Whiskey Sour Noir (The Hard Stuff) (3 page)

Now here I sat, both brave and scared to death. Because of some man. Which was silly. When nobody was looking, the Gulf Stream had up and died. Now the fancy people in Paris were wearing fur overcoats in August and Dublin was iced like a vanilla cupcake. Things were bad all over.
Hey,
I told myself,
if the Florida peninsula’s about ready to sink into a cold mean sea, why not take a run at Cat Avery while you still can, girl?

I bucked up, put on a brave grin, and eased myself across the bar toward Avery, who was polishing a beer mug with that grimy towel of his. “Make me something different today. A fancy umbrella kind of cocktail.”

I didn’t know cake from cornbread for any of the standard menu mixed drinks. Like I told you, I’m a simple girl with simple trash tastes. Don’t know why I asked him for such that. But it worked out just as well, at least for the time being.

“How about something straight out of the New York School of Bartending, circa 1969?” he asked. When I smiled and shrugged, he said, “Rum punch? Sloe gin fizz? Harvey wallbanger? Whiskey sour?” I must have perked up at the mention of whiskey because he nodded and said, “Whiskey sour, coming up.”

He sauntered down the bar with me watching the twitch of his buns, the way they filled out a tight pair of worn jeans with only the teeniest sag. I stared openly at his long arms with footballer muscles that bunched up when he used the silver shaker to mix my drink.
Um-hmm
. Cat Avery could take my mind off everything. I forgot about the mean sons-of-bitches who broke their own kids’ ribs for no reason, the rapist dads with their lying faces and heavy paws, the men who thought nothing of boarding up a trembling wife, hammering her inside a tumble-down house, just so they could go to the track with their low-IQ buddies.

Not to mention the upcoming end of the world as we know it. The lack of precipitation along the Atlantic coasts, the ensuing drought and famine, the freezing temperatures in normally mild areas. The resulting stock market crash, the housing crash, the everything crash. Hell in a fast-track hand basket. But all that tuned out as I watched Cat Avery strut back down the bar with a pretty little drink in his hand. And that’s what seemed, at the time, more relevant to my happiness than the rapidly dropping temperature of the Atlantic Ocean. He made me forget who I was and where we were at, allowing me to focus in on what I wanted to be.

Naked. With Cat Avery. In his bed. Or, preferably, mine.

He set the fuzzy drink in front of me with a jack flourish and, I have to say, I liked the color of that beverage. Reminded me of sunset on the bay. Of mango soup. Of the leaves up north in late October.

“What’s in this?” I asked him while I lit into it with a sniff and a swaller.
Yum
. Smelled like it tasted, went down smooth and cool. Autumn like.

“Three parts bourbon, two parts lemon juice, jigger of syrup. Shaken, and served on the rocks in an old fashioned glass.”

He leaned across the bar between us, watching me with those tidal eyes of his. I tried to think about my drink, sipping intently, but it was no real use. He smelled like vacation, like limes and pineapples and sunbaked flesh.

“You know your whiskey history, Tami Lee?” he asked.

I said no and licked the sugar from my lips. Slow enough that I caught him watching my tongue. I have a nice sharp tongue. I was pretty sure he wanted it in his ear, navel, and elsewhere, so I stuck it out a little bit and smiled around it.

“I’m serious,” he added. “Whiskey was around before Jesus was, and in my opinion has saved more men from despair.”

Down the end of the bar by the rest rooms, a couple of young drinkers with their caps on backward stood up to fiddle with the TV. “I’ll get that for you, guys,” Avery called to them. He turned back to me and said, “I think we need time alone. To talk about the creation of the whiskey sour.”

It was all I could do to not grab him in a headlock and drag him back to Love House, cavegirl style. Something about his victimhood brought out the primitive in me. I’m attracted to vulnerable losers. This is typical of women lacking confidence. But I just sat there, sipping at my sweet and sour, gave him a tiny nod. Like I was hesitant, rather than foaming at the bit. “What time you get off work?” was what I managed to say.

“Five, or as soon as Chaz and Chet come in. Chet has his kid cleaning the johns, says it’ll man him up. Ever see the inside of the men’s room in this place? Not for the weak of gut.”

He shook his handsome head and went down the bar to fix the TV the way the boys wanted it. More negativity from the talking heads, more dire warnings, more reason to drink too much and have wild sex with ex-cons. I didn’t care much for the whiskey sour. Not my kind of drink, too nice, too civilized. But it sure went down easy and it softened up the edges, giving my chicken ass a little kick in the direction intended.

“You coming to my place after work or are you inviting me to yours?” I asked when Cat Avery returned to my end of the bar. When he looked startled, I turned it into a joke. “If the whiskey history lesson is long, we’ll have to finish it up somewhere.”

I almost swallowed my tongue when he leaned right into me and kissed me on the mouth. His lips were cold, but wide and soft. He pushed his fat tongue into my mouth and ran it around my sticky teeth. He tasted as tropical as he smelled.

When I reached up to touch his face, he pulled away, looked around like he was guilty of something. I didn’t think Chet would care if his bartender hustled a customer or two. Wasn’t like it hadn’t happened before. To me. In this very bar. In fact, I’d gone a few rounds with Chet himself when I first moved to Pearl Street.

“You want another one of these before you go home and get your bedroom all ready?” Cat Avery asked me in a low, sexy voice. He used his shoulder rag to blot the sweat that had suddenly appeared on his forehead. God, I hoped he washed that nasty thing once in a while.

I slid off the stool and adjusted my wifebeater so that my lower back tats were covered. “Love House, room sixty-one,” I said quietly. “Now don’t keep Tami Lee waiting.”

“This is most convenient. I can do the long jump and I’ll be in your lobby.” He swung his arms like he was readying to hop hard and far. “I’ll be over less than a minute after I punch out,” he said through a stifled laugh that sounded more excitement than mirth.

In this regard, he was good to his word. By five-fifteen we were in my bed, clothes tossed around the small hot room, our naked parts mashed up against each other’s.

He took care of my needs first. His long, rough fingers delved and traced and prodded me into some state of grace I thought only the Tibetan monks were capable of reaching. Eyes closed, I saw a cemetery full of white lights, candle-lit arbors, a fiery suttee. His tongue knew its way to the center of the edge, where I hung by a thread, limbs shaking like fall leaves, until, with one final lick, he pushed me over. I let out a bellow that made us both laugh.

He climbed on top of me and I eased him inside. His dick was good and long and slick, and he knew how to slide it around until I was back on the edge again. Just as I let go, he covered my mouth with his hand. I groaned and latched onto his fingers, suckling them, and he began to thrust hard, then harder. We rocked the hard times as he gave me a pounding that made my ears ring. The bed left the floor over and over, his thrusting lifting us onto some other plane. Both of us drooled and moaned, and at one point I swear I heard a train coming right for us.

When he finally let go, it was with the fire-hose gusto of a man who has spent years alone in a bunk bed looking at photos of airbrushed starlets. Not tater tots.

Still, I listened close when he talked about his case. Which he began to do right after he came, and continued to do quite a lot in the days and weeks that followed. Unfortunately for me, he wasn’t in love with me. No, instead we’d eased into a comfortably familiar fuck-buddy routine.

After work and a whiskey sour at the Kettle, I’d give him the okay sign and come on home. Pretty soon he’d knock on my motel door and we’d go at it like couple of thirsty camels. Then I’d get us each a post-coital beer and we’d lie around my tousled bed, sipping and talking. Mostly it was him talking, me listening, um-hmming, listening some more. Especially when he went on about the whole child porn thing.

I wasn’t interested in having a fling with a pervert. I sleep down, but not that far down. From the first time, I was pretty damn sure I wasn’t doing the bump with a creep. From what I know after working at the DIC, your typical pederast likes his girls younger, flatter, much more compliant than me. I’m an aggressive sexpot if I do say so myself. Once I’m set on a man, I aim myself at him like a heat-seeking Parabellum and I go right for the tender center.

Cat Avery liked that about me. He knew how to please me, and he knew how to please himself too. The man loved his sexing. A lot. I know gay and I think I know perv, and he was neither of those. So Avery’s bad luck story seemed to back up my feeling he was one of the unknown number of not-guilty who’d been tagged unjustly.

“All the time I was inside, I did some deep thinking about who it could’ve been that set me up,” he said one night, two beers after our last lingering kiss. “You sit in a six by ten alongside a baby rapist with a creative brain the size of a billy goat’s, and you do some deep thinking about how you got to where you are. You think hard and long, all right.”

I rolled over onto my damp belly and tried to hold in a beer fart. We were close, but not that kind of intimate. “Reminds me of time spent with my clients at the DIC,” I said. “All those bruised people so numbed down they can never figure out why the hurt and why not go back for more. We talk it out and they blame everybody but themselves. Called self-victimization, Avery.”

“Hey,” he yelled, loud enough for me to squeak out my gas. “I
was
victimized. No joke, counselor. I got had, and there had to be a reason for it. I’ve been thinking about what that reason could be and who could have had it. Thinking hard for a hell of a long time.”

He grabbed my head and turned it, held his face mashed up to mine. I could see the pores on his straight nose, the fine wrinkles at the edges of his clear eyes. His breath mixed beer with pineapple, a hoppy aroma I’d grown accustomed to. He’d said he didn’t drink, but he didn’t drink
much
. Just a beer or two with me after work. Did this constitute a lie? At the very least, it was a parole violation, or that such.

“I wouldn’t be here with you if I liked little tykes, now would I?” He didn’t let go of my face until I shook my head, as in
no sir
. His eyes beckoned to me and welcomed me inside, where the truth lay waiting for me to embrace it. “I need you to believe in me, Tami Lee. It’s difficult enough without having to prove myself to you, too.”

That pissed me off. “Is that what this is all about? You proving you’re a he-man by banging the local bar-hopper?” I sat up against the wall where the wallpaper was darkened from people leaning against it to smoke in bed. Love House is the kind of place where you get a furnished room, usually by the hour, so it comes without headboards or other such amenities. “I’m good for a go with all kinds of pitiable men, but I do not abide being used.”

He snickered. “Tami Lee, you are a real character.” He reached over to play with my belly ring, twiddling it until I almost jumped out of my overheated and overly sensitive skin. He began to stroke my hip, carefully sidling the other warm hand down between my legs. “I like you and I want you to know me and like me for who I am. If that’s using you, I can’t see how.”

He slipped a finger inside me and I slid into it while he talked. I got to say, he had a special way of convincing a girl of his truth and intent.

He kept talking and, somehow, I kept listening.

“After much consideration, I narrowed the possibilities to three persons of interest. My boss, my wife, and the grad student who worked as my teaching assistant. Of the three, Rindle Champion is most likely. He’s a top-notch teacher and I liked having him with me in the classroom. But he’s got a killer instinct when it comes to climbing the hierarchy. Killer. And he’d be up his own asshole if that would help jumpstart his fledgling career. If you’ll excuse the phrase.”

Not one to take offense while on the verge of a raging orgasm, I let it pass, said nothing. My hips twitched against his hand. The train was coming, full steam ahead. I guess my heavy breathing encouraged Avery to continue talking about his prime suspect. First time I hear about the man who ruined Cat Avery’s life and I’m less than a minute away from screaming his name like I love him. Which I kind of did.

“Rindle Champion took over my old job at the high school less than a year after I left. He was still a grad student when I was there, worked in my classroom on a part-time basis, then subbed for me while I went on temporary leave. I had to sit in a rubber room while he taught my kids where Iran was located on the world map, showed them the Persian Gulf, Tasmania, the fucking Côte d’Ivoire. After all I did for him, all the guidance I gave him in the classroom, the off-duty time I spent listening to him, advising him. All along, what he wanted was to replace me. Any way he could.” Avery wasn’t paying attention to his hand, and I began to lose tension. The train wasn’t going to stop at the station. “My wife loved that boy. He brought her more roses than I did. And I was into the surprise bouquets, all right.”

Something in me wilted and I pushed his hand away. “Rubber room?” I asked, when what I really wanted to say was,
Where’s my roses, my surprise bouquets?