Old Roommates
Izzy entered Bull & Whistle after the end of a very long and trying day at the hotel. For whatever reason, it seemed most of the guests hadn't figured out what they wanted to do when they got to Key West. Izzy had been running ragged all day, setting up last minute reservations for this activity or that on top of helping those who were doing their planning in advance.
Why her alternate picked hospitality management, the witch had no idea, but she knew if she'd stayed any later, there might have been a homicide. At least now the workday was done and she could relax, and she'd changed out of her work clothes before walking over to the bar. It was crowded, but not oppressively so, and there was even a spot open at the bar, score! Izzy slid into the open seat and ordered a margarita, letting her fingers tap on the bar in time with the music from the band playing on stage.
The Bull and Whistle was a long-time fixture of the island. The first floor was dark, rustic, and open-air on two sides. The walls it did have were painted in murals of famous Key West personalities. On the second floor, the windows and balcony overlooked Old Town. On the foliage-heavy roof, clothing was optional.
No matter how much that appealed to Hayden on a visual level, he preferred it downstairs, where a guy had to work to get a woman to take off her shirt. And generally speaking, it happened afterward. At the bar, he engaged in light banter with the bartender, a college-aged kid named Tony, whom he'd been trying to lure over to Abandon Ship for months. He liked going to different places for drinks. For one thing, it was almost impossible to relax with a beer in his own bar. For another, he could check out the competition.
Okay, that was a stretch and he knew it. The Bull and Whistle was legend. His bar was convenient for people who owned yachts. Anyway, keeping an eye on what was going on in other places gave him business ideas.
"Hey, Tony, can I get another beer?" He put some money on the bar, stuffed a couple more dollars in the tip jar. Then Hayden rested his elbows on the wood. A few grains of salt stuck to his arm. He picked it up and brushed them off. When a woman sat down next to him, he looked at her profile with a normal amount of curiosity, then faced forward again.
Izzy hadn't paid the occupants of the stools on either side of her much notice until the voice to her right spoke up and her eyes widened. Hayden! She'd know that voice anywhere, having shared the same house with the man for close to a year before the events that night in Chicago had sent her into this dimension five years in the past.
The blonde looked over and confirmed what her ears had told her. Definitely Hayden Maragos. A little younger, a little less careworn maybe, but definitely Hayden.
"Here you are." The bartender handed her the previously ordered margarita with a smile and she handed over a twenty with a request to bring another once this drink was finished. She took a sip of the fruity concoction and sighed. "That's perfect."
So... to introduce herself to this Hayden or no? Izzy debated for a moment then decided to go for it. There wasn't any harm in getting reacquainted with an old friend, even if they didn't know it. "Excuse me," she tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention, "I'm sorry but I'd swear I've seen you someplace before, have we met?" It was even true, she could swear she'd seen him someplace on Key West before now that she knew what he looked like here.
Surprised, he looked over at the blonde, then squinted his eyes as he tried to place her face. It didn't ring any bells. "Nah, I don't think so," he said. Instead of turning back around, he stuck his hand out at her. "Small island. You probably bumped into me at the post office or something." He smiled, the kind that revealed he was well-aware how lame that sounded. The post office? Like he hung out there or something. Cruised chicks while he bought stamps. There was a package joke in there somewhere, but he let it fly by.
"I'm Hayden." His beer landed in front of him. He nodded distractedly at Tony.
"I'm Izzy, pleased to meet you Hayden," she grinned at him. "Post office huh? If you say so." The blonde took a sip of her margarita before she said anything more. After a day like she'd had today, alcohol was a necessity. "So you aren't a tourist then, good. I get enough of that at work."
"Uh, definitely not," he said, laughing into his mug. "I think you lose the title of tourist when you start paying taxes and rent down here." The cost of living was astronomical, unless you lived in the ghetto, and Key West had some of that. Hayden swallowed his beer. "I've been here a couple of years." He reached back and rubbed at his nape. Whenever he was thinking, he tended to do things like that absentmindedly. "Can't really imagine going back. I'm from New York, upstate," he said. "Too much snow." Too much a lot of things. The claustrophobia of a small town where no one new ever came, and few people ever left, didn't appeal to him. How his parents adjusted after living in Manhattan, he'd never figure out.
"I've only been here since May." Although really it had only been about the last two months, as far as this Izzy was concerned. "I'm from Atlanta, but I like it down here, it doesn't hardly get cold at all! Even 'cold' just means put on jeans and long sleeves. I spent a year up in Chicago. Northern winters are horrible!
"So what do you do down here, Hayden? Kind of a long ways away for a New Yorker to end up living."
Chicago? He tried to imagine himself living up there and couldn't.
He lifted his shoulders in the gray t-shirt. "I was in Florida for college," he said. "I used to teach high school, but I kind of hated it." When he said it, he winced. He always felt like a jackass admitting that he didn't like it, partly because his father taught, partly because it was a respectable profession, and partly because it felt like a failure. Going all the way through the preparation for something like that, only to find out he was totally wrong for it, had sucked and knocked him on his ass. It was the four solid walls of the classroom, the repetition and BS from administrators, even the smell of the cafeteria when he got to school in the morning. That syrupy scent still soured his face when he thought about it.
"I came down here to tend bar," he said. "Then I opened one with a buddy of mine."
"Yeah? I went to Florida State, where'd you go?" Izzy still felt she really owed her allegiance to Georgia Tech, but that wasn't what the sheepskin on her wall in this dimension said and it would be a bit odd for her to root for another school. This Hayden definitely had gone on a different path, but he seemed happier.
"No shame in deciding you were wrong for teaching. Sometimes you can't know until you really start doing a thing, you know?" Maybe she ought to consider getting into a different line of work than the hotel business, but she'd stick it out a while longer. Owning a bed and breakfast might not be so bad, if she could get the seed money and had a little more experience under her belt.
"You own a bar?" She was impressed and didn't bother hiding it. Definitely a different path! Izzy felt like the phrase was on permanent loop inside her head, but couldn't help it. He still seemed to be the same sort of guy, just tweaked a little maybe. "Which one?"
"University of Florida," he said. "And my bar's called Abandon Ship. Don't look at me, it wasn't my idea. Mike thought it ought to be nautical, since we're at the marina." Hayden held his mug by the handle and laughed, thinking about the bet he lost, giving his business partner the right to pick the name. They were drunk at the time, bandying about such possibilities as Pusser's, Seacock's, the Sextant, and Hayden's personal favorite, Spanker's. Why there were so many raunchy words in sailing, he had no idea.
He scratched his jaw. "I was all for calling it Hayden's Place, but he wasn't buying it." He was lying, but he figured it was a polite one.
"You run that place?" Izzy had to laugh, how many times had she been in there and not seen Hayden? "I love Abandon Ship! It may not be as popular and famous as the Duval street bars, but it's a nice place. I celebrated my birthday there a couple months back.
"Hayden's Place just doesn't have the same ring, not for Key West." Izzy wrinkled her nose slightly. "A bar like that could be anywhere, but Abandon Ship! fits the area better. Probably better that your partner convinced you on the latter." She winked at him and took another sip of her fruity drink.
"I'll tell him you said so." Not really, he thought as he gulped his beer. Mike had been on his shit list for two months. The guy wasn't pulling his weight and he had a dizzying amount of excuses. First it was a girl. Then it was his family. Then finances, stomach flu, car trouble. The problem with getting rid of a business partner was that he actually needed one. He couldn't afford to buy Mike out, not yet, anyway, so he was stuck putting up with him. It felt like a bad marriage.
"What do you do?" he asked. "For work, I mean?" Izzy had mentioned being tired of tourists, but that could be anything in Key West. His fingertips lightly drummed the old surface. One of the things he wished was different about his bar was that nothing in it was old.
"Me? I'm over at the Hyatt-Sunset, one of the concierges there." And one that was thoroughly tired of tourists, at least for today. She knew tourism was the lifeblood of Key West and her own job, but the witch wasn't feeling very charitable at the moment.
"Not as exciting a job description as that of bar owner, but someone's got to tell the tourists what to do." Izzy smirked, having another sip of her margarita.
"Ahh." He cringed. "See..." He tapped a finger into the bartop, as if identifying a suspect in a line-up. "That's what I thought, too. That's exactly what I thought, back when I was a bartender. Trust me, it's not as exciting as it looks. All the money and taxes and the hiring, firing... throwing people out when they act like assholes." He sat up straighter and stretched his shoulders, because his posture sucked when he sat on stools. "There are a lot of assholes on vacation. I guess they figure we're never gonna see them again, so they can do whatever they want."
Hayden drank some beer. "Luckily, this works out for me, too, see... If I kick them out, I don't have to worry about losing business, because what are the chances they were coming back anyway?"
"Not very likely." Izzy smirked knowingly after another gulp of margarita. She really ought to slow down, but after the day she'd had...the witch took another healthy sip and flagged down Tony for a refill since it was about empty. "But yeah, we get a lot of that at the hotel, too. Guests who think they have the right to treat us like shit and don't care since they won't be back anytime soon. Thankfully they aren't all like that.
"Besides, even if you toss them out, there are more where they came from, right? Key West is a tourist magnet."
"Yeah." A group of people came into the bar and he glanced at them, watching them scout for seats. Hayden didn't have an issue with tourists, in general. They made the wheels of commerce turn on the island. The local population wasn't big enough to support all the businesses without cruise ships and hotel vacationers. The funny thing was, with the economy so bad, numbers were lower than usual, which brought everyone who depended on the revenue to their knees. He thought it was a kind of cosmic slap to remind them they depended on visitors to fill their tills.
When Izzy's margarita arrived, he looked at it. "I can't drink one of those without getting brain freeze."
"It's a skill." Izzy laughed before taking a sip of the fresh margarita. Not all of the skills Izzy remembered from Isabelle were work related, after all. "I learned it through many nights of practice with my Sorority sisters. I will have to slow down a little bit if I don't want a headache though."
She hadn't meant to rag on tourists so much, it had just been a difficult day. Still, no reason to pour her troubles out on Hayden. As far as he was concerned they'd just met, after all.
"So what do you like to do when you aren't busy being a bar owner, Hayden?"
Sorority? Yeah, he guessed he could see that. Hayden probably looked like his fraternity brothers, but he thanked god he didn't act like some of them. A few chairs down, somebody got a basket of fries and the smell of it made his stomach grumble. "Hang on a sec..." He leaned forward, past the line of other people's arms, to get the bartender's attention. "Hey, Tony, could I get some nachos?" Once he had communicated with him, Hayden pulled on his earlobe and thought about his hobbies.
"I like to read," he said, squinting an eye. "I read a lot of nonfiction, historical biographies, that kind of thing. I work on cars, sometimes." After he said it, Hayden realized that sounded pretty fucking boring. Oh well. He wasn't one of those adventuring types who liked to para-sail or scuba dive or jump out of planes, whatever men said when trying to impress women. "I like sports. So basicalllllllly... I'm an average guy." He smiled, looking sheepish about it, like how uninteresting could he be? "Maybe I'll take up alligator wrestling. What about you?"
"No alligator wrestling for this woman." Izzy made a face at the idea. Any guys doing that probably had a case of testosterone poisoning in her opinion. "I'd stick to reading and car fixing, they'd probably be better for you in the long term.
"I like to tinker with things. I'll take them apart and see how they work and try to put them back together." That was something that would have shocked anyone who'd known the old Isabelle. "Window shopping and bargain hunting sometimes. Swimming is always good, too. I try to go out to the beach and get an hour in at least a few times a week." The sunbathing had been cut way back though, and now the witch appeared to have just a run of the mill healthy tan, rather than someone gunning for an early death by skin cancer.
"What book are you working on now? Some musty old academic text or a new biography?"
Hayden thanked Tony when his chips arrived with two bowls of dip and set it between Izzy and himself, in case she was hungry. "Uh, I started this book about Sarah Hemings and all the children she had with Thomas Jefferson, because it won the Pulitzer, but I got kinda sidetracked. It's... alright, this is embarrassing," he said, holding up a hand, "but I picked up a book about voodoo as a legitimate religion in the Caribbean and I can't put it down." He put his hand over his mouth and rubbed it, as if he couldn't believe he admitted that in public. "Anyway, I dunno what I think about all that. Y'know, magic and evil spirits, but it's... it's interesting, actually."
When he felt his ears turning red, he scooped up salsa with his tortilla chip and ate it.
If only you knew. Izzy suppressed a sigh. It would be great to talk about magic with Hayden, but it wouldn't be the same. She found herself wishing that Hayden had been transplanted here as well, and she could talk to him like she had back in Chicago. The witch picked up her margarita and took a good sip to cover her sudden sense of disappointment.
Well, what had Rhiannon said? Make it into an opportunity and not a predicament. "What's interesting about it? That people think it exists? I'd be curious to see that book sometime, it sounds interesting." It wasn't just talk, the book really did sound interesting, and voodoo was one of the few aspects of magic she hadn't studied in depth. Her intro class had devoted a few lectures to it, but that was about it.
"No, it's just... The more you read about religions, the more you realize they've got all these commonalities." He set his chin in his hand. "What one person calls a prayer, somebody else calls a spell. They've all got idols, whether it's the sun or a god or a goddess. And pretty much, if you're not talking about dark stuff, they've all got rules that delineate what you can and can't do, just to keep people from tearing into each other or totally self-destructing. People go to war over details."
He shrugged.
"I like to learn. Not like I'm gonna try to practice it or anything," he laughed, "But yeah, I like to learn." He didn't say it, but his recent encounter with the woman who bit his neck set him down this path. He was looking into books on cults and ran into the religious section of the bookstore.
"I wouldn't mind looking into that myself," Izzy said cautiously, wondering what his reaction would be if she told him she was a witch, a real witch. Not something she was going to declare right there in the Bull & Whistle, obviously, but if they got to be friends then maybe after a while she'd let him know part of the truth. It sounded like he might be headed down the same path he'd been on back in Chicago, just from a different direction.
She pushed away the half-finished second margarita. If she was going to get home without stumbling, she probably ought to cut herself off from the booze.
"Yeah?" He looked up, a little hopeful that she might not think he was a freak. It wasn't something he could bring up at the bar. Everybody there had a selective memory when it came to the vampire wannabe with the messed-up face, so he doubted he could engage them in conversation about ritual magic. "I can't remember the name of the book, but um... Tell you what. I'll give you my number and if you want, you can call sometime and I'll give it to you. The book. Or just the title, whatever." He shook his head and flagged down Tony again, this time borrowing a pen from across the counter. He wrote his cell phone number on a napkin and passed it to Izzy.
"Here." He ate another nacho and washed it down with the last of his beer. "So you can call me from a payphone, if you don't want me to have your number." He smiled.
"Well, if you're going to give me yours, I might as well give you mine. It's only fair." She had to laugh a little at how this was working out. Who'd have thought she'd be exchanging phone numbers with a guy over voodoo? Still, she'd always liked Hayden and this version seemed pretty close to the one she was familiar with. Trustworthy.
And on the plus side, he didn't have anything to do with her father's business.
The witch plucked the pen out of the man's hand and snagged another napkin to write down her name and phone number. "There. We've restored the balance on that front, at least." She smiled over at him and handed both items over.
"What balance? What other fronts are there?" His smile turned bewildered. He folded the napkin and stuck it in his hip pocket. Hopefully, he'd remember to take it out and program the number into his cell before he washed his jeans. He'd made that mistake before and spent the next few days cussing himself and picking lint off his laundry. When the bartender wandered by, Hayden put down some cash for the nachos so he'd be paid up.
"Don't mind me, I think it's the booze talking." Izzy shrugged with a smile and slid off her bar stool. "That's my cue to go home I think. It's been really great talking to you, Hayden, hopefully we'll do it again sometime." She gave a little wave before turning to leave. "See you later, handsome."
It wasn't until she was already out of the bar and on her way down the street that she realized exactly what she'd said.
Hayden watched her leave, then turned around. Tony was standing there staring at him. "What?" He picked up a tortilla chip and threw it at the bartender.