The Ram (23 page)

The dream is already slipping his mind, but he does remember he was having sex with Nell and he vows again to make another move tonight. Sev can be distracted and Nell wooed. He looks at his foot again, at the unfinished tattoo. That, too, will be remedied this evening.

Riley feels like he has a handle on life this midmorning Sunday. He shoots his arms straight into the air, clenches his fists at nothing but holds on tightly, until his nails put little crescent moons into his flesh.

70 Peach

The bouncer takes her money and tells her she looks extra nice this evening. Peach looks down the length of her red dress, the same one she wore to dinner with Linx weeks ago. The yielding fabric hugs the sides of her breasts and runs over the slight curve of her hips and ass. She smiles at the man and walks into the din and dim lights of Blaze Lounge, a black clutch bag tucked under her arm. Her eyes meter the actions of the room and find Sev and Nell drinking at the bar.

Peach smoothes out her dress, careful not to step on the hem with her heels. She feels trepidation at moving toward the couple. She knows she must, but all her careful planning, all her machinations as to how to get Nell away from Sev suddenly seem childish and uncouth.

There is only one thing she knows she must do. All other means and options are mutable; Peach realizes she might need to get creative and work with the way events unfold.

It’s Nell who sees Peach and waves at her, motions for her to come to the bar and join the duo. Peach grins, pinching up and in at the fabric at her waist so she might walk more smoothly. The attire is sleeveless so her arms are freezing but the material is synthetic, so the core of her body is deprived of airflow, sweat beading up and sandwiching itself between her skin and the gown.

When she reaches the two, they pull a stool around from the bar and place it between their seats. Sev winks at Peach and Nell slides off her perch and rummages around in a large canvas bag at her feet. She flings her arm into the air and a length of fabric follows. It’s Peach’s fleece jacket.

“Here,” she says and pushes it into Peach’s hands. The dancer’s eyes are glassy, her face relaxed. Peach wonders how long the couple has been at the booze.

She can smell that the jacket hasn’t been washed, still impregnated with the stink of old tobacco. “Thanks for bringing it to me,” she says and shimmies onto the stool, tosses the jacket to the brass foot rest below and places her clutch in her lap.

“What are you drinking? Nell’s shift is over for the night and you’re going to go home with us.” Sev waves over a petite bartender and waits for Peach’s drink order.

“I’ll have what you’re drinking,” she says and looks at the brown liquid in tall glasses in front of each of them. She has no intention to drink at all and will have to find a way to fake sipping at the alcohol. As to the comment about going home with the pair, she decides to stay mute for now.

“Dirty Aussie,” Nell says and touches a length of some of Peach’s hair.

“Is that the name of the drink?” Peach asks, her skin tingling from Nell’s caresses.

“No,” Sev laughs, “she’s talking about me. She loves me even though I’m a bludger.” Then the dancer and the poet give into their mirth, laugh heartily for a few minutes and Peach knows they’re probably too drunk to notice she won’t be drinking.

The bartender sets the drink on a bar napkin in front of Peach and Sev swiftly lifts the glass off the napkin and snatches it away, adding it to a pile of them to be inked with his poems. He turns his legs in toward Peach and she can feel Nell do the same thing. Their attention makes her squirm a bit, think about her options on running away. Their energy presses at her and she feels like the filling of a sandwich, ready to go spilling out the sides.

Nell’s outfit is comprised of a tube top in bright green and sequined boy shorts in black. Her shoes have been kicked off onto the floor and she lets her painted toes dangle from the stool. She’s curled her hair into tight ringlets and a tube of bangles runs up her left arm.

“I like your dress,” she tells Peach and leans in to rub at the fabric. “The color really suits you.”

Sev cuts off Peach’s reply. “It suits the carpet in our bedroom even better.”

And this gets the partners to lock eyes, their game of lust and a potential threesome more exciting to play with one another than the actual act might be. Peach clicks the plastic knobs open on her clutch and palms a bottle in her hand. She closes her fist around the orange plastic and decides to change the subject.

“So who’s the best dancer here, Nell?” Peach says and swivels around on her stool to look at the stage. Two women dance on the raised dais. One has skin the color of tawny sand. The other has three piercings in her belly button.

When Sev and Nell turn to look at the stage, Peach does her best to unscrew the cap on the bottle while the pair vocalize unkind criticisms of the strippers doing their best. Her hands shake and her fingers do sloppy work. She gets the top off one side only and she fumbles the container. She catches it in time, preventing the contents from spilling on the floor.

She turns her body slightly back to the stage and agrees blindly to what they’ve said and then points out the kinds of shoes the girls are wearing, which sets Sev off on a diatribe about women’s fashion, aristocracy and deception.

“It’s cold in here,” Peach says and reaches down for the returned jacket. With her body dipped under the bar, she opens the bottle completely and pours out the contents into her palm. She pulls the fleece up to her lap and rests her closed fist in its folds, white powder held in her grasp.

Her throat is so tight she must force a swallow. She looks around the room and while Sev and Nell are still distracted, she drops half of the white powder into Nell’s drink and the other half into Sev’s. She has no idea how much of the crushed Ambien she’s given them. But as the tasteless, ground-up sleeping pills sink down into the dark liquid of their glasses, Peach knows there is no going back.

She dusts her hands together to send the remains of the powder to the floor and reminds herself not to rub her fingers on her mouth or into her eyes. After tonight, she’ll never want to go back.

Peach touches Nell on the shoulder, then brushes Sev’s thigh, and points to their drinks. “So I’m actually new to drinking. I’ve had wine once but hard liquor? I don’t know if I will be able to stomach it. I’ve seen people pound drinks, of course. Do you mind showing me how to get it down in one go so I don’t gag on the taste?”

The poet picks up his booze and puts a hand on Peach’s thigh. “New to strip clubs. New to alcohol. The enchantress has led a monastic life all these years.” Then he and Nell slip the liquid down their throats, mouths open wide like fledglings await a meal, and drop their spent glasses back to the bar.

“I guess it’s never too late for you to catch up and be naughty. Before the night’s done you’ll be showing us your fanny,” Sev says as he wipes his mouth with the edge of a napkin already penned with a poem. Peach can see the words “serpentine” and “quixotic” as he blots his lips before returning the napkin to a soft stack of written treasures.

Laying her hand over his, Peach turns to look at Nell’s lips and then, her eyes. She only holds contact briefly before switching her gaze to the drink in front of her. The brown liquid dallies around chucks of sharp ice and the pink and blue lights of the stage hit the glass. Other shots of colored light zip across the plane of the dark wood bar.

“I thought it time to start,” Peach says.

71 Riley

He doesn’t ask Walker to join him at Blaze Lounge tonight. He senses his friend is tired of Riley’s overdependence on him since the accident. And besides, Riley has his tattoo appointment later in the evening and has decided to do it alone. Unless, of course, Nell is along for the ride. And Riley has every intention of making that potential a fantastic reality.

He gets past the doorman without an issue, showing him his ID while keeping his face pointed down so the bouncer can’t smell the whisky on his breath. He can’t afford to lose entry to the club because he’s perceived as being too hammered. And while he shouldn’t have driven after polishing off a half of a fifth at home, fun, free and wild Riley doesn’t worry about things like DUIs and criminal records. He didn’t worry before. He wouldn’t now.

Once his eyes adjust to the lack of light in the club, Riley immediately sees Nell at the bar with her boyfriend and another woman whom he doesn’t recognize. He smirks, emboldened by the booze and a level of horniness he hasn’t felt since getting his toes smashed, and he moves to the little group.

The woman he doesn’t know catches a glimpse of him coming and turns her back to him. Sev, the belligerent poet, stands to head Riley off, but stumbles a bit and catches himself on his bar stool. It’s Nell’s response that shocks Riley. Having always given him the cold shoulder and looks of unveiled disgust, tonight she stands too upon his arrival, nearly as wobbly as her partner, and reaches out to Riley.

He steps into her embrace and she twines her arms around him and takes a deep sniff of his neck. “You smell good,” she says. She sways a bit and Riley has to move his injured foot out of the way of her bare feet.

“Thanks, sweetie,” he says and then gently pries her hands away from him. Sev is glaring at him when he can get his eyes to focus for longer than a second on a single point of interest. Riley cocks his head at their drunken behavior. They’re so inebriated he wonders if they’ve taken a narcotic or opiate along with their alcohol.

Sev speaks, his words slurred and slow. “What is it you’re wearing, mate? There was a koala bear in my grandmother’s backyard in Queensland. It would scream at other koalas. Scream!”

Riley is tipsy but even he knows what the poet is saying is off base and irrelevant. Nell sways in front of Riley, so close to him the tips of her breasts rub at his shirt. He resists the urge to reach up and fondle the stripper in front of her boyfriend. But with the way the poet is acting, he’s not sure the man would even notice, and if he did notice, even care in his altered state.

The woman with the long blond hair keeps her face away from Riley but reaches out a hand to steady Nell, holding her lightly at the hip bone. Sev puts both hands on the stool and puffs out his chest.

“Do you know those koalas are filthy little beasts? They pass chlamydia to one another. Their genitals are covered in STDs and they fuck one another while high on eucalyptus leaves.”

Nell hiccoughs. “I need to pee.”

And that’s when Sev covers the distance between he and Riley, knocking the blond’s shoulder hard as he passes and pushing Nell back into the woman’s lap. Riley smells cigarette smoke in the man’s hair and watches as a vein in his neck expands and beats in time with his heart. Though Riley expects the poet’s heart to pump wildly with anger, the muscle in his chest must be working lethargically. The man has several inches, a hundred pounds on Riley.

“You’re trying to pass your filthy dick to my girl,” Sev sprays a bit of spit onto Riley’s face.

Riley tightens his hands, ready for a brawl. He won’t back down now. He’ll have Nell tonight and his life will be the better for it.

“Yes,” he responds, “and she’ll take it tonight.”

Instead of the punch Riley expects, or a yell of rage, Sev spurts out a laugh, then holds his lips closed with his fingers to try and contain himself. His legs fold under him and he sits crossed-legged on the floor, hand grasping the ankle of Riley’s left leg as he chuckles.

Riley picks up his leg and tries to shake him off but the man’s grip is steely. He hopes the poet won’t think to smash a fist into his wounded foot. After a moment, he decides to stay still and let the man hold him. He doesn’t feel trapped. He can detach, escape at any time.

72 Peach

The dancer is rocking around on her sequin-covered ass, pressing into Peach’s lap and Peach whispers into her ear, cautious to not let the man named Riley see too much of her face. She hadn’t planned on him being at the club, but it’s the first chink in her plot for this evening. She knew there were many potential challenges ahead of her and after slipping Sev and Nell the Ambien, her actions would be at the whim of the effects of the sleep aid and the alcohol. She didn’t foresee having to deal with competition tonight for Nell’s attention. She reminds herself to be flexible, to take whatever path leads her to her one immovable goal.

“Let’s get you to the bathroom. Put some cool water on your face,” she says and then stands up, lifting her weight and the dancer’s as well. Peach’s arms wrap around the woman to prevent her from slumping to the floor. The woman’s legs are flaccid and Peach has to encourage her to stiffen her joints by running the back of her hands along the back of Nell’s knees.

Riley is locked to the floor by a giggling Sev and tries his best not to look concerned about the odd scene. His eyes meander about the bar and he plays it cool. But she can see from the slight wobble in his torso, he’s far from sober as well. Peach uses the time to turn Nell’s body toward the back of the club and the hallway to the bathroom.

As she maneuvers the woman through the tables, men sling comments at them and one reaches out a few fingers to pinch Nell’s behind. He misses though, and catches her upper thigh. But the woman doesn’t have the presence of mind to stop and protest or slap at the man. The pair moves forward, guided by the pressure and direction of Peach.

When they get to the bathroom, Peach is happy to find it vacant and she pushes open the door and then escorts Nell inside. Once in, she depresses the little circular locking mechanism to shut them inside and then lets Nell go, free to stumble around the one room with its open toilet and free-standing sink. The stripper goes to the toilet and pulls down her boy shorts before squatting on the bowl. Peach turns away and pretends to check her lip gloss in the mirror.

“That Riley is quite the asshole, right?” she asks the dancer. When she doesn’t get a response she ventures a look at Nell on the toilet and finds her asleep, shorts around her lower thighs with her chin cupped in her hands.