alice liddell (inquisitive) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-22 11:55:00 |
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Tables, Angie concluded, were never meant for dancing on. It was such a simple, obvious statement, but the need to make sure seemed so necessary about five minutes ago. Now, with the music blaring, people cheering, the few drinks she had flowing through her veins, the table still felt solid. Test over, experiment complete. Still, getting off the table was proving to be problematic, and for a moment she wondered if she should just stay there and keep dancing. The loud spike of cheering caught her attention and she looked up just in time to see the girl next to her, also atop the table though she doubted it was for the same experiment, lifting her shirt. The crowd cheered and the girl nudged her with a hip, gleefully screaming at her to join, at least Angie assumed that’s what she said. Lip reading was a little hard and she couldn’t hear anything over the roar. But no, flashing was definitely not what she wanted to do. Sure it was a tried and true Mardis Gras tradition, but while she was here for a good time, Angie wasn’t one to find spontaneous nudity in front of strangers fun. Not even after two drinks. Or was it three? Who was counting. There was a slight groan of disappointment from the people nearest to her as she gingerly started to climb off the table. She laughed only in response, wondering what reaction they were expecting from her, dressed in grey slacks and burgundy blouse, clearly just off from work, not a usual party girl even if the occasion brought out the partier in her. Despite mostly getting off the edge she almost stumbled, and her hand shot out for the nearest warm body for stability, adding a clear, “Sorry, sorry, sorry! Just need to get my feet on the ground,” in case they were wondering why she was bothering them. Major festivals ought to come, Russ was certain, with warning labels. Sure, Hallmark did the legwork for Valentine’s, gave enough lead time to let you know when to run like hell away from women with that gleam in their eye and Christmas was un-fucking-avoidable when November sidled past a Thanksgiving that had always, long as he could remember, been more about the turkey than it had been about giving thanks for anything. But Mardis Gras was about as obnoxious as they came, everyone hollering like they were the first to get drunk and wanted to make damn sure other people knew the way. The bar wasn’t a favorite, it wasn’t far enough pushed back from the beaten track to be quiet all year around - the kind of place you bought a drink and the bar was tacky with someone else’s, the bartender knew enough to shut up and serve you and the beer was cold. But it wasn’t a bad place, most times. When women came by they weren’t looking for a fantasy, they were looking for a good time and Russ was neither fantasy nor willing to play the role. He stood at the base of a couple of bar tables and he watched with some degree of intent (and fair fascination) as two women got up and shook, the way they did when they were either drunk or trying to make a point about availability. One of them - Russ tilted his head, squinted some, she had a nice rack but now the entire bar knew it and there was something that made it as mundane as the furniture about that - was all short skirt and long hair and smeared lipstick, the kind that would be a puddle behind the bar or weeping about something three beers later. The other was not dressed for shaking her ass on a table. Russ was like many men in the bar, there for entertainment and there for the deviation from a usual night’s routine and he had not bothered to do much between work and the bar other than to wipe his hands clean and switch out his shirt but he knew enough and he had seen enough bachelorette nights for unsteady tables to become apparent.When Red Shirt stumbled, she had one palm against worn flannel and he’d transferred his beer from his right hand to his left, free to hold her off from taking him down to the floor. She was flushed, from the dancing and the heat, a pretty woman and she was attractive enough to dance on tables so she knew it. Russ made his observations with the objectivity of a connoisseur, but his smile was slow and it was steady and it made his eyes very dark, like caramelized sugar. “You planning on taking me down with you?” he asked her conversationally, as if the tabletop dance were an intermission rather than an introduction and his voice was as slow as the smile, an interest in it that was habit rather than intent. From his vantage-point, jammed up against her whilst the crowd swelled around them, Russ could tell she was warm and she was soft, and in Vegas ‘soft’ wasn’t something women took to heart all that often. “What?” Angie asked, smile sliding across her face as she took in the sight of her knight in flannel armor. “And break my fall, possibly spine, on these hard muscles of yours?” Her grin dissolved into a small laugh, barely heard over the noises of the bar but the slide of her hand, moving just to pat him intently on the chest twice, was clearly conveyed. “Not a chance.” Even with the unhelpfully dim lighting of the bar she could see he was handsome, just enough stubble and beard to make her want to dance her fingers along his jaw. It wasn’t until her fingers caught the tip of his chin between her soft fingers, a playful pinch half underway, that she realized she had let her thought get away with her. An impish wink was all the apology she gave before she turned her attention to the beer in his hand. “But I trust your drink is still intact? Mostly intact? Otherwise I think my two left feet,” as if that was the reason she almost bowled him over, “will owe you a beer.” Women did all kinds of things when they were half past tipsy and almost toward drunk. Pushed that close together, intent made real clear, they got just as grabby as the men and Red Shirt soft as she might be was no damn exception. Russ smiled broad and he smiled warm and it was the kind of smile that made people comfortable, at ease. It suggested things without him having to say a word and it distracted them from the easy way it meant nothing at all. Red Shirt tweaked his chin and Russ grinned as if it were a real novelty instead of Vegas on a drinking night. The weight of the beer in his hand was still as it had been and he didn’t need to look at it to know none - or very little - of it had been spilled. “No harm done.” Two left feet? Red Shirt had been shaking it like she’d learned from the best of them; maybe enthusiasm and all the beer floating around in there had had more to do with what sent her flying off the table. One broad hand slid down her hip, “You didn’t break nothing or anything?” He sounded solicitous, the kind of laugh in his voice that said copping a feel was as much about the joke as it was getting a handful. Her laugh was immediate, warm as ever, the alcohol lacing through it neither dulling or strengthening. “Oh, wouldn’t you like to do a thorough check.” She gave him a wry look, swinging her hip to the side, so very aware of his hand and so very okay with it there. Well, provided it stayed mostly there. This was still fun, all this flirting, and touching, and laughing. It wasn’t serious, not everything had to be, and it was still early enough to make sure it stayed so. The moment of brushing against each other passing, she slipped easily out of his arms, hips and hands to herself once more. “How about I buy you a beer instead?” That sounded innocuous enough to her, though everything sounded pretty good at that moment. Her hand already raised she caught the bartender’s attention, intent on ordering something. Whether it would be just for her or for both of them was up to him but she was feeling generous, and thirsty. “Mojito for me and a…” she gestured to Flannel next to her, hands unfurling helplessly as she realized she had no name for him, “whatever he wants. I’m sorry, I didn’t get your name. I’m Angie.” The words tumbled out of her mouth with a sheepish grin. Nearly bowled him over and didn’t get a name. Where were her manners? For a minute or so, she was warm curves that fit into the palm of his hand and some kind of perfume between the smell of beer and clean sweat and Russ didn’t mind Fat Tuesday all so much when the women fell from the sky like Red Shirt had. She pulled away but she smiled like it was a game, and Red Shirt was good at it. Russ didn’t smile, but he tipped the beer bottle in her direction and he drank the last of it and set it down on the bartop alongside the empties from half of Vegas. “Russ,” he put in for her, and there was the smile, slow and steady. She was all over the place was Red Shirt - Angie - and it made him think of bare-scrubbed skin and sheets, the kind of sex that was laughter and anticipation as much as it was hard and fast. “I’ll take another,” he gestured to the empty to the bartender because no one should put leaves in a glass and be expected to drink from it, “Angie.” He said it slow, like he was trying it out, “You always throw yourself at men you don’t know, Angie?” with the kind of grin that pulled her into the joke. “Never,” she insisted, so immediately and dramatically that it might have been seen as insincere if not for the completely embarrassed duck of her chin. Angie was never forward like that. Friendly, sure. Clumsy? Sometimes. So grabby with strangers? Not even. But booze had a certain way of bringing out someone completely different, not to mention the day. “Besides it’s Mardi Gras! It’s the time to do things you don’t usually do. Get it all out of the way and out of your system before tomorrow.” Someone clearly knew more about the meaning of the day and the time of the year – or perhaps cared more, maybe both, than the rest of the dancing, cheering, and drinking revelers around them. But that wasn’t something she advertised, knowing better than that even after so many drinks, and she misdirected their conversation to other things with a soft swing of her hip against his. “So, Russ.” She savored his name with a bright grin, not often coming across a Russ or a Russell, some names just not as prevalent as others. It made her recall the last time she heard – or read – it and though her lips were poised for one thought, they fell apart with a soft “Oh!” as another struck her entirely. With her shoulders pulled back slightly, she gave him an assessing squint, the attempt at seriousness ruined by the way corners of her mouth kept quirking upward. “You wouldn’t by chance have a thing against Hallmark holidays, would you?” Russ didn’t need Mardis Gras to do the things he wouldn’t; he had a solid set of inhibitions that covered what he did not wish to do and he cared little enough for others and their opinions to let them hinder him in what he did wish to do. Mardis Gras was an excuse, for people who didn’t know how to do what they wanted to do the rest of the time, and he shrugged his shoulders like it was nothing because tomorrow would be the same as tonight, and the next night. But he thought she was cute, the embarrassment and the belief in a get out of jail free card because of a festival down in New Orleans, and he smiled as the bartender passed over his beer, and he handed down her mojito, fingers warm against the cold glass. It was quick, the change and it was small. It was a shuttered look behind eyes that had been warm and soft and friendly and the smile didn’t go but it went hard at the corners. Russ didn’t like his worlds bleeding into one another and he didn’t care for the world that demanded doors and locks and other people’s lives, blank space in his own where another had lived his. He eased up a moment later, the smoothness of something gone stiff and then coaxed back into softness, and he looked at her and her green-leafy drink and her soft blond self, and he squinted back, like there was curiosity that didn’t play itself out. “Not a real fan of any holiday,” he said, like there was no room for questions. “You expecting hearts and flowers from someone?” He said it like the room and its beer and its partiers made him think she didn’t, but there was doubt enough to ask it. Angie didn’t understand this need for compartmentalizing. Sure it was weird, beyond weird, having this Door nonsense but they weren’t alone in it. They were many – more numerous than a mob, maybe a few numbers short of a community, but still many – other people in the same boat so there didn’t seem much use in keeping quiet about the whole thing. But Russ, if this was the Russ she was thinking of, was being coy about it all and who was she to burst his bubble? She had seen the change, that fleeting moment where all the fun had disappeared, and though it was quick she wasn’t in the mood to bring down the room again. Changing the subject was just fine for her. “Oh no,” she reassured him, waving the hand that held her mojito glass a little too much before taking a long sip. “I just thought you might someone else. But it was a long shot so don’t even sweat it.” It was truly nothing, no hint of defensiveness in her tone, just simply explaining without going into too much detail about strange devices or voices in the head. That was certainly something like third date material and this wasn’t even a date. “And no flowers or anything. I’m not seeing anyone. Just moved here. Besides, I don’t think I’d be dancing on tables and feeling up cute strangers if I was.” Perhaps it would be different, had the Door and its occupant been anything but closed - for Russ, the community - or band of people clustered around a single and sole connection that didn’t do much for connecting any of them - was limned down to the lack of something. Days strung together, he woke up one day to voicemails about shifts he’d never shown up for and Russ had little intention (and a small disappointment) in tying laughing, blond Angie to a name and a handwriting and a sentiment about sharing one’s life down the middle. He raised an eyebrow, all comfortable solidity and the beer bottle fit nicely into his palm as he watched the progress of her cocktail as her hand wavered with no small amount of wariness as to its trajectory. “Honey, if you call that feeling a man up,” he said, slow and measured and the pace of it was enough to say he was native, not tinsel and tawdry but the kind of trash that sat on wheels in the dirt and waited out the long hot sun, “You’ve been missing out.” His laugh was a gravelly thing and it had the implication of suggestion. “Where are you from, they don’t dance on tables there?” Missing out? He didn’t know the half of it, but the thought was kept checked behind a warm grin and a laugh, a tinkling contrast to his rough chuckle, before she pressed her fingers to her lips to sweep the few drops of an ill-timed sip from her mouth. “Oh, they dance like that back in LA. I, however, don’t.” With one hand grasping her cocktail, her free one gestured down her body, as if he or anyone else had forgotten her attire, or the fact that she still had them on. “This, Russ,” she said, leaning closer, voice dropped one notch to an almost conspiratorial whisper, if not for the loud bar they were in, “is a once a year sort of deal. I’d actually be surprised if it happened next year.” Granted, her previous recollections of past Mardi Gras partying were a bit fuzzy now but at the moment, Angie had not one intention of partying again, let alone next year. “If you end up catching another dancer’s fall, it won’t be mine.” Once a year sounded real dismal to him; once in twelve months to cut loose and to have fun, the unthinking and purely for pleasure fun that was as much part of Vegas as the neon and the feathered, half-naked women. He let her lean in, mint and alcohol on her warm breath was not unpleasant and he smiled acknowledgment as another guy looked on over, drunk enough to make the oblique stare at Angie’s ...assets real obvious. He looked back, the kind of pleasant, ambivalent hardness to it that was not threat nor opening gambit but enough to turn the guy’s head back to his own company. “I can’t think why you don’t dance like that every day,” his voice had warmed through, honey and whiskey and laughter in the back of it like effervescence. He took his time looking the path her hand had drawn and he made his admiration as obvious and clear-cut as it was sober. His eyes lingered a little and then deliberately lifted back up to bright eyes and pink cheeks and all that blond hair. “You don’t need to go fallin’ on me, honey. You just gotta ask.” Pink cheeks deepened into a slightly rosier blush, realizing how easily welcomed a once over a moment too late. But she did enjoy the attention, taking a moment to give him an amused smirk until he spoke, making her swat his arm with her free hand, the other setting the now empty glass on the bartop. “Tempting, tempting,” she replied coyly, her once over just as obvious as his, though tinged with a hint of regret as gaze climbed up toward his face. Her green eyes met his for a moment before she turned her attention to the bartender, signaling for and smiling when he handed her bill. “But I should be going,” she said, signing her name on the dotted line with a flourish. There was sleep to be had and mass and work in the morning, no falling or asking anywhere in sight. A pity. He enjoyed the blush, even if it came with another physical attack; Russ liked the way women lit up, be it full of anger or full of something else. It was like they couldn’t contain it, most of them, couldn’t help it spilling out and getting all over. It was fascinating; Angie went pink and Russ grinned comfortable and easy, the bar at his elbow and he leaning into it like it was there for exactly that. “You gonna turn into a pumpkin?” he didn’t need to look at a watch to know it was early still, early enough for the partiers not to drift away from the bar. She didn’t look like the in-bed-before-nine sort, if he stretched his mind that way. “Night’s still young.” His fingers grazed her wrist, real gentle, like it was an accident. “Something like that,” she insisted, a loud hint of wistfulness in her tone but even when she turned when he touched her wrist, a sheepish smile on her face and nervously tucking stray blond hair over her ear, there wasn’t any dissuading her. Already she was sliding off her stool and checking to make sure she had all her things once more. “Don’t worry, I think my shift is officially covered.” Her free hand gestured to the table she was dancing on earlier, another blonde joining the other girl as they flashed and cheered and drank to their hearts content. Angie couldn’t help her amused laugh – she wasn’t going to begrudge someone’s good time – and turned to toss Russ a wink before turning to the door. “Have fun, Russ. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” A beat. “Well, maybe not. But have fun, at least.” |