by Unknown
I told Anni all about last night, about Aiden and the similarities between him and Jason, and she’s going with me tonight to the pool hall. She says she wants to see these ‘mad pool skills’ I learned in Texas, but I know she’s going more to look after me. She has the same mixed feelings I do about him. It could be a good thing to use him to get past Jason. ‘Use’ has such a terrible implication. I don’t want to use the poor guy, but I don’t know any other word to describe having him around as a tool to move forward. I’m aware it’s probably not the best thing in the world for my mental health to jump from one guy to the next, but how the hell else am I supposed to distract myself from the paralyzing pain I feel any time I allow myself to sit still?
And maybe it wouldn’t even be like that. Maybe I could have genuine feelings for him. I mean, he did stand out to me last night in the crowd. I noticed him before he ever saw me. It was his smile and laughter that caught my attention before I even knew about his tattoo, or that he liked poker and pool. I was definitely attracted to him. Sure, it wasn’t the overwhelming magnetic pull that I felt toward Jason, but at least something inside me could still feel attraction to someone else.
“We’ve still got a few hours before we need to head out. Do you want to watch a movie?” Anni asks as she puts the final touches of polish on her toenails.
“Yeah, sure. What do you want me to put in?” I stand up and make my way over to her drawer of DVDs.
“Put in that one with Johnny Depp and the horseless headman,” she says, and I look over at her with my eyebrow raised. She has no idea what just came out of her mouth.
“Um…you mean the headless horseman?” I snort.
“Shut up, you know what I mean.” She pouts.
It never gets old. The woman has dyslexia of the mouth, always saying shit backwards. I’ve missed spending so much time with her. She never fails to entertain me. I find Sleepy Hollow, put the DVD into the player, and walk over to her kitchen to grab the wine bottle I brought with me out of her fridge. I don’t bother with a glass. I plop myself onto her couch, snickering as she growls when I make her hand holding the nail polish brush streak a line down the center of her big toe.
“Bitch, hand me that remover and a cotton ball. You’re lucky I don’t make you lick it off,” she gripes.
“Gross.” I hand over the bottle of pink liquid then twist the top off the wine and take a swig directly from the bottle. When she looks at me with a peaked brow, I tell her, “Just getting started here so I don’t have to spend so much at the bar.”
“Uh-huh. Do you plan on finishing the whole thing before we leave? You know I have a cabinet full of wine glasses you left over here before you moved.”
“You kept all of them?” I ask, trying to take the attention off the fact I did plan on polishing off the bottle, therefore not wanting to dirty up a glass.
“Wishful thinking that you’d be back,” she says, and then looks at me with an apology in her green eyes.
“Don’t worry about it, woman. The plan was always for me to go just for the semester. I never intended to stay longer, didn’t even think about it until…” I choke up, not able to finish the thought.
She puts down the cotton ball and wraps her arms around me. I take a deep breath of her familiar, comforting scent, my soul being soothed just a little by the ever-present Elizabeth Arden perfume she’s worn since the day I met her.
“It’s okay,” I sigh. I loosen my grip on her, and she lets go of me, and we both turn our attention to the movie.
By the time it’s over, I need to start getting ready for the evening activities. We used to do this all the time. I’d bring over my clothes and makeup to get ready with Anni before going out to the club for a night of dancing. Unfortunately, the one club we used to go to is now overrun with drugs and prostitution, but we made plans to try out a different one next week. South Beach is a hip-hop club hooked onto a country bar called the Palomino. We had been to it once before, but at the time preferred Kagney’s because of the male revue they had for two hours before they cleared the stage and started playing the dance music. It was sad to think we wouldn’t be returning to the club we’d gone to nearly every weekend for two years before I left for Houston.
I grab my bag from beside her front door and head to her room at the back of her apartment. Changing from my comfy sweatpants and t-shirt into a tight pair of jean shorts and a hot pink tank top, I look into her full-length mirror as she walks in.
“What is this sorcery?!” she asks, astonished. “Is that leg skin I see?”
I chuckle lightly and reply, “Your eyes do not deceive you. My legs are, in fact, bare to the eyes of other life forms.” Before, I would have never worn anything but jeans or pants, always self-conscious of my skinny legs. I guess one good thing I had taken from my relationship with Jason—if you could call it that—was that he’d made me feel beautiful, confident in the way I looked. He’d helped wash away most of the damage girls from my adolescent and teenaged years had done to the way I viewed myself.
I grab her lotion off her dresser and rub some into my legs. Then I walk up to the mirror and plop down in front of it cross-legged with my makeup bag in my lap. I see in the reflection as Anni walks into her en suite and turns on her curling iron, saying, “Well, hot damn. We’ll have to go shopping for more stuff, so you can show off those sticks. Maybe go before Wednesday so we can find something new for South Beach.”
“Sure. I have nothing else to do.” I wasn’t signing up for a summer semester at my community college. I had half a mind not to sign up for the coming fall either. I don’t feel much like doing anything with my life at the moment, but I decide to save that thought for processing at another time. Tonight is all about having fun with my best friend, getting to know Aiden, and hopefully hanging out with Brittany if she comes. Oh, and getting wasted. That is definitely a must. I’m already halfway there after finishing the bottle of wine before the movie had even ended.
My face looks a little flushed in the mirror as I start applying my makeup, so I go light on the blush and focus more on my eyes. When I’m done, it looks on the outside like there’s life in this empty vessel, and I practice a smile. Good to go.
I stand up, walk into Anni’s bathroom, and sit on her toilet lid, watching as she makes quick work of curling her now dry locks. A short while into Sleepy Hollow, she had taken a shower to rinse out the hair dye and blew it dry to make sure the color was even. Perfect as always, she had strutted her way back into the living room, flipping her hair over one shoulder and then the other before turning around and g peeking at me over her shoulder like in a Clairol commercial. The girl looks good with any hair color, but I think this is my favorite. The super dark brown, almost black makes her green eyes pop like crazy.
I’ve always loved watching people get ready, whether it was my sister-in-law, Renee, when I was little, other girls getting their makeup and hair done before pageants, or even my granny, when she would take me to the beauty shop with her. For all the watching I’ve done though, I haven’t learned a thing. Best I can do is blow dry mine straight. Sometimes I get fancy, and bobby pin a little poof back with the front of my hair, but it always ends up lopsided. So mine is just down tonight, as always when I go out. It’s kind of like my security blanket, giving me just a little something to hide behind.
Anni isn’t big on makeup. Her skin is flawless, and she has the most adorable freckles, so she only applies a little mascara, and some gloss to her lips. She always complains she hates her lips, because she says they are too thin. I personally think it just makes the attention fall more on her gorgeous green eyes.
When she’s all done, we make our way back into her bedroom, which has clothes piled on every surface, and shoes stacked in every nook and cranny of available space. I can’t count how many times I’ve helped her organize all her stuff, but somehow, only a few days later, you practically have to swim through her room.
She looks at me and ponders aloud, “Hmmm, if you’r
e wearing that, I think I’ll wear my new shorts. But no pink. You know I don’t do pink. That’s your thing.”
“Not even on Wednesdays,” I sing from her closet as I slide hanger after hanger holding shirts and dresses from one side to the other, looking for a top to go with the jean shorts she’s holding up for me to see.
“You and that dumb movie. You’re still not over it? It’s been what, a year since it came out?”
I look over my shoulder at her and say haughtily, “You can’t sit with us.”
“Who, you and the voices in your head? Find me a top, bitch.” She jerks her head toward her closet.
Before I turn back to the task though, I stage-whisper to her, “Horseless headman,” then laugh and duck when she chucks her shorts at my head.
We finally decide on a low-cut white shirt for her to wear, and when she puts on the outfit, the next challenge is finding a pair of shoes. She has about a trillion, and almost all of them are cute and would go with the outfit she’s wearing; the problem is finding a match. Every time we think we find a set, one of the shoes has disappeared from the last place we saw it. Eventually, we unearth a pair of espadrilles that make her legs look a mile long. She’d been a horseback rider all her life, so her legs are much different than mine. Where mine are long and skinny, hers are thick with defined muscle.
“Bitch,” I tease for making me move fast while wine is in my system, and I smack her on her non-existent ass. At least I have her beat there.
Feeling my buzz heighten after a nicotine break out on Anni’s balcony, it’s finally time to leave. Neither of us has ever been to the pool hall we are meeting Aiden at, and as if he can sense we are heading to him, I receive a text message.
Aiden: About to leave my place. See you soon. Britt coming too.
I smile down at my phone. I’m not sure whether the expression was brought on by him texting me or from the happy news that Brittany will be coming too, but I don’t question it. I let the little bit of excitement I feel carry me out to Anni’s red Mustang, where we blast music and sing along with the radio as I shout directions out to her that I had printed off my computer before I left my house.
About thirty minutes later, we pull into the small parking lot of Little Reno. It doesn’t look like much, just a generic one-story building with blacked out windows, and a brightly lit sign with the bar’s name. As Anni and I enter, there’s a closet-size room with a window, with a weathered looking biker-esque woman checking IDs sitting on a stool. We show her our licenses, and she marks my hands with black Xs, but not Anni’s, since she turned twenty-one last August.
Walking into the main bar area, it looks just like any other, with round tables and lots of chairs scattered throughout, neon beer brand signs glowing along the perimeter of the ceiling. In the center is a rectangular bar with stools surrounding it, and off to the right is a small dance floor with a disco ball spinning above it. Looking farther to the right, there are a couple of stairs leading up to an entirely different room full of pool tables, which we can see through the giant window on the opposite side of the dance floor.
We hear the bell above the entrance ring, and after a few seconds, in walks Brittany, looking just as cute as she did yesterday, in a pastel yellow tank top and jeans with a white belt. Behind her, Aiden walks in, not looking up as he puts his ID back in his wallet, barely missing running into Brittany.
“Hey! I’m so glad you had him invite me. I was bummed when I went back outside and couldn’t find you last night,” she tells me, giving me a quick hug.
“Brittany, this is my best friend Anni. And Anni, this is Aiden.” I gesture to him as he holds his hand out to shake hers.
She looks at him suspiciously for a moment, probably doing her usual guy-assessment, before finally placing her hand in his for a solid shake. There’s nothing prissy about my bestie. I can’t help but grin when Aiden flexes his hand a little when they let go.
“So do y’all want to get a drink before we get a table?” he asks. I hold up my Xed hands and stick out my bottom lip. “Don’t worry about that. I don’t turn twenty-one ‘til December, but I know the owners. If you’re with me, they won’t say shit.”
I look at Anni, who is frowning at him, so I nudge her lightly with my elbow. She’s always so protective of me, hating it when I break rules. When we used to go clubbing, she was always a mother bear, never letting me accept drinks from guys, even when we saw them take it directly from the bartender and placed it in my hands. I could only drink it if the bartender handed it me, which was kind of hard when I wasn’t of age. That’s why we liked to go to Kagney’s, because we’d just wash the Xs off. A lot of the other places around here, it was the opposite. You had to have a wristband or a stamp in order to drink.
“I’ll take a glass of white ziff if they have it, thanks,” I tell him. Anni opens her mouth to refuse, but I send a glare her way that stops her in her tracks.
“I’ll take a Jack and Coke,” Brittany requests, and when Aiden looks over to Anni, she just shakes her head. If I’m drinking, she won’t even take a sip. Girl takes her job as a DD very seriously. The only time she ever really drinks is when we are at her place, and even then, the occasions are very few and far between.
When Aiden returns with our drinks, I’m surprised when he doesn’t go back to the bar to get a set of pool balls. All the places we went to play in Texas, you got your set and then went and picked your table. Instead, we follow him directly to the back of the room, where he pulls out a couple rolls of quarters from his pocket and sits them at the small table next to the pool table. He unrolls several quarters and walks over to the wooden edge of the green felt-covered surface. There is a plastic holder with the numbers one through seven printed in circular slots, and I watch as Aiden takes the coins and fills up the circles.
He looks up to see my confused face, and explains, “You put the quarters in the slots to show you’re claiming the table for that many games. As long as you keep the slots filled, no one will jack your shit.”
At that moment, I hear Aiden’s name being called as a large group of guys I recognize from last night walks up the couple of stairs and into the billiard room. Each one does the guy handshake-hug thing they all seem to do, and after a few moments of them discussing whether they want pitchers of beer or other drinks, the huddle disperses. Some of the guys go back down the stairs to the bar there, and a few of them go to the bar that’s against the back wall of the room we’re in.
They gradually return, and I’m kind of pissed when instead of offering me a pool cue, Aiden hands it to one of his buddies. After all, wasn’t it he who invited me to come play, since it was the one thing I told him I enjoyed doing? I sit down in the chair across from Anni, take a sip of my wine, and then reach into my bag to pull out my cigarettes, lighting one and pulling the ashtray in the center of the table closer to me. When I look up at her, she’s watching me intently, and I can tell she knows I’m upset.
Oh shit…
I know the moment the idea clicks into her vindictive little mind. My eyes widen, and I whisper-hiss, “Don’t you dare, Anni Lee. We just met these people. Don’t embarrass me.”
“He had us drive all the way out here for you to get to know him, and then his stupid friends show up and he doesn’t even introduce you. And now, after inviting you out to play, you’re over here sitting and getting sloshed, while his buddies take over the pool table. What the ever-loving fuck?” She abruptly stands, and I grab her hand as she walks toward Aiden, where he is focusing on the shot he is about to take, but she shakes me off. I watch, horrified, as she makes her way over to him, and just as he’s about to take his shot, she hits the back of his stick, sending the cue ball flying across the table.
He stands up straight and turns, a half-smiling, half-pissed look on his face, obviously thinking it was one of his friends playing a joke on him. The look of surprise is almost laughable when he sees it’s my very short-tempered, fuming best friend. “Uh—”
“Sh
ut it,” she cuts him off. “What is the deal with you bringing my girl out here to play, and these assholes show up, and suddenly she doesn’t exist? Do you think that’s the polite thing to do when you’re supposed to be getting to know a chick?”
“Uh—”
“Did I say you could talk? No,” she states, and he looks confused.
“You just ask—”
“I wasn’t done. You can speak whenever I’m finished asking you all my questions. My best friend just had to crawl her sweet ass back to this shithole of a town, and she had actual hope today when she was telling me about this ‘nice guy’ she met last night who actually seemed to want to take her out for a good time. Does she look like she’s having any goddamn fun?”
I just know she gestures toward me, where I’m now slouched down in my chair with my glass of wine cradled to my chest, my head thrown back, looking up at the ceiling in mortification, my cigarette sticking out the corner of my mouth, because I can feel everyone’s eyes on me. I probably look like a train wreck, smoke and all.
“Well…are you going to answer me?”
I can’t help but snort at Anni’s question. The poor boy she’s giving hell probably has no idea what just hit him. I almost feel bad for him…almost.
“I didn’t know my friends were coming. I’m sorry I got distracted,” he tells her, and then I watch as he moves toward me. He kneels down next to me and puts his warm hand on my bare thigh, sending a shiver up my leg. “I’m sorry I kind of left you. My buddy and I have a bet going from a game left over from last week, and that got in my head and pushed everything else out. If you want, I can tell them to open their own table, and then you and I can play on this one,” he says quietly enough only I can hear.
“That’s okay. I’ll just wait my turn.” I take a sip of my wine, tapping my cigarette out in the ashtray.
He leans forward and whispers, “Your friend is scary.”
“That was nothing,” I warn, looking him in the eye.
He sucks air in through his teeth before standing up again, then bends at the waist to say in my ear, “Then I better be a good boy.”