WHO: Olivia Dorough and Open-to-Any WHERE: RJ's Bar and Billiards, District 0 WHEN: Wednesday night WHAT: One of Olivia's 'friends' is having an office party. RATING: PG-13 for now.
Hump-Day. An idiotic hyphenate internationally revered and laughed at, but only reserved for those who's lives revolved around the proposed 'work week', that being five straight days of turmoil from morning til late afternoon, followed by evenings and 'weekends' in which to relax, unwind, spend some time with the fam, or completely and utterly destroy themselves.
Olivia didn't belong in this category. She never had.
Wednesday was like any other day, it only depended on the schedule Wesley sometimes decided to post on the crumbling peg-board in the back of the club. This week, it was the one day she wasn't written up for the stage, and good thing too: a scrawny, but rich little acquaintance she had made a few months back had texted her earlier that day in hopes that she might be available to serve as arm candy for him at a colleague's birthday celebration. Of course, Olive was happy to oblige.
RJ's was one of your typical over-priced establishments retro-fitted to look like a local hole-in-the-wall to appeal to a new generation of the rich and nostalgic. A long mahogany bar ran the length of the red-bricked pool hall: a few scattered heavy oak tables and chairs, as well as six green-felt billiard tables positioned in the opened back of the place. It smelled like stale smoke and spilled beer, as well as the subtle hint of over-indulgence and after-shave.
A mediocre crowd gathered that evening, the majority of which belonged to the one party celebrating the thirtieth birthday of an up and coming security-firm IT-desk-jockey. Twenty or so people seethed about in a space built for a hundred, tops... Drinking, talking, cheering on whatever game was playing on the bar's two TV's.
Outside, the smell of damp was a lot more prevalent in the atmosphere, and it hung there like an invisible cloud of dank and humanity, What little breeze there was toyed with the sleek, straightened locks of a woman smoking a cigarette: the blades of her shoulders rested against the rough brick exterior of the building's corner at the mouth of the alley twenty feet from the door. The white, rolled stick made it to a nestling point between two plush, passion fruit stained lips for a pull. Olivia turned her eyes up at the colorless sky, releasing the aimless wisps of smoke into the atmosphere from two delicate, but flaring nostrils... like some petite, greeneyed dragon.
Her brain was occupied, and not by anything she deemed even remotely entertaining enough to warrant another smile. She wasn't drunk yet.. or even remotely buzzed. Her client had promised her lines, but had yet to deliver... and quite honestly, Olive was getting a little peeved at his delay. Another drag from the cigarette inflated a subtle stepladder of ribs beneath the stylish top, swirling acrid smoke into her lungs, to sit and simmer until she exhaled again into the night, and flicked the butt toward the opposite alley wall, where it bounced with a burst of pathetic sparks and landed, sizzling in a puddle.
"Fook'in waste.." Words uttered in the woman's natural dialect, filtered through the screens of irritation and boredom. Maybe she'd find something more entertaining among Simon's office-buddies, and latch onto that for a lucrative end to the evening, or at the very least, something to justify her not being at the club tonight, mutilating the tecniques of any new dancers into Wesley's ear.
All in the name of competition. Of course, some might call it territorialism. No one could dispute the fact that Oliva was the alpha-bitch at the Red Door.