by M. J. O'Shea
“Yeah. We’re coming too,” Vaughn said, no question implied.
“Agreed.” Avery gestured for Macy to lead the way.
“The more the merrier,” Macy replied with a grin. Then she grabbed Avery’s hand and dragged him off to meet this Donovan guy.
Looked like the night just got at least another hour longer. Maybe even more, depending on what happened once they got to this mysterious new bar.
THE trip to the bar was… strange. Macy had chosen to take a cab with Donovan, which left Vaughn and Avery to share one. They got closer and closer to Avery’s house, to a part of the Quarter that was sleepy and quiet and didn’t have anything that could be considered a club. At least not as far as Avery knew.
“You have a weird feeling about this, man?” Vaughn asked.
He’d had a weird feeling all week. But it had just gotten a hell of a lot more real. Avery was glad he wasn’t the only one.
“Very.” The entire thing sounded sketchy. He shrugged. “I just want to make sure she’s safe. She’s had a lot more than usual tonight.”
Donovan had seemed okay, if a little bit cliché in the brooding-mysterious-hottie department, but Avery wasn’t going to let anything happen to Macy. She might be an independent woman and all that, but she was still his best friend, and he took care of the people he loved.
“No. I get you, man. I’m here too. We’ll keep an eye on her.”
THE bar was in a place Avery had passed a million times. The windows, like on so many buildings in the French Quarter, showed nothing of the inside. A lot of the buildings looked rather deserted from the outside, all the life focused within, to courtyards and gardens that were sheltered from the very public streets. This place was clearly not any different. The entire building was quiet on the outside, like it was empty, but as soon as Donovan touched the door and it opened—Avery didn’t even know what to think of that, so he decided to ignore it—there was another world.
Avery, Vaughn, and Macy stared at each other in awe.
“Did you have any idea this was here?” Macy asked.
“No. Not a clue.”
The bar seemed enormous on the inside, which he supposed wasn’t a surprise since the outside façade looked like two or three buildings. Avery couldn’t see any walls. It was like they disappeared into the glowy distance. It was, in a word, opulent. But strange opulent, like something out of Avery’s steampunkiest dreams. Velvet curtains and fixtures were everywhere, all burnished gold and cranberry and antiqued brass. Odd clothing seemed to be the norm, and there were bartenders with old-fashioned vests and garters on their sleeves. Macy grabbed Avery’s hand for a moment while they both gaped before Donovan led them to a booth he announced was “his.”
“Do you, like, own this booth?” Vaughn asked. He gingerly sat down on plush velvet that matched the curtains and the walls. Yeah, the walls were covered in thick, expensive velvet as well. There was an actual oil lamp on the booth’s table, and strings of Edison bulbs hanging from the ceiling. It was downright romantic. Avery felt very out of place.
“Something like that.” Donovan gave him a small smirk.
Avery had to admit that Macy’s taste was rather impeccable. A long look at Donovan showed that, well, the guy was gorgeous, just like he’d thought back at the first bar. Totally not Macy’s style, if he was to guess, but gorgeous all the same. He had that “hipster with a heart of gold” thing going on, dark jeans, tattoos, vest open over a T-shirt, hair a little too long to be modern—kind of like Aramis meets Professor Xavier or something. Avery, well, the guy wasn’t his style either, but he had to appreciate. Donovan raised his hand slightly, and in moments there was a server at their table.
“What would you guys like to drink?” he asked.
Avery thought about protesting. He was so far out of his element, and another drink would put him into nonlucid territory, even after the drinking break the cab ride over had given him.
“We do have a few specials, sugar,” the server said. She leaned over and put her hands on the table. She was dressed simply in a low-cut tight black sheath that hugged her curves and ended at her knees, but there was something about her too, just like Donovan, just like this bar. He… wished he could put his finger on it, but it sure wasn’t ordinary. The server had platinum blonde hair curled up like a pinup from the ’50s. A quick glance told him she had on fishnet stockings and heels too. There really was one of everything in the bar. Avery found himself wanting to reach out and stroke the smooth, pale skin of her arm. She caught him looking and giggled.
“Can you do some Nightcrawlers?” Donovan asked.
“For you? Of course.” She winked and walked away.
“What did you just order us?” Vaughn asked. He looked just as out of sorts as Avery felt.
“It’s good. You’ll like it.” Donovan watched them quietly freak out for a second and then chuckled. “I promise. You’ll be fine. It’s just a specialty of the bartender. He’s an old friend.”
“How old?” Avery muttered. He suddenly had visions of his students and talks of vampires and ghosts.
Stop it.
Donovan just chuckled again and then returned his attention to Macy, who was staring around the place just like Avery and Vaughn.
“Can you believe this?” Vaughn whispered to Avery.
“No. I feel like we’ve entered some alternate universe. It seems almost like… it should be impossible. Should this actually be able to fit behind that building façade? Every time I look, it gets bigger.”
“I don’t have a clue. Where did all these people come from?”
Avery hadn’t looked in detail much past the server and Donovan, but as he scanned the room, he noticed there were… things he couldn’t explain. People could’ve stepped off the pages of Dracula chatting with others in jeans and T-shirts, drinks that seemed to not quite empty even when Avery watched people take a sip, odd doors jutting off to the side, and the people. The people. It was the most intensely strange experience of his life, watching them swirl around him. So many of them were just… beautiful. Like model beautiful. Avery had never seen that many beautiful people in one room in his life.
“Do you suddenly feel like you’re in a movie?” Vaughn asked.
“Or an acid trip.”
Across the table, Macy giggled and snuggled her face into Donovan’s neck. Giggled. Macy. It was so unlike her. Macy had always been more sexy and seductive. This ingénue thing she had going on was like watching someone with her face and a completely different personality.
“Here are your drinks, darlings,” their server said. She leaned over and kissed Donovan on the head, then wandered off.
“Do you know her well?” Macy asked.
“Brooke?” Donovan laughed. “Years. We’re like brother and sister.” He said the second thing pointedly and squeezed Macy’s shoulders. Avery had never seen her like that. Usually if a guy paid attention to someone else, she’d just, well, do the same. Donovan seemed to have some kind of pull for her that Avery hadn’t seen before.
Avery took a sip of the drink that had been placed in front of him. It was one of the strangest but most intoxicatingly delicious flavors he’d ever had. He couldn’t put a finger on what it reminded him of, but he instinctively wanted more. The drink was nearly black, and it was fruity and tingly at the same time. He took another sip and immediately wanted another as soon as he swallowed.
“What is this thing?” he asked.
Donovan shrugged. “It’s one of Dan’s specialties. He made it up years ago. It’s a bar favorite. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?” Donovan asked.
“Yeah.” There wasn’t much more Avery could say.
He sipped his drink and blatantly stared at the crowd, since he’d gone far past the politely pretending not to look stage. He watched the crowd hanging out near the bar—retro clothes and beautiful faces and….
Holy shit. Avery felt like the goddamn breath was knocked out of his chest. Everyone else just turned into an unimportan
t blur when he saw him.
He was leaning over the bar, talking to a bartender, and he tipped back his head and laughed. In that moment he was caught in one of the warm pink lights, and he looked like… like an angel. And Avery was completely aware of how stupid that sounded, even in his head, but he couldn’t help thinking it. The guy was tall and lean, ethereal, and so pale he looked like he should be translucent. His hair, flaxen and beautiful, was styled into a bit of a side swipe and glowed just like his skin. Avery couldn’t stop staring. He didn’t even know if he breathed.
“Who’s that?” Vaughn whispered. Vaughn, who as much as Avery knew was completely straight. Apparently it didn’t matter. That kind of beautiful was impossible not to notice.
“I have no idea. Fuck.” Avery must’ve been breathing because he could still talk. A tingle raged down his spine, and his entire body broke out in shivers. He thought about his dreams, about that thing just beyond his reach, and wondered if maybe this was it and he’d finally found it. But Vaughn’s voice broke his increasingly impossible chain of thought and made him turn.
“He looks like a kid, man. He’s gorgeous, but he has to be barely old enough to be in here.”
He looks like everything I’ve ever wanted….
Which was just about the stupidest drunk thought Avery had ever had, including the time he got the outline of Mickey Mouse tattooed on his ass. He’d thought that was a good idea too. But picturing forever with a total stranger at the oddest bar he’d ever been in had to be a hell of a lot stupider than some drunken Disney.
“Avery, you’re still staring. Snap out of it.”
“Right. Wow.” He ripped his gaze off the guy, who seemed to just radiate like the moon, and back to his friend, who was staring at him like he thought there might be something wrong.
“You okay, man?”
“Yeah. I just… I don’t know. I feel like I’ve seen him before.” And he didn’t realize until he said it that he did feel like he’d seen him before, in little flashes and moments when he was asleep, and somewhere else. He was familiar somehow. Avery was too fascinated to be creeped out.
“You have?” Vaughn shook his head. “I’ve never seen anyone in this place before. Do they even come from around here?”
Sure, there were a lot of people in the city, but you tended to see faces around—especially since they were faces Avery should have seen, only blocks from his cottage.
“I have no idea. But yeah… he’s familiar.” Change the subject. Avery decided it was better, he was better, if he stopped scaring one of his friends and started talking about something else.
“Tell me about your experiment with Karen.”
“Wait… what?” Vaughn barked out a laugh.
Macy and Donovan had practically melted into the seat across from them, and Avery’s choices were to stare at the blond guy he felt like he’d dreamed of, stare at his best friend sucking some guy’s face down her throat, or yeah. Time to talk about bread mold.
“Sure. Tell me about the experiment.”
“It’s not that exciting. We’ve gotten our mold colonies to multiply at twice the normal rate.”
“Why’s that a good thing?” Avery asked.
“It’s… you know, I don’t really want to talk about mold. Usually, sure, but this is so not the place for it. More like the place to talk about your class.”
“Monsters, Inc.?” Avery said with a smirk.
“You know about that?” Vaughn chuckled.
“If you do, then of course I’ve heard it.” He was pretty proud of how hard it was to get into that class, and he didn’t mind the nickname. Of course they didn’t clamor quite so hard to get into one of his normal classes, but hey, he guessed it went with the territory.
“What are you guys talking about next week in class?”
“Vampires and then my favorite.” Avery shuddered. He’d expressed his revulsion for the local horror story more than once.
Vaughn nodded sympathetically. “Madame LaLaurie?”
Yeah. A very real monster who’d spawned more than her fair share of bump in the night stories.
“Why don’t you just take her out of the curriculum?” Vaughn asked.
“How could I? She’s an absolute legend… of the real and highly embellished variety. That would be like taking out Marie Laveau. They’d riot.”
Vaughn chuckled. He lifted his drink to his mouth and drained the last of it.
“You want another?” Avery asked. “I don’t mind grabbing this round.”
“Sure. I’m not usually a fruity drink guy, but this was amazing.”
AVERY took their glasses and went to the bar. He waited in line and tried not to stare, but he knew. He knew the guy was near, still talking to the bartender, Dan, just around the corner, but he was there. Avery studied the glasses in his hand, the coat of the person in front of him, and he waited to get to the front of the line.
When he did, he awkwardly asked for two more of… “Umm… what Donovan ordered, please?” Then he waited again while he watched as the bartender started to mix them up. Brooke sidled up to him.
“I can take these over to the table, sweetheart,” she drawled. “You don’t have to stand here.”
Avery was surprised to be spoken to, so he mumbled out a thank-you. Brooke winked flirtatiously, which seemed to be her typical state. He pulled out money, but she shook her head with a tsking noise. “Donovan wouldn’t ever let guests of his pay,” she said. “Don’t be silly.”
Then she shuffled him off toward the table and turned back to the bar to chat with Dan while he mixed the final drink.
Avery walked a few steps before he felt another thump in his belly. He looked up, and there he was, right there. The blond guy was only inches away, with his pale hair glinting, smile so big and open and aimed right at Avery. Holy shit. Avery had that cliché moment where his heart tried to pound its way out of his chest, and then he got all light-headed and hot. He would’ve thought some of the magic would disappear being up close, but no. If anything the man was even prettier. Man? Boy? He hoped desperately he wasn’t the victim of some serious jailbait. He also hoped he wasn’t staring like a creeper.
He was definitely staring like a creeper.
The guy nodded at him and smiled again, like he was acknowledging there was something there. Something between them. Something. That was a word for it. So was force of nature. He nearly tripped on nothing. It was a good thing he didn’t have his and Vaughn’s drinks in his hand.
Avery smiled shakily and nodded back, then kept walking, because he didn’t know what the hell he was supposed to do. He wanted to kick himself.
Damn, damn, damn. He didn’t have much choice other than to walk the rest of the way back to their table and sit down. Go talk to him. Stand up and go talk to him.
“Where are the drinks?”
“Brooke’s on her way with them. I think she had something else on her tray to drop off first.”
Vaughn chuckled. “You sure you’re okay, man?”
“Probably not.”
Avery didn’t think he’d ever be okay again.
Chapter Three
TYSON had been in the middle of talking to Dan, when he turned and saw what had to be the most intoxicating guy—on the small side, golden, juicy in all the right places, big brown eyes, fall of chocolate hair. Beautiful. And it wasn’t just because there were a ton of beautiful people at the bar. There was something else about him, something that pinged deep in Tyson’s chest.
That’s a weird feeling….
He wasn’t sure if he’d ever felt it before—not once in his years bedding every pretty boy and half the pretty girls he came across, not once in all the time he’d been coming to Donovan’s club. It tightened and then released, shimmering down his spine. Tyson felt alive, like he wanted to see what happened next. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the stranger. And against all of his usual instincts, he didn’t even want to try.
He had to talk to him. And he didn’t talk
to anyone. If anything, Tyson waited for people to come to him and rebuffed them half the time when they did. He held court at the bar and took a man or a woman home every so often, if he was interested. He was rarely interested.
When he was younger, he used to get into wild shit, stuff he wouldn’t even consider anymore—sex parties and orgies, public shows, parties where everyone was masked and naked the entire night. None of that did anything for him anymore. Truthfully, it had been such a long time since he’d even wanted to be bothered with the scene that it was far easier to simply stay home.
But this guy? This compact piece of beautiful man who’d smiled at him nervously and made him feel melty and warm like he hadn’t felt since he was an actual teenager? He was irresistible. Special.
Tyson excused himself from his conversation and made his way over to the table where Beautiful had just plopped down. Donovan’s table. At least that wouldn’t be trouble—he and Donovan had always been friendly. Donovan gave Tyson a vague nod and a silent be careful look before he went back to his conversation with a rather voluptuous blonde. Tyson didn’t really care. He only had eyes for….
“Hi.” Tyson didn’t sit, but he kneeled to bring himself to the booth’s level.
“Hi,” he whispered. His voice sounded like he looked, all caramel and sweetness.
Tyson felt the guy’s nervousness, the flutter of his heart, and the way his scent intensified, things his tea made him able to do, but he rarely bothered to try. This time every instinct, every sense, every pore of his body was aligned to this one small man. Tyson didn’t want to make him nervous. He just wanted to kiss. “Do you want to get a drink?”
Tyson noticed the nearly full drink on the table, but still the man nodded.
“Good.”