freewrite #1, vignette #2

She had dreamt the night before of an old lover, one of the ones who said they loved her and meant it. His wife had left recently, or so the social pages said; but why she dreamt about him over the others was a mystery the whore was not interested in. Still, the dream clung to her lips and breasts all day, and it seemed like her johns noticed it too, because they seemed almost afraid of her. She didn't know why.

She told Hairy Back about the dream while he smoked a second cigarette. He kicked his heels against the table legs for a while before looking over.

"Let me get this straight. Your old lover came to you as a john."

"Yes."

"But didn't want sex."

"No."

"But then decided he did."

"Yes."

"Well, did he get it?"

The question was obscene, and for a moment the whore forget she was a whore. But then she remembered. "Not in the dream. He kissed me though."

"He kissed you. Curious," Hairy Back grunted.

He wanted her to continue, she knew, and because it was Hairy Back she did. "He said he'd lost God and his wife, and he wanted to ease himself into the deep pool of sin."

He snorted. "Was he always so melodramatically metaphoric?"

"Yes."

"Forget him, lady. He may have lost God, but that sort always finds It again in the end."

"In the dream--"

He waited. "Go on."

"Well. He called me a compromise. I had once been his Great Love and now I would be his Eve."

"He certainly does have a flair for the poetic."

"Hairy Back."

"Forgive me, lady."

She shrugged one shoulder at him, and he nodded. "Forget him, lady. That sort always rediscovers God in the end. They're bad news for our sort."

"Our sort?"

He took a long drag. "Those caught somewhere between drowning in the riptide and swimming with the current."