Miles had been right—this nightclub was definitely going to make a killing.
“Jesus, Mary, and fucking Joseph.”
The previous night had been one epic bacchanalia: she remembered booze (pouring it, mostly), dancing, more booze (drinking it, this time), more dancing—but then her memories were fuzzy, indistinct, veiled by the mother of all hangovers and the ache of muscles that she didn’t even know she’d had. I was dancing on the bar? Wait—was that really me? She remembered thinking how awesome the full tip-jar was, so full that the men involved but then her memories of the night turned dark. What she remembered was vague, fuzzy—not the least because she had the mother of all hangovers. She didn’t quite remember falling asleep in booth, but she did remember Miles easing her away from the bar.
“Cerise, you okay?”
She looked up and saw Jaxon standing over her, his eyes studiously averted, a towel dangling from his hand. That was when she realized that she was nearly-naked: her skirt had hiked itself above her waist and the sequined top had gone missing.
“What the—” she gasped, grabbing the towel that he’d been holding out to her and wrapping it around himself.
“You were amazing,” he said, quietly, handing her a glass of some kind of juice.
She gulped it down. “Who did—”
He pressed his lips together, and looked up. Miles, who’d been mopping up and sweeping the floor, looked over at them, and blushed. “You did,” Jaxon said.
“I didn’t,” she cried. “I couldn’t have. I ain’t a stripper.”
Jaxon and Miles shared an apprehensive look between them. The only sound was Miles, mopping and sweeping.
Had she—
Take it off, take it off!
Kiss her!
And then the memories of the night came back in a flood of impressions—the nonstop requests for drinks; she was moving back and forth, shaking this, mixing that; the DJ laid down four tracks, getting the crowd going; a guy who’d looked vaguely familiar ordering; conversations with the guy who’d looked vaguely familiar revealed that they’d gone to school together—Ben Harmon. He looked good, now—a little underdressed for a club—but even through his baggy clothes and work boots she could tell that he’d lost the bit of pudge he used to carry. She found herself wondering whether it was appropriate to ask if he was taken.
Get out! You were in my class?!
Hell, yeah! Remember those pep rallies?
Go Wildcats!
Then her remembrance took a leap to midnight: the nightclub kicked into third gear. It was the hour of drinking games—she filled shot glass after shot glass. They ran out of vodka. “Just use whatever you’ve got,” Jaxon had said. “They’re too drunk to notice or care.”
And then for some reason she was doing shots, too. The shots made her feel the thoomp-thoomp of the bass and her body began dancing, and then Ben got behind the bar with her and put his hands around her waist, which was fine—and then slipped his hand up her skirt, but she was drunk enough to think that was funny.
Jaxon was right—she had taken off her own top, staring into Ben’s eyes all the while, feeling more than hearing the wild exhilarated whoops of delight coming from the men who’d gathered around. Jaxon was behind her, his hand pushing her skirt up to her waist as they twisted and ground against each other, while Ben pressed his lips against her throat and began squeezing her breasts in his hands, sending thrilling vibrations straight into her pussy, which was so hot and wet she was drenching Jaxon’s hand as he slid his fingers in and out, in and out.
“You were there,” she gasped now, staring at Jaxon. “You were—”
Somehow a woman had worked her way past the bar and now they were kissing and her delicate fingers were gentle against the soft flesh between her legs. Kiss her! And the three of them bent her backwards on top of the bar and opened her to their world, while she felt the woman’s soft lips against her pussy—
And that had been the end of her memories of that night. Cerise gasped—the woman had been Jaxon’s ex. This is how to do a woman properly, since you ain’t never figured that out yourself. Had she imagined hearing those words, or had someone actually said them to her? “What were you thinking?” she demanded, now. The headache was beginning to abate, but right now she preferred the pain of the hangover to any more memories from the night before.
“I wasn’t,” Jaxon muttered sullenly. “But it was Miles’s idea. We just never thought you was—”
“You find yourself another bartender,” she said, standing up and pulling her skirt down. “I’m going home. I’m taking a fucking shower. And I ain’t never working the bar here again.”
Miles came to see her late that evening but he left without convincing her to come back and keep the bar. “Look,” he’d said. “I understand that you’re a bit shaken by what happened last night but we need you otherwise the bar fails.”
“I got my barkeeping license two months ago,” she had snapped, as she slammed the door in his face. “Go find someone on Craigslist.”
Cerise was furious—she went to the gym late that night and ran on the treadmill until she could hardly stand, completely spent, because the urge to smash things against the walls of her apartment was overwhelming. How fucking dare they, she thought, as she showered. At least her anger was articulate now, instead of wave after wave of wordless fury and hate that made her want to destroy everything a la the Hulk. She took a turn or two at the punching bag, even—something that drew stares from the usual patrons. She thought about all of the horrible ways to die that she’d seen on TV, wondering which method to use on which brother—not that she was seriously entertaining the thought of killing them, but simply because her fury at them demanded that they suffer, even if it was all just in her head. How could they let me do those things? Why did they let me do those things? What were they thinking?
But eventually, sanity returned. By Sunday afternoon she’d accepted that what had been done was done, and now all she could do was move on with her life—without her stepbrothers. Being pissed off at them didn’t pay the rent or put food on the table, and when she checked her bank accounts she realized that while she might scrape by for another 30 days—if she ate ramen noodles for dinner every night like she had in college, if she stopped buying meat, if she was careful about not going over the limits with her phone—she was going to need another job, and fast.
She spent the rest of her weekend at the partition between her apartment’s kitchen and living room, which doubled as a breakfast bar and dining area. She used it as her desk—the rest of her one-bedroom didn’t have the space required for a good office setup, and it wasn’t as if she ate much at home, anyway. She hit up every job posting and fired off a volley of letters and resumes, hoping that her resume would catch the attention of someone, somewhere. It was probably a good thing that she wasn’t independently wealthy—her job hunt kept her too busy to obsess about ways to get back at Miles and Jaxon, but that didn’t mean her worries about the videos leaking had abated.
Thank God for little mercies. By Wednesday she was starting to feel a little optimistic; the reviewers who had been there either left before things got insanely crazy, or else they’d chosen not to write about it. The videos that did pop up were too shaky (thank God for strong liquor) to make much out besides that there was someone naked on top of the bar, but most of them forgot to focus and the ones that did weren’t interested in her face. And that at least nobody had thought to ask her for her name—not that she could remember, anyway. Cerise was an uncommon-enough name that doing a search for her would be easy—and if there was a video tagged with her name on it, she’d never be able to find another job in her life.
But by Friday she was starting to feel hopeful: nothing scandalous was coming up on Google searches for her name, and she’d even gotten a few replies from the companies that she’d applied to. And even though she hadn’t spoken to either Jaxon or Miles since that awful morning after the opening, they kept their promise to her-a third share of the profits—all the same. A week of deleting voicemails and ignoring text messages and blocking calls hadn’t released them from the contract they’d signed, and there was a nice fat three grand deposited into her account, with a digital memo to please, please, please come back and work for them. “Guy’s all right, but he don’t got that thing you do,” the little line concluded.
You mean he don’t got no tits, she thought sourly, as she debated whether to accept the money or not. Her job hunt was going well—she’d sent out fifty job applications by now and had already made arrangements to do her first few interviews for the following week. It wasn’t unreasonable to suppose that she’d make it all right without them, but three-thousand dollars—and that was just her share, too—after being open for exactly one week was tempting.
A girl needs to eat.
A girl needs to know that there are things that matter more than money. Still, there was no getting around the fact that dignity didn’t pay the bills.