You Thought You Knew Someone

20250405

Prompt from DailyPrompt.com

Patrick stared unseeing at his half-drunk margarita. Perhaps he should be looking past it to the row of empty glasses and wondering if he’d imagined what Josh said, or if the other man had made some “hilarious at the drunken time” joke. But he seemed serious.
“You what?” Was all Pat managed.
Josh looked away across the ocean. His voice calm and quiet. Appropriate to where the conversation started - his terminal diagnosis. But utterly bewildering after the bombshell he’d dropped seconds before. “What matters is that you don’t owe me anything. I gave you that money to get the whole mess off my conscience. I thought that, I don’t know, that maybe it redeemed the decisions I’d made if a bunch of kids could get a leg up from it.”
“I - I… you’re an assassin?”
Josh’s lip curled into the shell of a smile. “A word like that sounds too damn noble. No, I was a murderer for hire. Was. I haven’t been lying to you, I didn’t…” He shifted in his seat. “I left all that behind the night my girlfriend’s head got blown open in front of me. Got onto the train, sat there dazed, and then you asked if I was alright.”
“Yeah. I remember.”
He’d assumed the poor guy was an addict, or maybe fleeing a bad situation and in shock. Which apparently had been correct, but to think that mere hours before…!
“You tell me all about your charity and the work you do, and it was like a… an epiphany? A loophole?” Josh shook his head. “I felt like if I just latched onto a good person like you hard enough I could buy my way out of the hell was in. I should’ve been grieving, and I think I was, but what I remember clearest is the fear. I didn’t want to die like that. I wanted the rest of my life.”
He gave a bitter laugh. “And now I find out I’ve got maybe three years. Might as well have stuck with the game. Or gone to prison. Go out with a bang. Y’know?”
Pat slowly set his glass down on the table between them.
What could you say in this situation? What should he do? If that had all been ‘left behind’ just a year ago it was still relevant, right? Cases might be open. Families were grieving.
Trying to hold that in his mind, in the place he normally held all the good he’d seen come out of that two million dollars, made the world pitch and waver.
“So. Yeah. I don’t want a fundraiser. Please.” Josh’s voice was sinking and faltering. Almost drowned by the waves. “Just… let me go quietly. Back to her. Where I belong.”

Prompt was “Over margaritas on the beach, two friends have a life-altering conversation.”