Throb (Club Grit) (2 page)

Especially seeing as he hadn’t even contacted me since September, a few weeks after the internship ended.

Especially since that’s all I’d wanted him to do.

I watched as Jason took the shaker, added ingredients that looked like they belonged in a Frappuccino instead of in a cocktail, and after doing his mixological magic, poured out the mixture into the martini glass, garnished with a cherry on a small neon plastic sword. Of course, it had to be 1980’s somehow, and what was more eighties than neon?

“Here, try this,” he said, passing it to me gently because he’d filled the glass to the brim.

“Just one?” I asked. I wasn’t about to get ripped off by Jason, of all people, especially if he expected a tip.

“It’s on the house. You can be my test subject tonight, tell me which variation you like first, okay?” he said, a glint in his emerald green eyes as he made a visual connection with me. He had a way of persuading me to do things, and the fact I’d already had a good amount to drink helped.

“I stopped listening after “on the house”. Sign me up,” I said, with a laugh. Jason could be so frustrating at times, but when he was like this? When he went from being someone I had something complicated with, to that bartender friend everyone wishes they had? That’s how he could win me over, easily.

“Okay, so, that first one, that’s the control, of sorts. I added a cherry, because I know how much you like fruity drinks. How is it?” he asked earnestly.

I took a sip, expecting something sour because of the whole “martini” thing, but it tasted like chocolate milk, but for adults. The cherry’s juices mingled well with the drink as I bit into it, releasing its juices into my mouth and letting it melt into the chocolate, like a fondue in my mouth.

“It’s surprisingly tasty,” I said, and Jason smiled. He started to make the next drink.

“So, why are you escaping from your friends tonight?” he asked.

“The usual, you know?” I knew Jason would know. He just sort of “got me”, unlike most people that judged me based on what I wore, or what I looked like, or the fact I was a sorority girl. Jason? Jason knew that I was different, and that’s what made him different.

“Oh, The Guy, right?” I’d been coming to Club Grit often enough that Jason knew not only my name, and the fact I hung out in the VIP with the Omega crowd at least weekly, but that there was a guy in my life, a guy that I hadn’t told him too much about. Okay, well, that wasn’t exactly true: Jason knew everything about me and Keanne Slims, except for Keanne’s name. I knew that would have changed things, that Jason would have seen me as a groupie or something when that wasn’t the case.

“Yup. They won’t shut up about him,” I said, closing my eyes the way my grandma did whenever she was about to say
bless their hearts
, which was code for
what a fucking mess
.

“And so you escaped to the bar. Nice,” he said with a laugh. “Okay, this next one should be a bit smoother than the last.” He poured the drink, a medium brown versus the dark brown of the first drink, and handed it to me. The drink wasn’t transparent like the last one, looking creamier.

And it was. It tasted like melted milk chocolate, but at the same time, there was something both comforting about it, like a hot chocolate at home with family, as well as exotic, like sands of a foreign beach. It went down like a glass of warm milk.

“It’s...different. What’s in it?”

“That’s got a horchata cream liquor in it, we had to special order it and it’s not very popular on its own. That adds the silkiness as well as a hint of nutmeg and cinnamon. You like it?”

“It’s good. It’s different, but a good different.” Like Jason. Like the thing we had. I passed the glass back across the bar as I savored the aftertaste of the drink.

The way Jason looked at me, it was as if he wanted my approval all the time. It was the kind of look I’d call “pathetic” on anyone else, but Jason was like a puppy, ready to please. All my friends said I should go for Jason, that Jason was the perfect rebound because he was sexy, had a cool job, and was obviously super into me. But part of me was still waiting, waiting for Keanne to see that I was the girl he was meant to be with, and I knew that this summer, things between me and Keanne could get to the next level, and I didn’t want to make things messy by involving Jason. Jason and I...we weren’t meant to be. I had an opportunity, to be with the man that I’d fallen for last summer but had never had the guys to tell. And Jason, well, if things didn’t work out, he’d always be around.

“So, how
are
things going with “The Guy”?” asked Jason, casually. Even though Jason and I were what people would call “friends with benefits”, we still talked about my relationships. It was weird: Jason never talked about the other girls he was seeing (the girls I knew he had to be seeing, given that he was a bartender and all the bartenders had tons of barflies hanging onto them, wanting free drinks and their numbers), but it was just the way our weird arrangement worked. I talked about The Guy, Jason poured me drinks, I tipped well, and he gave me more than just the tip.

“He still hasn’t contacted me, and so things are still complicated until he does,”

“You know, you don’t have to wait for him to contact you,”

“I don’t want to look desperate, you know? Besides, remember? I already tried texting him before and never got answers. It must look creepy as fuck, having five messages from me over five months, all unanswered,”

“Well, if I was The Guy? I’d feel blessed to have a girl like you blowing up my phone,” he said, pouring something that looked like a slushie into a glass and adding a dollop of whipped cream on top with chocolate shavings added as well. I didn’t even know that whipped cream could be used in drinks. “Here. You sorority girls like those Crappuccinos, right?”

“Frappuccino,” I corrected him, rolling my eyes.

“I know, you know I like giving you a hard time,” he said with a smirk, tipping his fedora. Ugh, it was such a stupid habit! I hated that fedora, it was so stupid looking, but all the bartenders at Club Grit wore them, and at least it was from Goorin Bros (as Jason wouldn’t shut up about, especially when we watched Breaking Bad and Walter White’s hat was shown on screen) so it wasn’t as cringe inducing as the cheap boardwalk fedoras that most of the guys in the club wore, neon white in the black lights of the club, except when examined up close: stained and gross with blotches of liquids that were better left unknown.

I took a sip of the drink. It did taste like a Frappuccino, except grittier. I mixed in the whip cream and it became much smoother.

“So, which was your favorite?”

“I’ll have to go with...the chocolate daiquiri. But, you have to blend in the whipped cream or it’s like a snow cone,” I said.

“Duly noted, we’ll call it the Becca.”

“Don’t you fucking dare,” I said with a glare. I rolled my eyes as he walked over to the blackboard and picked up a chalk marker, but my eyes wandered down to his ass. The pants he was wearing were so tight that I knew if he wasn’t wearing his half apron, covering him from the waist down, that his prominent bulge could be seen through the dark denim. The uniforms at Club Grit were altogether far too revealing and sexual, for the men and for the women, in cut out bodycon dresses, but right now, I was enjoying the view.

“So which of these lucky men are you taking home tonight?” he asked, leaning on the counter. “There’s Sparklepants over there, he looks like a real adventure.” He was pointing at a guy who was decked out, head to two, in bedazzled Ed Hardy, from a baseball cap down to his shirt, pants, and shoes. How he’d gotten past the bouncers at the front, I’d never know.

“Gag me with a spoon. Next,” I ordered.

“There’s Mr. Corporate, if that’s your type,” he said, pointing at a guy in a white oxford shirt, pit stains showing, grinding on a girl that looked like she was too young to be at the club to begin with.

“You know I’m not into man purses,” I said, pointing out that there was a strap leading to a “miniature messenger bag”, a.k.a. a man purse or “murse”, on the other side. “Next.”

“Well, m’lady, if none of these men are your type, I can offer myself, as your white knight,” he said.

“God fucking damn it Jason, stop using memes,” I ordered. There was a point where his sarcastic analysis of his douchey job became too close to home and he started sounding like one of the weirdo pick up artists with names like Danger or Disaster who wore fluffy top hats and eyeliner to the club. “But yeah, if you’re free tonight...”

“Well, there’s this little thing called work, that normal people do, Becca, but I’ll be sure to oblige you after my shift is up...which is in about five minutes,” he teased, and I wanted to lean over the counter, shut him up with a kiss, but wasn’t about to risk his job over that. Being at Jason’s bar, watching him make drinks and laugh and talk with people? It was like being at a strip club, where I could look but couldn’t touch, and where Jason was the only man on display. The other bartenders treated this job like it was just a normal job like working in a factory like my dad had or working as a secretary like my mom, but Jason? Even though in private, he joked about how the job was terrible, a stereotype for an artist like himself to be a bartender, to the patrons of the club, he was nice as pie. Even though we joked about people I called “ratchet” and he called “trashy”, if they were at the bar, he was as gracious a host as a Southern housewife, and he knew how to play “the game”, out earning all other bartenders in tips.

I went to my phone to text Kim and Sam, to let them know I wouldn’t be going home with them that night, when I looked and saw I had a text from the one person I’d wondered about for the past school year, non-stop. The one person I couldn’t stop thinking about, except for when I was around Jason.

Keanne Slims: One Unread Message.

I
DIDN’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS. Out of all the times Keanne could have texted me, he chose now? He’d had months to contact me and right now, I was with Jason and didn’t want to think about anyone else. I turned my phone off, all the way off, not bothering to text anyone. I felt a hand on my shoulder and looked up: Jason had taken off his apron and was carrying a small black backpack which had the other parts of his uniform in it, including his fedora. His hair was freed from the confines of that awful felt hat, and I got to rub my hands into it, pushing it back like a comb, feeling its silkiness, the texture protected from the all-too gritty atmosphere of Club Grit that made my own hair feel gross afterwards.

Jason grabbed a cab voucher from behind the bar and we headed off into the night. I zipped up my fluorescent yellowish green American Apparel hoodie over my Lilly dress and Jason opened up his backpack, pulling out a pair of rolled up flats.

“You’re a size eight, right?” he said.

“Yeah, but those aren’t my shoes,” I said. Was he trying to pass off stuff from his sexual lost and found as mine? Or as a present? That wasn’t about to work on me.

“Yeah, I know. I saw these at CVS, they’re flats for after dancing and stuff, and I thought you might want some relief so I got them for you,” he explained, emphasis on the last two words. I felt the lining of the shoes in my hand. They were new, brand new, and although they were inexpensive, they felt like the most luxurious spa slippers in the world as my toes slipped out of my tight white platform heels and into the flats.

I started to slip and Jason took a knee, catching me, stabilizing me. He was my rock and I was Cinderella, as he slipped off the white platforms with their glass-clear plastic tops, the kind you’d see on a stripper, not a princess, and put on the flats, black with a leopard print lining and bow at the tip, like a kid’s pair of ballet slippers. He slipped the shoes over my feet gently, raising and lowering each as if they were precious porcelain he couldn’t risk dropping, before rising again.

And then? The moment was over as Jason hailed a cab and helped me in first, opening the door for me, before slipping in, giving the cabbie his address, and we were off to his apartment. He opened his bag up to get a voucher and I noticed two of the pink papers inside his bag.

“I thought you only got one?” I asked with a frown.

“Yeah, I got one last night, one tonight, so you’d have one for tomorrow morning,” Jason explained.

“So how did you get home last night?”

“There’s this thing called a bus,” he joked. The cab pulled up at his place: an apartment complex mostly filled with college students that went to California State University – Los Angeles. He was the only person I knew who lived here, and we took the elevator to his fifth story apartment. Jason made enough to afford to live alone, without a roommate, and enough to afford a big screen television, which, as we entered, he turned on instead of the lights.

“So, I might have lured you here under false pretenses,” he stated.

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, really. I know that more than anything, you want to rip my clothes off and toss me onto the bed,” he said facetiously, but little did he know how true that statement was. “However, I did just get the Breaking Bad boxed set in the mail, and there’s deleted scenes that I haven’t watched yet.”

“Why not? Too busy?”

“Or, just maybe, I was waiting to watch them with you?” he said. “It’s your choice. Sex...or Breaking Bad.”

“Sex,” I said, pulling him by the hand to his bedroom, but he pulled me to the couch instead and sat, forcing me to sit as well, in front of the large screen TV which was already open to a DVD menu with a bald Bryan Cranston glaring at us, the screen flanked by two large shelves filled with DVDs and many boxed sets. In front of the couch was a plain pine wooden coffee table, and a plush grey area rug filled this section of the studio apartment, with its open floor plan allowing for us to talk from “room” to “room” without yelling.

“Trick question, you’re still too drunk for sex,” he said, giving me a kiss on the cheek as he got up to go to the kitchen, covering me with the throw blanket he kept on the couch, a plain black blanket that was plush, a contrast to the stuffed tufted white Chesterfield sofa.