Helluva Luxe

by Essary, Natalie

  Directly in front of me stood another door, a heavy black one with antique oil lanterns burning on either side. It was edged in sharp vinery, and Ash had clearly left her mark. The door was crawling with scantily-clad, golden-eyed beauties.

  One of them winked at me.

  Rorke flattened her palm against a painted palm, and all the eyes on the door flashed from gold to green. When it slid open, I heard “Love Cats” playing inside.

  “Nice touch,” I said.

  “Mad’s in a good mood.”

  “What’s on when she’s not?”

  “Same thing.”

  We started down a long hall.

  “Isn’t 1974 the Year of the Tiger?” I said. I was just trying to keep my mind off her towel.

  “Yep.” She turned partway to smile at me and kept walking.

  “Same year the Cure was born,” I said.

  “Don’t I know that one.” She laughed a little sarcastically. “Luxe’s birthday, too,” she added.

  A beat of silence passed.

  “You’re Year of the Tiger,” I said. “Aren’t you?”

  She kept walking.

  “What about Ash? Same thing? What about Chance?”

  “If I drop the towel, will you stop asking questions?”

  “Try me.”

  And that’s when I noticed Madder.

  She was more impressive off the stage, and by that I mean terrifying. She sat at the end of the hallway with her front paws crossed, watching us with bright amber eyes that burned right through me. Rorke nodded, and she rose in one swift motion and padded over to us on feet that were bigger than my head. She circled Rorke closely, nuzzled her arm and sat back on her haunches. Rorke reached over and scratched the tiger behind the ear. A rumble echoed through the room, and my eyes bugged out.

  “She’s just purring, Salem. Follow me, and she’ll follow you. Trust me. I wouldn’t put you in danger. Female Bengals aren’t like the males. They share their territory. They make family of their friends. She doesn’t want to hurt you. She knows you already.”

  I couldn’t let that one go. “How?”

  “She’s smelled you on me more than once.”

  “You’re making things worse by trying not to smile.”

  Her lip twitched. “Worse for whom?”

  I considered grabbing her and pushing her up against the cave wall, but I didn’t want to get eaten alive. By the girl or the tiger.

  She started walking again, and soon we turned a corner into paradise. “My kitchen,” she said.

  It looked like Madder did the decorating.

  Rorke had more foliage than the Amazon. Plants, trees, flowers everywhere. Things I’d only seen in National Geographic. They were in pots, crawling up the walls, suspended from the ceiling. There were even sections of the tile floor that’d been broken away for the sake of indoor gardening.

  “Jackhammer?” I said, pointing at the floor.

  “Oh, yeah. Around here, it’s always Hammer Time.”

  I almost said I love you.

  She grinned and pulled the chopsticks from her hair. I watched it fall around her shoulders and wondered how in the hell she had time to run a bar.

  “I don’t sleep much.” She winked at me. She was enjoying herself, watching me take it all in. “It’s nice to see this place through your eyes. Not that I ever forget how lucky I am. It’s just…nice.”

  The walls were carved stone. I’m pretty sure Ash’s ladies were lurking there, too, but I couldn’t seem to catch one. Everything else in the kitchen was blood red, dark gold or black. All fire, no frill.

  The moon and stars streamed down through huge skylights scattered across the vaulted ceiling. Rorke hit a switch on the wall, and they cranked open. The room filled with the sounds of night, and the cat let out another purr. A huge black bird flew in, circled the kitchen, and landed in one of the trees.

  “Friend of yours?” I said.

  “Madder’s, actually.”

  “Fair enough.”

  Sunk into one long wall, she had a wood-burning fireplace bigger than a Buick. It had a black, wrought-iron gate that was woven and twisted just like the vinery. Her mantle kit consisted of a broom I could’ve ridden and a poker fierce enough to take on Poseidon.

  Along the adjoining wall was an exact replica of her bar, redone in black marble with forest-green veining. It was so gorgeous I wanted to lick it. There were tall chairs for seven, and they were all different. As I got closer, I noticed a small engraved plate at each place. Lily. Ash. Chance. The next four were blank, and the one in the middle looked like it had just been added or replaced. It was shinier. I guessed it once said Zayzl. The eighth plate was opposite the other seven, in the middle, facing the inside of the bar. It was the same shape as the others, but larger and made from a darker metal. The writing across it was in French. Unfortunately, my upside down French is not that great.

  “Comme vous le voyez,” Rorke said. “As you see it.”

  As if all of this weren’t enough (tattooed, French-speaking girl in towel included) there was a chef’s island in the middle of the room. It was surrounded by a circular, free-flowing stream that had stone crossings every few feet, so you could reach the island from anywhere in the kitchen.

  “Those fish,” I said. “Are they snacks?”

  “Not usually, but they’re good in a pinch,” she said. “Poisson Noire. Pity for the fish.”

  “Chance named them.”

  She grinned and nodded.

  In the center of the circle was the biggest shrine to carnivores I would ever bow before during this lifetime. It contained a grill so massive you could’ve hitched a whole cow up there. This was no redneck smoker, nothing pussy with a lid. No, this was a monstrous, immovable, open-flame grill as big as a queensize bed. And it was emanating the promise of meat to come.

  “Is that drool, Nick?”

  “For the love of god, woman, you have got to change out of that towel. I’m in over my head here.”

  “Be right back,” she said.

  The tiger followed her around the corner.

  I sat down on one of the barstools and breathed the place in. My whole body was humming. I felt like I stumbled into the mountain air after spending too much time in the city. I felt like I did when I smoked my first joint. And I realized with vivid clarity that her bedroom could possibly be the death of me. I was trying not to picture it in my head when she reappeared, wearing black-and-white striped boy shorts and a beater with big Rocky Horror lips across the front.

  “Better?” she said.

  “Better for whom?”

  She walked up slowly, and my hands immediately went to her hips. I couldn’t have stopped them if I tried. She stepped between my legs and leaned into me. There was so little fabric between us I didn’t know how much longer I could go on keeping secrets. But then I heard a noise that could’ve been sampled in a horror movie. A scraping sound so exaggerated it had to be deliberate, like knives on metal.

  Rorke started laughing. She pointed to the corner of the room where Madder was scratching at the fridge door and staring at us.

  “Check it out. I’ve got three hundred pounds of cat-shaped birth control.” She leaned in and bit me lightly on the lip. “Come on, Salem. Let’s fire up the grill.”

  She stuck her hand in my pocket again and pulled out a cigarette, lit it and slid it between my lips. Then she took my hand and led me over to the fridge. Madder stepped aside and nudged me in the leg a little.

  “Here, Nick. She’s hitting on you. Give her this.” Rorke pulled a tray of cooked bacon from the fridge and set it on the counter. Then she picked up a piece and stuck the end of it in her mouth. Madder leaned in and licked her from chin to forehead.

  “Bitch, you cheated.” Her laugh was this low, throaty sound. “She likes to cheap shot me more than she likes the food.” Rorke tossed Madder the licked piece of bacon and handed me the rest of the tray.

  So there I was. Standing in an exotic jungle kitche
n under the moonlight with the sexiest woman I’ve ever seen, listening to the Cure, wearing a bathrobe I forgot to pack, smoking a cigarette that was not in my pocket moments before, and feeding a tray of bacon to a fucking tiger.

  Rorke started lining up meat on the counter.

  Porterhouse. Kobe. Filet Mignon. T-Bone. Rib Eye.

  “What’s your poison?” she said.

  “You, apparently.”

  She pinched me. “I feel like a Porterhouse. Madder?”

  The tiger made a snuffing sound and pawed the air.

  “You always want the Chateau,” Rorke said. Then she started digging around in the fridge again. She found the steak she was looking for and rolled her eyes at me. “I tried to trick her into picking something different by leaving it in there.”

  Madder tossed her head and snorted.

  “She wants to share hers with you. You down?”

  “I don’t eat raw Chateau.”

  “Neither does she.”

  I looked at Madder. She blinked at me lazily.

  “Of course.” I reached out and touched the tiger without even thinking. “I’d love to.” Electricity shot up my arm, but at least my hand was still attached.

  Rorke handed me the Porterhouse and Chateau for two. Then she piled on a Filet Mignon and a Kobe. She eyed the stack for a second, added a T-Bone, and put the rest of them back in the fridge. I assumed the tiger could eat more than one.

  “I’ve been to steakhouses with less on the menu than this,” I said.

  “Wait ’til you see the appetizer, Salem.”

  I followed her across the water to the center of the room and set all the meat down on her marble chopping block. It matched the bar and was littered with a variety of unmarked spice jars and spatulas. She flicked a match to the center of the grill, and a flame leapt up through the skylight, then settled back down to a low blue glow.

  I was trying to figure out how she still had eyebrows when she bumped the grill base with her knee, and a cabinet clicked open. She reached in, pulled out a couple Guinness, and handed one to me. Then she plucked an entire freaking pack of smokes from my pocket and lit one for herself.

  “Um,” I said. But I just didn’t have anything left.

  She let the cigarette dangle from her lip and bent back down to the cabinet, where she rummaged around for a while and came up with a mortar and pestle. I stood there drinking my beer and watching her move around the small island, pulling things off plants and trees that were close by. Then she came back to the grill and ground it all together with other spices from the counter. She reached into my other pocket and fondled the cayenne.

  “Madder,” she called out. “Hot? Fiery? Devil’s food?”

  A tiger roar thundered from several rooms away, and the ground rumbled under my feet.

  “I want what she’s having,” I said.

  Rorke leaned around me and grabbed a remote off the counter. She clicked it once and The Smiths came on. Madder roared again from the other room. Rorke rolled her eyes and skipped to the next song.

  “Not a fan,” she said.

  We unwrapped the meat together and laid it out over the flame according to cut, clarity and color. I could feel more heat coming from her body than the grill. She grabbed a bottle of Jack from the bar and doused each steak. Flames leapt through the room again. Bar-flavored flames. Then she got a small brush and braised each steak with her jungle concoction.

  I could’ve died that night and been fine with it.

  More than fine.

  I got to watch a half-dressed woman with a cigarette dangling from her lip and a bottle of Jack in her hand cook me a steak.

  And then she looked up at me without a trace of a smile and said, “Wanna hear the rest of the story, Salem?”

  “The rest? What do you mean, the rest?”

  “Well, somebody’s gotta die. Right?”

  Chapter 35

  “I can’t believe you left Kate swinging in the wind.” Chance hadn’t blinked in over five minutes. “Seriously, Rorke. You must be the first. The only.”

  By the time he got back from the penthouse, I’d managed to move from the floor behind my bar to an actual seat. I paid one of the guys in security to break everything down, and Chance and I were trying to regroup. I was exhausted. Over a year’s worth of exhausted.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I lost the napkin. Somebody’s already saved a place in hell for me, I’m sure.”

  “You don’t lose things, Rorke.”

  “That’s not true. I misplace my mind all the time.”

  “Maybe she’ll come back,” he said.

  “The front door is locked. It’s late. Let it go. I’ll write an apology to her publicist.” I sighed. “Maybe she’ll get it. Who knows how that shit works?”

  “Speaking of publicists.” He nudged me in the ribs. “I hear Z’s looking. You two have worked together before.” He waggled his eyebrows at me.

  “Don’t go there. And don’t make air quotes at me, either. I know way too much about Z. And I bet I learn even more tomorrow. She really took all four of them to the party?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know anybody who’s left the bar with four of your crew.”

  “We might not see Z for a few days.”

  “I don’t know.” He grinned. “I think she’s into Ash.”

  “Who’s not into Ash?”

  “So, you’re okay with Z moving in upstairs?”

  I shook my head. “I am okay with her hanging around. As long as the family agrees. But she can’t have a room. Not yet. She’s been on Kendol for years. I want to make sure she won’t fall off the wagon.”

  He seemed relieved. “I just want it to be the four of us.” he said. “For now.”

  “I know what you mean, kid.”

  “Think we oughta buy Z a new lamp for the penthouse?”

  Beer almost shot through my nose. “I still can’t believe Ash taught you how to use a gun.”

  He shook his head. “You’re like a wind-up doll.”

  “When did you do it?”

  “Baby, I don’t know. Some random day. It’s not like learning guitar. It only takes a few tries. I’m sorry we kept it from you, but clearly you can see why.”

  “I know. I get it. I’m just not used to having loaded weapons in the house.”

  “Rorke…we give college students liquor, and you’re worried about one little pistol hidden upstairs?”

  “You’re right. This whole place is a loaded weapon.”

  “Cheers to that.”

  We clinked and kicked back.

  “What do you think they’re doing right now?” he said.

  “Zaz and Ken? Clawing each other’s eyes out.”

  “I don’t think the cuffs reach that far.”

  “What if they have to go to the bathroom?” I said.

  “Aw, hell. We really didn’t cover that. I think there’s a trashcan by the bed.”

  “Let me see the envelope.”

  Chance immediately came up out of his chair and lunged toward the big clock above my cooler. Then he started hollering. “Nineteen minutes, forty-seven seconds! Who had nineteen forty-seven?”

  The four remaining members of my crew started cursing creatively and folding their arms. One of them shot me a deadly glare and called me a derogatory name.

  Then I heard, “Ooh, me! I said nineteen!” Evilyn came hurrying down the stairs from the front bar. “That’s four hundred bucks, my lovelies. Pay the door.”

  My earpiece clicked, and Ash entered my head. “Rorke, you lasted longer than I thought you would.”

  I heard Lily giggle in the background, and then she said, “Tell her she can borrow the pants now.”

  Wolf and two kids from security appeared at the top of the stairs, and he handed Evilyn a wad of bills.

  “Thanks, doll.” And then she landed one on my cheek.

  “Thanks to you, too. Dinner’s on me.”

  My eyes narrowed. I glared at each of them.

  �
��You bitches got a pool going on me?”

  Nobody said anything.

  “You did! Hand over the grid.”

  Chance swiped a piece of paper from under the bar.

  “You don’t want to look at this,” he said too quickly.

  He tried to ball it up, but I snitched it from his hand and smoothed it out on the bar. At the top of the paper, Lily had written, How to mix a Horny Bartender.

  “You bet a minute, Chance! A friggin minute?”

  “That’s as low as the grid goes,” he said.

  “There’s twenty names on here, and most of them are in the first five minutes.”

  “Some of us bet more than once,” Chance explained. “It’s been a while since you’ve gone on a date. Plus, I saw you check out Ash’s ass, too.”

  “But I wasn’t—” I sighed hard and Lily started giggling again. “Ash, this better be good. Give me the damn envelope.”

  Chance handed it to me, and the room went silent. Eleven people were staring at me and holding their breath.

  “You bunch of freaks,” I said. “It’s just a picture.”

  I shook my head at them and opened the envelope. What was inside was definitely more than just a picture.

  “Sweet mother of god.”

  “Who had ‘sweet mother of god’? Damn it, Rorke. You were supposed to say ‘holy shit.’ You just cost me another fifty bucks.” Chance flipped the grid over. There was another one going on the back. “Ash,” he said. “You had ‘sweet mother of god.’”

  “Was she any good?”

  Ash made a creative gesture from the booth. Wolf pulled another wad of cash from his back pocket and started walking across the dance floor toward Ash.

  “You bunch of heathens,” I said. “Somebody is buying me a steak.”

  “Well, it ain’t Kate.” Chance chucked me in the arm.

  “Fuck you,” is what I tried to say, but I was laughing.

  He threw his arm around me. “I think we should blow this picture up and put it over the stage. In place of that one.” He pointed his beer at the huge print of Lily in the mud that was hanging over the runway, and a cheer rose up from the family. I looked back to the booth. Ash had her arm around Lily, and Lily was smiling back at me.

  “Tell her I’m okay now,” she said to Ash.