A Stick in the Mud or a Disco Stick?
Who: Ro, Brian What: Harassing Miles, Talking When: Present, Evening Where: Searchlight Warnings: Language
Recently back in Vegas meant Ro was back to going in and out of Searchlight. The small town wasn't a place she wanted to live but it was Ronnie's home. The drive wasn't so bad to see a friend. She often stopped on her way in and out, getting a snack or something to drink. Today, Ro was in M&M's. She'd been enjoying the drop in temperature, wearing a T-shirt, one tattooed arm hanging over the edge of her open window as she drove down. It was pleasant and she wanted a treat. There was another customer, a good looking dark-haired man. The corner of Ro's mouth turned up as she ordered (a white mocha with an extra shot, sweet foam, and caramel drizzle; as well as a croissant that she had given a hard appraising look). When asked, she gave the name Ro for her order and received her croissant. Fluffy but not layered the way something she made would be. Win some, lose some. Popping pieces into her mouth, she went to wait next to Tall Dark and Handsome.
…Who had ordered a coffee from the person at the register and was in animated, but quiet, conversation with the man making it.
“Do I want the usual?” Brian lifted both index fingers. “No, Miles, I don’t. I don’t even want the unusual, but it’s either here or the truck stop, so I’m gonna stand here and stare at you the whole time and you’re gonna pour a regular cup of coffee.” He watched for Miles to slide a mug his way. “Dude, no-- don’t, I can put my own sugar in it.”
The sandy-haired barista mumbled, “Fine. Order up for Brian.” He plunked the hot beverage on the counter. If Miles was the invisible man before the text message fiasco, he was a minor celebrity now. He sulked as he read a display and began making a white mocha for the next customer.
With one hand in his jeans pocket, Brian took his coffee to a table of condiments and upended a glass canister of granules. A tiny spout in the metal lid opened. Sugar spilled out in an arc, then the whole top fell off, dumping a mountain of white crystals everywhere but his cup. Brian grabbed the lid and screwed it back into place.
So this was Brian. Too bad he was such a stick in the mud. A regular upright citizen. Or at least playing one, considering his secret. "Are we wrecking the place? Need a wingman?" Ro offered. "Sugar packet confetti is always fun. Fuck stevia."
Brian looked up from scraping sugar into a hole and hoping there was a trash can under it. He didn’t know the woman talking to him, but he smiled at her. “I’m always down for destroying the M&M. Right, Miles?” he called. The employee’s cheeks puffed out with a sigh. “Don’t mind him,” Brian said. “He’s grounded.” The werewolf rubbed his palms together to get the sugar off; it was relatively successful.
He took a sip of his coffee. The saccharine flavor was tooth-rotting, but he’d punch his own balls before he asked Miles for another cup. “I don’t think I’ve seen you before,” he added. “If we need a getaway car, you’re driving.”
She had maybe two minutes before Miles announced her name. That might be interesting. "I can handle that but you'll need new coffee." Ro had a lot of experience measuring sugar and the amount of sugar that just went into his cup was a lot. "Here, trade." She handed Brian her mediocre croissant, took his cup without waiting for him to agree.
She marched up to the counter, glaring hard at Miles and when she smiled it was all teeth. "Need new coffee. Black. Fix it or I have nothing but time to fuck with you." And then she folded her arms over her chest and stared until a new cup was produced. She blew a kiss as she took it just to see the look on his face and returned back to Brian. "Here."
“Wow, thanks.” Amused, Brian raised it in salute. This time, he used a plastic spoon to put sugar in it. Better safe than sorry. He stirred the contents and licked a drop of coffee from the bowl-shaped end. Not bad. While he waited for the short-haired woman’s drink to come up, he stood next to her, keeping her company. Miles dropped an ingredient. Brian leaned closer to her and murmured, “I think he might have pissed himself. You have that effect on all baristas or just this guy?”
He studied her profile.
There was something… He couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe a kind of mischief about her, as if she knew a joke no one else saw happening, and she moved with a lot of confidence. It could be that Miles was reacting to that. Meanwhile, Brian was a guy who might have been intimidating -- long hair, a thin, black hoodie pushed up to his elbows, tattooed forearms, frayed jeans, lean muscles -- except his smile was crooked and his eyes were kind. It took work to convince people he had claws three days per month.
"I'm a people person. It's either that or something very, very different." Ro took back her croissant, poking at it sadly.
She leaned over the edge of the counter, all lithe angles. "Don't forget my sweet cream and my caramel, Miles. The lamination on your pastries is average at best, I really don't want to be disappointed in my drink, too."
She straightened up and looked at Brian. "If it goes wrong, we can still riot."
There was some clanking and a hiss of a steam before Miles deposited a cup on the counter with "Ro" scrawled on the side.
Brian snapped his fingers.
“You!” His face lit up in recognition. “Arrow.” He looked around and lowered his voice. “He’s squaring off with two of us at the same time, no wonder he’s freaked out. Wait.” He gestured at Miles, who had recently celebrated his twenty-second birthday. Brian knew that because he found the kid hugging the men’s toilet in Lucky’s on his twenty-first birthday. “That’s not… Oh no. You didn’t break up his parents’ marriage, did you?”
He put the cup up to his mouth to cover a smile. It didn’t work.
Ro's eyebrows could be seen from space. "Not as far as I know. And I don’t accept that. Marriages break up for all kinds of reasons after things go wrong for a long time. Not my fault.. If a car is built badly and a part fails and it crashes into a pole, is it the pole's fault or was the problem there all along?"
Ooof. That backfired. “Hey.” Brian stopped short of touching her, but he put out a friendly hand. “That was a bad joke. Sorry, I was trying to take the edge off.” Judging by the expression on her face, he put a new edge on, which was a dick move after she got him a new drink. He raised his shoulders. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think you look like a pole.”
"I bet you say that to all the girls." The flirtation was almost a reflex, easy as breathing and just as thoughtless. "You were hard on me. I figured you for some stick-in-the-mud rules lawyer who was going to start lecturing me on ruining people's lives."
Brian made a face. Was that how he came off? Jesus. He swallowed a sip of his coffee and said, “I think the theme of that week should be, ‘Just because I wouldn’t do it doesn’t mean I hate you for it.’ Especially since I got called out for mauling someone to death.” He lifted his cup in salute to the barista. What a shit-head.
“What’s your deal, anyway?” he asked Ro. “How’d you get lumped in with the rest of us?”Brian’s eyes did an up-and-down, searching for ‘the thing,’ trying not to be obvious about taking a deeper breath. No nose twitch. She didn’t smell like a vampire. He liked her tattoos.
Ro shrugged, an indication of what she thought of Brian's mauling. Not much. She'd made it clear in their crazy week of shared secrets that she wasn't one to hold a past against someone. Brian didn't seem likely to tear her throat out or go on a sudden rampage. Not her problem.
Ro was good at knowing when she was being looked at. She met Brian's gaze with an even more obvious one of her own as she sipped her drink. “Ahh," she said slowly. "You want to know if I'm like you. Sure. We're both into ink. You've got some catching up to do though." Her eyebrows rose and the corners of her mouth curled up. "I'm an etheric." No sense in playing coy. Fucking Miles already knew.
Etheric. He scanned his memory for it. If a piece of critical supernatural knowledge hadn’t come to him in Searchlight, there was always Jersey, where his pack got knee-deep in it. Occasionally it was another thing. “Oh.” He pulled on his earlobe, which was hot. “I was in Santa Monica once, about two years ago. I went out there with my band, we were doing a show at Harvelle’s. The opening act was this kinda rock ‘n roll burlesque group, then it was us, then a local band. I met this girl in the crowd.” Brian’s hand migrated to the back of his head. “It’s kinda fuzzy,” he admitted. “I remember her name was Harper. She had an Anna Kendrick vibe. I think excitement was her… what do you call it, food?”
His eyes cut to the display of pastries. “It turns out werewolves are packed with nutrients.”
"We don't all know each other. I don’t go up to every dog I see and ask if it knows Brian." She shook her head. "And that's food." Ro pointed at the pastry case, raising her voice for Miles. "And it's crap. You have to laminate the dough. Cold butter!" She grinned, enjoying the sound of a spoon clattering against the milk container.
"My feed is something different. It's not so much the type of creature but the strength of the feeling. I'm a lust etheric so," she waved a hand, "You do the math."
Brian leaned towards Ro. “You know what a story is, right? It’s all in the details. I didn’t expect you to know her. Anyway, I think I’m wording this wrong. Weres have stamina,” he clarified, figuring Ro would appreciate a blunt explanation. “You know? Or maybe you don’t.” He raised his hands and backed towards the register. “You did call yourself a faker.”
He took a couple of bills out of his wallet. Two tip jars stood side by side on the counter, one marked Alien, the other Predator. Brian’s hand hovered over the Predator jar, then he remembered the Sigourney Weaver factor and went for Alien.
"No, I am not of this world and unaware of the concept of stories," Ro said with a light and breezy sarcasm. "Touchy, Sticky." Brian wasn't as lecturing as she would have expected but his identity had become firmly fixed in her mind as Stick In The Mud. Ro had a moment of distraction thinking of alternate phrases (hall monitor, mall cop, Canadian mountie for some reason) but Stick...had stuck.
"I like a nice long ride on a disco stick probably more than anyone. I'm old enough to know not everyone cares about the old give and take. Especially when people look at you and see an object to want." Ro sipped from her coffee, quiet, and then burst out. "Why did stamina matter to Excitement Girl? Did you sleep with Excitement Girl? You did, didn't you? You had sex with Excitement Girl." Her words tripped with laughter, amused.
Brian folded his wallet and put it in his hip pocket. “You just catching onto that? Wow.” He gave the other employee, a newer girl with a shiny nametag that read ‘Olivia’, a wide-eyed look, asking the unspoken question: can you believe this one? Laughing, Brian gestured towards the front door of the coffee shop. Did she want to go for a walk, pull up a chair, or keep standing by the counter?
Ro threw the remains of her croissant in the trash and flashed her middle finger at Brian. "Kids going to Disneyland are excited. Excitement doesn't have to mean I want you inside me." She did want to step out into the fresh air. Ro held the door open behind her for Brian. "I've never done the groupie thing," she said thoughtfully. "Is it fun? If it's just ego-stroking I'll stick with rich tourists on the strip. Hotel rooms might be better."
He let the door close quietly and joined her outside. “Is it fun to be a groupie?” Brian nudged a broken chunk of sidewalk with his shoe. It clinked into the gutter. “I guess it could be. You get to know all the bands, you get access, you can drink other people’s alcohol instead of yours. But if you’re in it for the sex?” He sipped his coffee and thought about it. “It probably sucks.”
He put a hand up, lest she think he was being a stick in the mud again. “I’m not knocking casual sex, but I get the feeling sex is a means to an end for people who hang around musicians, or something they feel like they have to do, and the people they’re sleeping with know it, so they’re putting in minimum effort.”
Ro leaned against a column, crossing her ankles and sipping her drink. "And that, Sticky," she said, licking away foam from her lip, "is why I don't take shit about faking it. Imagine that transaction almost every time, forever."
Light bulb on. “Got it.” And Brian thought he did. If someone figured out she needed sex to survive, and that all that mattered for it to feed Ro was their own pleasure, there was a selfish percentage of the population who would let the rest fall to the wayside. He stood with his shoes half on and half off the curb, bouncing, wondering if dancing worked and if sex was just the most potent way, and if Ro had sex when it wasn’t for survival, and some other things. All of that seemed like a lot of personal questions and they hardly knew each other.
He spent a few seconds staring into space, the coffee cooling in his hand. “Sorry. I was thinking about having to make myself attractive and appealing to an endless series of partners. Being a werewolf is looking pretty good.” Brian emptied his cup and tossed it into a garbage can. “So between that and laminating dough, does it keep you pretty busy, or do you get into anything else for fun?”
"And what a burden that would be for you," she couldn't help but tease. Brian was good looking. On the other hand, Ro was routinely told she was gorgeous, knew it was true, and still had to put forth a great effort in her appearance when she was going out. Well, out out. Today she was just in jeans and ankle boots, with a white T-shirt cuffed at the sleeves and covered in black outlines. No makeup but eyeliner. All the work was to entice people she could feed on with no strings. Ro was meant to be desired and on some level that meant understanding the ways that made her an object. She'd learned over time to balance her own self-expression with the needs of her life. And everything was easier now than it had been in the sixties.
She was antsy, some combination of caffeine and weather putting an edge under skin. Ro straightened up, nudging a cracked newspaper box on the sidewalk with her toe. "Laminating dough is my hobby. I bake and I cook. Get tattoos. I like to have a good time. Still binge Netflix in my underwear the same as the next non-human. And what about you Sticky? What do you do when you're not hooking up with girls who came to see your band and asking people in text messages about their choices?"
Brian’s head cocked to the side. “You trying to convince yourself I’m an asshole?” He caught his tongue between his molars and watched Ro. Then he offered, “That girl, Harper, she wasn’t there for what was happening on stage. She was there for the crowd. I’m pretty sure I was dessert. I don’t usually hook up with people after shows.” Brian looked at the sky, the stars in it bright enough to overcome the meager lights of the town. “What do I do..? I run a bar. I play piano, guitar. I write music, ninety percent of which doesn’t see daylight. I run a lot. It keeps me from overthinking. It’s hard to think when you’re dying of heat exhaustion.”
He shrugged his shoulders, allowing, “I probably drink too much.”
"Not at all," Ro said breezily as if reassuring Brian she didn't mind if he had the last donut. "I think you think I'm one." Maybe that was what bothered her. Ro didn't think of herself in terms like asshole but she liked to be liked. Feeling as if she wasn't had her pressing against the boundaries, wanting to be both endearing and at the same time, worse than expected. It was an antsy feeling and she drummed her fingers against her thigh.
"Ah yes. Running. Gotta work that werewolf stamina somehow. And we all drink too much. How do you get through eternity without a little oblivion now and then?"
Brian put his hands in the pockets of his hoodie. “If I thought you were an asshole, I wouldn’t be standing here.” It was easy enough to give a polite greeting but maintain distance. “I swallow a lot of shit from people when I’m on the clock. I don’t have to take my coffee with it.” His mouth lifted with humor. “It does seem like you’re always playing thumb war.”
Behind him, an old sedan turned onto Hobson Street and accelerated its final stretch toward the driver’s home. When it hit a pothole, the sound was enough to set his teeth on edge.
Ro's smile returned. "I'm always playing a lot of things. That's another way to pass your time. Need to keep things interesting or the shine goes off." There was a slurping now as she sipped from her cup, coffee nearly gone. "But I'm a delight, ask anyone."
“Nah.” Brian shook his head. “Why bother with what someone else thinks?” He let his foot find the street behind him. A piece of litter crinkled under his shoe. “Maybe that should be part three of my code. Don’t make the same mistake twice, don’t make somebody else’s life worse, and don’t worry about what other people think… That’s not bad.”
He reached up and patted himself on the back of the shoulder. “I’m gonna get out of here. You good?” Brian gestured to her in case she needed a ride somewhere.
"Always." There was a garbage can a step way and Ro tossed her empty cup inside with a clatter. "You ever get bored of running or you want a new way to work off that stamina, you have my number."
Brian pulled out his key ring as he backed away. He checked up and down the street to make sure he wasn’t about to get mowed down. “You need someone to carry some heavy boxes?” He kept walking, turning in the direction of home. The werewolf’s voice bounced off the asphalt and the few buildings that dotted the street. “I’m kidding, Ro.”
"If you want it to involve heavy lifting, that can be arranged," she shouted after him, smiling to herself and turning away towards her car.