Page 66 of Handful

“Yeah.”

She drank some of the whiskey and looked at the empty room for a while, the stages dark, the chairs up on the tables where the prospects had stacked them.

“You know what the worst ones are?” she said. “Everybody thinks it’s the Renners. The grabbers. It’s not. A grabber I can handle, I’ve been handling grabbers since I was nineteen, you see the hand coming a mile off.” She let that sit. “It’s the mouths. The ones who never touch you, never break a single rule. They talk about me like I can’t hear them. They look at my tits, they talk to my tits, they’re still looking at my tits when I answer their questions.”

She turned her head a little, like she was watching it happen on the far side of the room. “I can respect a man who comes in to look. Admires the view, tips well, goes home to his wife. That’s the deal, that’s what the chair’s for, I’ve got no problem with him. It’s the one who comes in every Friday and spends the whole night telling his buddy how he’d love to bend the whore with the big tits over the stage and then finish on her face. Loud enough that I hear it. Smiling at me while he says it, like I’m in on it.” She looked at me. “I take my clothes off to pay rent. That’s all I do.”

I sat there with my soda water and didn’t say anything.

What she was describing — a man narrating what he’d do to her while she stood there and smiled through it — that I’d never done. But I wasn’t going to sit there and play clean. I’d rated a woman to a brother across a bar and not much cared if she heard me. Made a server at Austen’s place so uncomfortable she went and got the boss — back before I knew the boss was going to turn out to be the woman of my dreams. My mouth had been careless plenty but I’d never been that.

“Say what you want about me,” I said finally. “Most of it’ll be fair. I’ve been free with my hands — never where they weren’t wanted, but free, I’ll cop to that. And I’ve run my mouth about a woman to a brother when I should’ve kept it shut.” I held her eyes. “But not the way you just said. I never once set out to make a woman feel the way those men set out to make you feel.”

Lex made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “No. I don’t expect you have.”

She looked me over like she was pricing me out. “I’ll bet women throw themselves at you. I’ll bet that cut does half the work before you open your mouth. And maybe you take a little advantage of that — course you do, the edge it buys you, why wouldn’t you. But every one of them walked in knowing exactly what you were. They came looking for a night of something they weren’t getting elsewhere, hoping you’d give them a taste of it, and I’d put money you gave them plenty. They went home satisfied and got on with their lives.” She lifted a shoulder. “That ain’t the same thing, honey. A grown woman who wanted you and got what she came for isn’t some stranger up on a stage while you tell your buddy what you’d do to her and how much she’d thank you for it.”

“You don’t know the half of how I —”

“I know the kind, honey. I know every kind there is.” She wasn’t unkind about it. “But I’ll say this for you. You sit in an empty bar at two in the morning weighing your own moves, putting yourself on trial for them. That takes something up top most men haven’t got. So quit drowning in it. You did right tonight. Leave it there.”

She held my eyes a moment longer than she had to, and what was in them was respect — plain, and for me, not for the boss who’d barred Renner.

“Tomorrow,” she said, standing, pulling her coat straight, “you treat me exactly the same as today. You don’t get gentle with me because Renner got handsy and we had a nice talk. You go soft on me now and I’ll know tonight was about you.” She finished the whiskey. “Same as always. That’s how I’ll know it’s real.”

“Same as always.”

“Good.” She set the glass down. “Lock up.” She was at the door. She didn’t turn around. “Renner’s been touching girls in here for six years. Four owners. You’re the first one who walked him out the door instead of walking me off the schedule for making a fuss.” Then she was gone.

Before I locked up, I went out back to check on Jacks - the girls had started calling him that. Same spot under the loading dock, same wary distance he always kept. I crouched down in the cold and watched him eat, no closer to touching him than I’d been the first night.

Afterwards, I Wasn’t ready to go home so I rode to the cemetery instead.

Three in the morning, the gate open the way it always is, because who robs a graveyard? I walked in past Snake’s stone and the two older brothers’ and down to the end of the row, to the one that still looked newer than the rest. Anchor. Danny. Nineteen forever.

I don’t come here. We toast him every Saturday, now Sunday. His cut hangs in church. I say see you out there, Anchor with the rest of them, but I’ve never been out here to the actual stone, because there’s nothing on it worth looking at.

But I’d been up too long and I wanted to talk to someone. So I put it down on him.

“Barred a whale tonight,” I said. To granite. “Cost us a few grand on a Friday. Year ago I’d have sent the guy a bottle and told the girl to lighten up.” I had my hands shoved in my jacket. “I’m trying to do this right, Danny. I don’t know if I’ve got it in me. Some nights I think I’m getting there, and then I lie down and the only thing I want is the one I threw away myself.”

I huffed out something that wasn’t quite a laugh into the cold. “And I’ll be straight with you, since it’s just us — it’s not only her laugh I’m missing. Me and that woman are unfinished business, brother. I’ve got a whole lifetime of making her squirm in that bed, wrecking her slow till she forgets everything except that she belongs to me. A man gets a taste of that, he doesn’t just hand it back.” I shook my head. “You’d have liked her, Danny.”

The stone didn’t say anything back.

I put two fingers on the top of it and left. Rode home to the clubhouse, to the room with a lock on the door I still wasn’t used to, and went up to bed.

Chapter 20

❧

— Austen —

“That’s not a Negroni,” I said. “That’s a Negroni’s sad cousin who didn’t get invited to the wedding.”

Fewin held the glass up to the light, wounded. “It’s got all three things in it.”

“In the wrong order and the wrong measures. Build it again. Equal parts. Stir, don’t shake — you’re not auditioning for a Bond film.” I pushed the bad drink back to Fewin. “And drink that one yourself so it doesn’t go to waste. Penance.”