A Fire Between the Seats

Story Submitted by Walter:

It was a Saturday night, I didn't have anything going on, and so I messaged three women on an online site to see if any of them wanted to hang out, no strings.  Coffee and a talk, that's it.

Melody wrote back first and said that she'd be up for something.  We spent about an hour getting to know each other.  What stuck out about her was that she was a painter who saw a therapist twice a week.  I didn't ask her why she needed such frequent therapy, but I was curious.

She said that she was in walking distance of a cafe.  I drove there and we went inside.

While there, she showed me pictures on her phone of some of her artwork.  There were portraits and landscapes, and they were actually pretty good.  So many times, people call themselves "painters," when all they do is splash paint on a canvas or draw shapes next to each other.  Watch me scribble a spiral on a piece of notebook paper and call it "symbolic for the triumph of the human spirit."  How much would you pay for it?  That's what I thought.

I digress.  Melody sucked down three cups of coffee and was becoming jittery.  I advised her to cut herself off, but she demanded that we go out to find marshmallows.

We went to an all-night store, bought a pack of jet-puffed marshmallows, climbed back into my car, and I tore into them.

"What are you doing?" she screeched, "We need to roast 'em."

She took a matchbook out of her coat and lit one.  She pointed to the marshmallow bag and said, "Hold one up."

I held it and she toasted it with her match, right there in the car.

Then, she brought the match near my skin and said, "Whoops!"

She was kidding around (I hope) but I jerked my hand away and she dropped the match between the seats.

"Is it out?" I demanded.

She looked between the seats and asked me if I had any water.  I jumped out of the car and ran inside the store to grab a bottle.

When I came back out, she was dropping more lit matches between the seats.

To put it nicely, I screamed at her to stop, and I doused water all over the seating areas of my car.

As for her, she was laughing the whole time.  She opened her match book with a frown.  "Out of matches," she said.

I kicked her out of my car and drove home.  We weren't too far from the coffee shop, so I'm sure that she didn't have a bad walk.