Page 63 of Shadowman

“First of all, Joy would obviously understand how to read it, and then she would castrate you.” I grumble-laugh. “Second of all, there isn’t really a ‘twat waffle’ in Korean. It’s more like… vagina pancake.”

Ren cackles out loud. “Oh myGod!Please, B! I’mbeggingyou—”

He goes quiet when Joy stomps over, plopping down next to Luthor. He’s literally holding his lips together with his fingers. It’s killing me.

“Alright. It’s done,” she says to Luthor, unaware of the ridiculous conversation we were just having, involving Ren’s promise to tattoo her in exchange for helping Luthor get his computer parts.

Luthor is instantly bouncing. “Oh goodie oh goodie oh goodie! Thank you, Joyful!”

“Yea, yea,” she sighs. “If anyone asks where you got it, what do you say?”

“A spaceship landed, and it—”

“Yea, whatever, I don’t care.” She grunts. “Just not from me.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Luthor nods.

Shaking her head, she grumbles under her breath. “Not sure when I became UPS in this bitch, but whatever…” She peeks at Ren. “You owe me some ink.”

Ren beams. “You got it, vagina pancake.”

Joy lifts a brow, suspiciously unamused, while the four of us try to disguise our laughter.

Her face turns slowly from Ren to Luthor. “Do I wanna know?”

Luthor just shakes his head.

Thailand is good for me.

Well, notgood, but you know…

Bangkok is bustling with action from sunup to sundown, and I’m almost certain their main cultural export is sadness.

It’s not a bad thing. I think the people who live here being overly familiar with the clandestine, the perverse and the deceitful, makes it one of the few trulygenuineplaces in the world. Granted, I haven’t been to many places, but in terms of cities, I like the ones that wear their grit and grime on theoutside, for all to see.

London’s not like that. On the outside, it pretends to be prim and proper. But there’s a festering underbelly, just like everywhere else. The hypocrisy makes my eye twitch.

That’s not to say I blame London for all of my problems growing up, but I certainly associate it with many of my youthful hardships. I do miss things about it from time to time… Like how lively the city gets in summer.A good Yorkshire pudding.

Especially being here, in Bangkok, a place so inherently different—it’s liable to make your head spin if you visit here from somewhere like America or England.

Despite missing some of the comforts of the States, Thailand is the perfect place for me to continue living the hedonistic lifestyle to which I’ve grown accustomed. I can get by pickpocketing, as if I’m twelve years old again—back to my roots!—there’s heroin on every street corner, and strange, filthy sex is a staple.

In short, I’m living my best destructive-boy life down here, and I couldn’t ask for more in terms of a breakaway from the path ofstraight and narrowI was attempting to follow in Atlanta.

I miss Alice. Of course I do. I think about her every day.

But the more I sink into the perversions and debauchery of my current lifestyle, the more I realize we weren’t meant to be together. She was just another mask for me to wear… A beautiful one, yes. But my biggest mistake was not listening to my gut.

I always knew she was too good for me—I was right.And she paid the ultimate price from getting mixed up with someone as wholly tragic as yours truly.

Am I certain that Andres wouldn’t have killed her one way or another if I’d never come along?No.But the course laid out by the universe is a mysterious and melancholy one. Something about me slithering into Alice’s life disrupted her cosmic flow. Who knows, it could even be a twin thing… My malediction muddied the waters between Alice and Andres. As soon as I started fucking around with them, they both wound up dead.

I’m fine swallowing all the blame. It might even be mypurpose.

Some more evil to balance out the world’s good… Yummy.

Anyway, none of that matters anymore. Because I’ve been living in Thailand for about three weeks, and every day, I move further and further from the person I was trying like hell to be, and back to who Iam.