanning her up and down.
“You’re pretty,” Mimi stated.
Monica’s standoffish expression softened somewhat. “Thanks, booboo—I mean, Michelle.”
“You can call me Mimi,” Mimi gagged with her tongue sticking out. “My mother called me Michelle whenever I got in trouble, so now I hate it. What’s your name?”
“I’m—”
“This is Momo,” Cassie introduced with a gesture.
“Momo?” Mimi leaned blurted out with an overjoyed expression.
Monica stared daggers at Cassie and said, “It’s. Monica!”
“Oh, it’s way too late now,” Mimi interjected. “The rule of cute wins every time. Now we can be Mimi and Momo! Come in, come in!”
Monica mouthed the words ‘I’m gonna kill you’ at Cassie, who simply giggled as Mimi stepped back to usher us all inside.
Mimi’s apartment was a shrine to all things spooky cute. I was expecting a macabre monument of deathly imagery, but she’d somehow flipped everything into an adorable representation.
She had little Grateful Dead dancing skeletons in a variety of colors, all lined up on the mantlepiece with their top hats, lava lamps and incense in dragon shaped holders, with smiling plushies and Hello Kitty bobbleheads, among many other doodads.
All of her lamps, the lampshades of which all had curved flares like batwings, emitted a gentle orange light. The string lights I’d seen in the video ran across the top of every wall.
Of course she had posters of various bands all put up, and her black fabric tarp covered every window with tidy precision. The neon fixtures added additional light.
A plush pink rug covered her living room floor in front of a leather L-shaped couch, with her gaming desk set across from that, with two monitors and a brightly lit desktop with interior color changing LEDs.
And right beside her black keyboard with rainbow backlit buttons, was some kind of a half-bear half-bat plushie. A bear-bat. With a pink heart-shaped tummy and a pink bowtie to contrast its black and pink wings.
“I wasn’t expecting a place like this,” I remarked while looking around. “Looks fun.”
“Not every goth is a Manic Depresso poser who wears fangs and watches The Rocky Horror Picture Show every week,” Mimi explained as she paced through the living room, presenting her lair before turning around with her hands tucked behind her back and her left knee pointing inward.
“Mimi, you watch that every week, and you own fangs,” Cassie accused with a hand on her hip.
“Uh yeah, because they’re awesome,” Mimi sassily retorted staring at me directly while she counted off on her fingers. “There’s Cyber Goths, RomantiGoths, Goth-a-billies—even Rivet-Heads!”
“So what kind of goth are you?” I asked.
“The kind that eats E-girls for lunch,” Mimi beamed. “So, why are you here?”
“We were hoping you’d lend some of your taste to a little get together I’m throwing,” I replied, slightly bemused.
Mimi squeezed her lips together and looked off to the side with flared nostrils, then went to the couch and plopped down to lie across it on her back, her feet kicked up on the armrest with her face looking up toward us.
“Mmm, that’s not the reason. People go to parties to find somebody to have sex with. So who do you wanna have sex with?”
“Damn…” Monica recoiled. “This girl’s a savage.”
“We’re all savages deep down,” Mimi replied, rolled over onto her tummy for a maximum cleavage show, then got up and went to her desk to pick up the bear-bat, holding it in front of her with both hands. “Do you like Barry?”
“He’s got a name?” I asked with a surprised chuckle.
“Of course he has a name!” Mimi giggled as she walked closer. “He’s also a lie detector, so if you don’t tell the truth, he’ll get angry.”
“The bitch is hearing voices…” Monica murmured through clenched teeth and a nervous grimace.
Mimi handed me the plushie with an expectant smile, then asked, “Wanna see?”
I stared into the face of the bear-bat as a strange alertness came over me and the hairs on my arms rose on end.
This plushie was absolutely adorable, but the longer I stared into its beady pink eyes, the more I could’t help but feel an implicit sense of danger.
For a brief moment, I believed that Barry was alive. And then I snapped out of it with a quick head shake and handed it back.
“Cute stuffie,” was all I said. “Kinda creepy, though.”
Mimi stroked the top of Barry’s head and set him back down on the desk, then hopped up to sit on it with a jiggle of her bra-less boobs. “Okay, I guess I can help—but I don’t wanna go all the way out to hang out with people I don’t know in some big house with my decor. We can have it here.”
Cassie turned her head askew. “Do what here?”
Mimi clapped her hands together. “It’s perfect! Small, cozy, intimate, and I don’t have to ask for a ride home—I can just kick a bitch out.”
I raised my eyebrow. “Are you suggesting…?”
“Mmm hmm! For one night only,” Mimi happily replied as she performed a grand sweep before her with a performative bow, then whipped her head back up to flip her short ponytail back over her head to look at me. “We can have the party here, at my place…”