By Megan Catana

The man reminds Annie of the guys at her oil change place. His hair is greasy and too long on the top. She continues scrolling through the pictures on his dating profile. In all of them, his face has a hardness, a flickering smirk that’s almost a dare. In one of them, he’s shirtless, revealing a boar tattoo on each pec, done with an amateur’s crude hand, perhaps his own in front of the mirror.

When consulted, her best friend snorts and says, “I’m sure he has some good prison stories.”

Annie responds to his message.

Their first meeting is in a crowded open air market. They stroll the rows of stalls selling herbs and flowers and honey, and he takes her hand. The intimacy of this act and his perfect, easy confidence startle her. Later, as they sit yanking apart a rack of ribs, his fingers lightly brush the scar gleaming on her forearm.

“What’s this?” he asks.

“I hate it.” She hastily tugs down her sleeve. “It’s so ugly.”

He raises her arm to his mouth and kisses the scar.

Their second meeting is dinner. Afterward, he pins her against the restaurant’s exterior and reaches into her jeans. After a moment of deft work which hardly grazes her skin and leaves the button and zipper undisturbed, his hands emerge. One holds a Swiss Army knife, the other her black cotton thong. He snaps the knife shut, shoves the severed underwear into his pocket, and smiles like a wolf.

He keeps changing. She’s always disoriented. When he has his two-year-old son, Annie watches from a park bench and marvels at his bounding exuberance. Other times, she arrives at his apartment to find him in such abject depths that he cannot be cajoled to the surface.

His ever-present gun—in his waistband when they go out, on his nightstand, on his coffee table—makes them an uneasy trio. When Annie asks him about it, he says he needed one once and didn’t have one. He won’t make that mistake again.

He introduces her to his friendly, normal sister. He asks to come to Annie’s family barbeque, thoroughly charming everyone in attendance. Then he talks about friends she never meets, former bandmates from his heyday, who have master/slave relationships with their girlfriends. Our drummer, he tells her, left his girlfriend tied up in his closet for days while we went out on the road.

Annie shakes her head slowly, drawing her legs close. “I can’t…imagine that.”

“Don’t worry,” he assures her. “She’s totally into it.”

They’re flopped on opposite ends of his couch, knees and calves touching. She’s about to inquire about the closet slave’s bathroom problem when something in his long gaze stops her. Oh, my god. He’s going to tell me he loves me.

He backhands her.

Her hand flies to her flaming cheek. He’s still with anticipation, and she bursts into ugly, outraged tears. His face falls. He mumbles, as she storms out, that it won’t happen again.

She’s almost finished. She should have been weeks ago, when she stopped telling her friends anything honest. But she’s waiting for the spectacular finality, which she senses near at hand.

A week later, they settle in at a dive bar where his band used to play. He knows the bartender, another tiresome Betty Page lookalike, and the glum local music writer who occupies the stool next to Annie’s. He joins her for cigarettes out on the sidewalk and bemoans the undeserved fame of Kid Rock.

Later, when things are much blurrier, a bulky fifty-something blonde who’s been parked at the nearest table with friends hauls Annie to the cramped bathroom. She locks the door, demanding, “Are you okay?” She’s Southern.

“I’m fine,” Annie tells her, unsure what they’re talking about, but transfixed by the woman’s hands. Rings glitter on every finger, their nails shining fuchsia daggers that are starting to curve.

The woman says, waving her remarkable hands for emphasis, that she’s been watching them. She doesn’t care for the way he talks to Annie, the way his hands keep finding their way to her throat.

Annie dismisses her politely and frees herself from the bathroom.

On the way back to his apartment, his barreling, swerving truck makes her stomach lurch and roll. He blares the radio. Annie presses herself into the passenger seat and closes her eyes.

A thunderous boom, like a firecracker, rips through the cab.

Annie’s eyes fly open, and she shrieks.

They screech to a halt on the shoulder of the freeway. Annie sits shaking as he bends down to examine his floorboard. The center of it showcases one perfectly round bullet hole.

After a few moments of stunned stillness, he fires up the truck and eases it back onto the road.

Annie begins to blubber. “Did your gun go off in a moving car?” Question. “Your gun went off in a moving car.” Statement. Her voice and face are thick with snot. “Oh, my god. Oh, my god. Oh, my god.”

His eyes scan the road, his hands whitely clutch the steering wheel, and his soft, dazed voice loops around and around: “I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Head hammering, she tries to sleep next to him for a few hours. Then she silently extracts herself from the tangle of blankets and slips out of the apartment, which feels like a crime scene. She makes the hour drive home and crawls into her own bed.

A day later, she texts, “I can’t.”

His silence signifies his understanding. And only two days later, when the haze begins to dissipate, does it occur to her to consider why he had removed the gun from the truck’s center console as he drove, why he had held it in his lap as she sat beside him, and why he had it cocked.