butter cake

The fee is paid until the end of the month, and there was still a week to go. He thought this as he entered the Golf Bar Restaurant. Outside, the green, which he rarely frequented, served as a perfect backdrop. Since it wasn’t the weekend, there was no brunch, but it was already past 10AM, so he was going to order a stout and settle at one of the tables facing the green.

He was, more or less, a third of the way through his beer when she arrived, announcing herself with the intense citrus of her perfume. She was dressed in black satin, gloves up to her elbows, lips painted the colour of fresh arterial blood, all highlighting the paleness of her skin. Fatima. Fatima, imagine. His family doctor was called Fatima; the woman who sold him magazines and tobacco was also called Fatima. It’s a name of peace, of bread and butter, of afternoon strolls. And there she was, a vision of sin. Calling her Fatima was like calling a Doberman trained to kill “butter cake.”

He stood up, offering her the chair opposite him.

“Don’t bother,” said Fatima, sitting down with the elegance of someone who knows she’s being watched.

“What can I offer you?”

The grimace of Fatima’s smile would make the Mona Lisa envious. “Nothing, except a little of your time and your signature,” she replied, sliding a contract across the table as if it were a death sentence.

He took a sip of stout, looked into her eyes, feline, an intense green, and his gaze descended toward the paper, lingering conspicuously on Fatima’s cleavage.

“Be a big man, sign, and with that little signature you’ll own it… or I’ll own you,” she said, extending a pen to him with the delicacy of someone pointing a gun.

He accepted the pen and signed, thinking, “You have the most expensive cleavage I have ever set eyes on.”