by Amy Brent
Her arms and her back were aching and sore but she had to admit that three months of working with power tools and heaving lifting had toned her body better than anything she’d ever done at the gym. She was waiting the bar on opening night, wearing a silver-sequined spaghetti-strapped tank top and a short tight skirt. She’d debated wearing stilettos, but in the end decided to go with her stripper heels—a pair of heavy, sturdy platform heels that professional strippers used—because they were comfortable but made her look damn sexy. She’d almost forgotten that she had a body to show off, what with all of the hard labor that she’d been doing. And now, looking in the mirror, she was pleasantly surprised to see that all of her curves were still there, and then some.
It was all about the sexy tonight, and as she dusted her self with body glitter and painted her lips she had to admit it was an exciting change from being in old t-shirts and torn jeans all the time. Just a touch, she thought, as she put her hair up in a messy up-do. Not too much. The goal was to be attractive but not overtly sexual—to look hot enough to get the men’s libidos up but not hot enough to make their girlfriends jealous. She brushed on a little mascara and stepped back from the mirror, pleased with the effects.
Miles and Jaxon almost didn’t recognize her when she showed up to help them open the club. “Damn—you sure you Cerise?” asked Jaxon, as he helped her out of her car. “I ain’t never seen her look this fine before.”
“You sayin’ she ain’t fine?” Miles asked, punching his brother lightly in the arm. “Where yo’ manners?” Jaxon scowled. They were wearing tight-fitting black t-shirts and pants and work-boots; their jobs for the night were to manage the lights and sound and bounce the place if needed—and judging from the size of the crowd that was already gathering, it would very much be needed.
“Come on, guys,” she said, as she opened the back door. “Let’s show these people what a good time is really like.”
All nightclub openings were relatively big events—Philadelphia had its share of them and people were always looking for something new, exciting, edgier than the last one. But for its size, the Azure Code opening was huge: the crowd had been gathering for more than an hour before the opening time and by the time they opened the doors they were ready to party. Miles had flown in a Dutch DJ—their selling point was “sophistication”—and as soon as the crowd entered he began laying down beats that got even Miles to shake his fine, fine ass on the dance floor (he may have been her stepbrother, but that didn’t mean that she was blind). The drinks orders started coming almost right away—brightly-colored spritzers and, along with Jaxon, but even they managed to have a good time—and their tips ballooned when she, just drunk enough to think that this was a good idea but not drunk enough to fall off, got up on the bar to dance, shaking her body in sync to be beats. The DJ seemed to be timing his tracks to her, and the dollar bills kept raining down.
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 o
n 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.
She decided to sleep on it. It was Friday night—she could balance her virtual checkbook tomorrow when she wasn’t foggy-headed from crafting cover letters and tailoring her resume. A little beauty sleep would do her a lot of good—
There came a knock on the door of her apartment. “Who is it?”
“Cerise, that you?”
Ben Harmon. She wasn’t exactly glad to see him—she still remembered his hands on her body, but for some reason he was easier to forgive than her stepbrothers—but she couldn’t help grinning as she opened the door all the same. It wasn’t until he blinked, surprised, that she realized that she looked like a mess: still in sweatpants, a stretchy undershirt, her hair still in loose and sloppy twists winding around her head like Medusa. “Hey there,” he said, grinning at her. “You look lovely.”
“Please,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Come on in. You don’t have to hide the fact that I look like something the cat dragged in.”
“Well, the cat has good taste,” he said.
She had to smile at that. “Want something to drink?” she asked, opening her refrigerator. Shit. She hadn’t gone shopping all week—she had a few cans of some random sodas that she’d filched from the supply closet at her last job (she reasoned that if she was “supposed” to drinking them then it didn’t matter when) and a quart of milk that had been dated sometime last week. “You know what?” she said, closing the door. “Maybe we should go out for drinks instead.”
“I’m game if you are,” he said. “Thought you’d be working the bar—”
“Not after what happened that first night,” she said. “Did you—”
He shrugged, turning ever-so-slightly darker with shame. “I didn’t do nothing to encourage you, if that’s what you’re sayin’. I mean, I’m sorry I got you to take that first shot, ‘cuz it led to all the shit that happened later, but I didn’t think it’d lead you to that—”
“So you were there, and you didn’t stop me?”
He put his hands up and said, “Wasn’t anything I could do,” he said. “You was flinging yourself at me and takin’ off all your clothes and all I could do was go along with it.”
“You make it sound like I forced you,” she said.
He looked away, and then back at her again. “I’m sorry,” he said, quietly. “I was drunk, and I’ve liked you since forever—I think part of me just wanted to, y’know, have you all to myself, ‘cuz I seen how you looked at me—I knew what you wanted. I know it was wrong of me, but your brother was there—I remember thinking that he’d beat the shit out of me if he thought it was wrong, so maybe it wasn’t so bad to begin with?”
She could feel the anger rising in her blood, a sharp, hot, stinging anger that reminded her of what she’d been avoiding all week: the fact that this had happened while her stepbrothers were there. They were supposed to look out for each other—they were supposed to be there for each other and they were supposed to catch each other before stupid shit like this happened. “Fuck Jaxon and Miles,” she snarled. She could forgive Ben—it’d been years since they’d last seen each other, some mixed signals were inevitable, and it wasn’t as if he was family or anything. He had nothing to lose. She could forgive him—that didn’t mean that she had to.
“Come on, Cerise—we were both drunk,” he said, plaintively now. “I swear, I ain’t like that normally.”
“No,” she said bitterly. “You just like that when I’m pourin’.”
“At least lemme take you out for dinner, then,” he said. “You know, to say ‘sorry’ and stuff.”
Well, your fridge is empty, she thought. “Fine,” she said, after a while. “Where we goin’?”
***
The Oyster Shack in Center City wasn’t her ideal for a dinner, even though it was posh in all of the right ways. She never liked to be reminded that her upbringing was decidedly quite a few income levels beneath the ones that could afford fresh oysters. Hell, it was a miracle that they could afford a chicken for Sunday night dinners; as it was just her mother and her, they’d eat it all week if they could.
She’d once bought three oysters
on a trip down the shore, in Atlantic City—it’d been a drunken dare between her and her college friends at the time, and three oysters had been all she could afford. They did their vodka shot and then slid the mucoid creatures down their throats. Rhonda had gagged as it went down, but she got it down in the end and didn’t throw it back up, unlike Aisha, who’d run underneath the pier five seconds later. But Cerise had managed it—easy-peasy, as if she’d been slurping those suckers down her whole life. “It tastes like cum.” Cerise didn’t remember who’d said that but for some reason the words had stuck in her mind, and made her confused about giving blow jobs.
All of which she confessed to Ben now, sitting across from the table at him, in the pause between the arrival of the wine and the appetizers. So this was why he’d been willing to wait the twenty minutes—that was how long it’d taken her to piece together her outfit: a cotton summer dress with a halter top and a silk scarf, ballet flats. Pretty, but not ostentatious—something that a “good girl” would wear on a date with her boyfriend, and as they’d made their way from the subway station to the restaurant she was aware of how many admiring looks they’d received. We do make a nice couple, she thought, as the waiter drizzled a light vinagrette on the half-dozen slime puddles on a bed of ice in front of them. “Enjoy,” said the young man pleasantly enough, backing away with a little half bow.
“Come on, admit it, you never thought I’d mean dinner,” Ben said now, a big smile cracking across your face. “Bet you didn’t think I’d be doing so well, didja?”
“Is it that obvious?” she asked, making sure that the teasing note was in her voice.
He shrugged and picked one up, tilted his head back, and tilted the creature down his throat. “Mm,” he said. “You oughta try one.”
As she picked it up she suddenly realized that this was some kind of test: swallow the oyster and pass, gag on it and fail. But the consequences of passing or failing were lost on her. They’d gotten along all right last week, but she wasn’t sure she wanted a boyfriend just down. She was okay with her life right now—she’d be better if she could figure out what to do about Jaxon and Miles—being single and hanging out with her friends and doing projects and things just because they were fun, well, who wouldn’t like it. But a boyfriend—she was flattered, but even as she tried to think of a way to politely-but-firmly tell him she wasn’t interested, she could feel his eyes on her, expectant.