Rory & Holly: strip club drinks Who: Rory & Holly What: Dancers and drinks Where: The club where Holly works When: Recent Warnings: Fairly tame aside from language and boob job conversations
Holly? Didn’t hate the strip club.
It was kind of a running theme with the dancers. There were people here for their kids, who had a wallet full of plastic-coated photos and who stuck around to the last note of their music and bailed immediately after, sticky-glitter under mom-shirts and sneakers instead of heels. There were girls here because they had no place else to be and they totally resented it. They sulked from start to finish, beautifully but sad girls got fewer tips and no matter what they felt, it sank into their dancing like ink into water. It colored it, until it was as dark and depressed as the girls shaking it around a pole.
Holly? Holly had no place else to be but she didn’t hate it. The club made a lot of sense. It was regular cash with a bar with a heavy behind it who double-hatted over-priced drinks and security. It wasn’t the tired-looking trailer-park, where a torn curtain fluttered in the window of a trashed-looking trailer and the air smelled like sadness and resignation. The club? Was what you made of it. And okay, the money probably wasn’t enough to make rent and stash emergency cash away, but that was what the Capital was for.
It wasn’t hot shit. It wasn’t burlesque and titillation, it was tits and ass and shaking it to loud music with a steady beat. But if it had been high-end, burlesque and fans and whatever, Holly wouldn’t have made the cut. She wore neon, the same highlighter-pink bra and yellow panties she wore under her clothes regular, and she danced like she enjoyed it, because she did. The guys were just guys, and the guy behind the bar kept them polite and she was enthusiasm and energy instead of polished talent, because fuck it.
She got the lame shift, early afternoon until dusk because she was new and she was young, and after she’d peeled off-stage and dressed backstage, she headed out to the bar, fishnet tights under denim shorts, a loose white vest that showed neon bra-straps and glitter still stuck to sweaty skin and wild hair catching under her shirt collar.
“Hey,” and she leaned on the edge of the bar, tips of her toes in heavy boots and she was twenty-one in the books but still Holly, because she hadn’t had a name that wasn’t hers the entire length of her gig. “Can I cash out?” The heavy was preoccupied serving, and she leaned elbows back against the bar and watched the next girl dance. She did a hip thing, that looked totally good, and she was going to try to remember that shit for next time.
Rory didn't hate the strip club either, although one couldn't go as far to say that it was his favorite place to get absolutely knackered in this shit town. The old trash bar down the street had been more his style, it'd been the kind of place where the whiskey was always a little watered down, but a guy could still get drunk for a few bob. It'd also been the kind of place where if the stars were in line and the company was self-destructive enough, Rory could find a quick lay in the bathroom stall. Ah, memories. There wasn't enough lucky pennies in the world to bring those kind of good times rolling into this place.
Strip clubs could be counted on for overcrowding, especially on afternoons in small towns. Repose wasn't exactly the epitome of club life. There weren't that many options, and Rory preferred blending into a mishmash collection of sad sacks as opposed to being one of a couple barflys taking up bar stools in an otherwise vacant bar. Rory was keeping a low profile these days. After all that shit with the Facility, he kind of had to… but that didn't mean that he knew how to stay locked up in some reclusive witch's cabin in the woods either. Rory, despite whatever better judgement he could drag up from the pit of his ugly soul, was a social creature. Even wild dogs ran in packs.
So today he was at the strip club, sitting bar side on a stool that wasn't warped from being a tool in too many bar fights. This was the kind of bar that Rory went to relax, which was kind of a fucking joke considering how crass and loud the music was and how seizure-bright the stage lights flashed like cop-light colors. Talk about fucking PTSD. Rory bunched his shoulders and leaned more into the bar, focused on sipping his warm whiskey rather than the stage routine. He had on a long sleeve cotton shirt, despite the Spring warmth that was rolling into town this time of year. There was a ball cap crammed tight with the brim dipping low over his distinctive eyebrows. He looked real small town, blue collar American with nothing better to do on this afternoon than punish his liver a little.
There was a girl next to him then, asking to cash out. Rory, good fucking samaritan that he was, motioned for the bartender to get the girl a drink on him. She was off the clock, wasn't she? Not that this dive was the type of place to really give a shit either way. "Yer a new one, ain't ya?" He spoke into the brim of his glass with that misplaced accent. Irish by way of a Boston beating.
The strip club wasn’t exactly busy but there were two bars left in town and the other one was tiny and had cops in it so there weren’t a lot of options lying around. Holly didn’t care so long as the heavy behind the bar still solicited tips on the dancers’ behalf, which he did. The music was pound-pound-pound loud as the glittered-up dancer shook it on stage, and Holly leaned into sticky wood to get a better view. She hadn’t been around the club long enough to know the regulars from the once-offs, the guys who came for a beer and a view instead of lingering but all-American at the bar piped up and she hadn’t pegged him for one of those. He wasn’t interested in the shimmy on-stage, and that was kind of the point for the mark-up on the drinks.
The heavy strolled over when there was cash in it for him. Holly smiled grenadine-sweet, “I want a rum and coke.” The pricing? Was extortionate, but she didn’t care. All-American hadn’t watched so he probably hadn’t tipped good, and the drink was good for ten bucks, minimum. The heavy raised eyebrows, but if she wasn’t overage she couldn’t dance, so there was no need for the fake in the bottom of her wallet.
The accent wasn’t all-American, and Holly looked him over without a scrap of guile in doing it. He’d started it and she was unself-conscious even with left-over glitter smeared up to her earlobes. “I’m new,” she agreed with him, and the heavy brought her glass of rum and coke, cherry bobbing on a sugared-syrup dark sea. He set it down on an already-damp napkin sitting sweating on the sticky wood, and she drummed her fingers on the bar when he disappeared off the other end of the bar without her envelope.
She swallowed warm heat in cool liquid and she smiled, fishing the maraschino out with her fingers to eat. “Thanks for the drink.”
"You birds work hard. Not getting a drink when the clock is off? That's just criminal." Rory thumbed the bottom edge of his shot glass, although he didn't shoot the whole thing. He'd been sipping the same two ounce pour of brown sugar for a while now. It was best to pace oneself if they didn't want to veer into the familiarity of old wounds and fresher mistakes. To be honest, Rory had been avoiding this place for awhile. Ever since that girl with the candyfloss hair had run off with his heart and a good portion of the zeros in his bank account. What was it with him and these girls, huh? Rory really must have just had a heart of gold underneath all of that calcification.
He scratched bloodhungry fingers beneath the back edge of his ball cap. Behind the ear there, where scar tissue and whatever the fuck they'd put in his brain stirred up an itch any time he was sober enough to think about it. It was just another reason to drink. Was a time once, when he first stumbled into this junkyard town, that work kept him busy. Those days were gone. There were no borrowed souls here, and no orders to direct him elsewhere. Maybe whatever the fucking humans had planted in his head turned his demonic radar off, maybe the Devil was dead or on vacation. There weren't even any real demons here, just hunters and that waking nightmare fuck of a thing. Rory felt like something out of a lost generation. Aimless as a motherfucker. What else was there to do but drink and get an eyeful of all the girls that were out of his league? These girls were too young, too pretty, too alive for his undead ass.
"No problem," he said of the drink. "The night's on me." He hadn't bothered to tip the stage or get a private dance, but his money was good even if he was good for nothing.
Did they work hard? Maybe for the mom who kept her pictures stuck to the mirror, temporary during her shift. Maybe it was different for the girls who worked lates, when the crowd was awake instead of halfway through the hair of the dog from the day before. Holly? Thought hard work looked a little different than a little glitter. “The mark-up,” she said blithely, blowing a kiss at the heavy who wouldn’t fetch the envelope with her name on it, serving a drink to another old guy who was parked with his nose into his beer, “Would take out my tips.” Which the regular All-American probably knew anyway.
“They don’t give it away. None of us do,” knowing, because Holly learned the ropes quickly, and the dead-shift gave you a lot of observation downtime. She meant the booze, but the dancing was kind of a free-with-purchase. He was kind of reneging on the whole social contract shit here, with his shot he wouldn’t drink. “You’re making it work for you, but you weren’t watching.” It was blunt, but it was also true, and she didn’t sound like it bothered her. Mostly, because it didn’t. She chewed her cherry and smiled maraschino-gloss, “Do you just like the taste of overpriced liquor? Because if that’s your poison? There’s a liquor store somewhere around here, and Marcus over there, he’s not cashing me out.”
But his accent slid the scale past All-American to something else, and the language was past cute into quaint. He wasn’t from small-town Repose, and Holly was starting a collection, of places that had drifted into Repose and lingered. Jersey, the Bronx and now, “Boston?” Guess. Holly? Had never been to Boston.
“The night? Boston, it’s the afternoon.”
"Ah right," he barely commented at the mention of how getting drinks would come out of her pay. The overhead was probably dire to a little thing like her who scraped together sticky and glittered dollar bills for rent and hot water in some local shithole. He couldn't imagine the kid was old enough to have a kid herself, but money always went somewhere. Maybe she had a more interesting addiction… or maybe not everybody was like him, filling up his belly and the till just to empty his bloody head. Whatever happened to the American Dream when a girl who may or may not have been of legal drinking age couldn't get rightfully hammered in her place of work for a reasonable price? The little thing could probably get perfectly twisted on Midori sours(Rory spotted a bottle of the absinthe green liquor on the top shelf behind the bar). It looked dusty as fuck, because when was somebody in this joint ever going to order melon liqueur? A damn shame and a damn waste, if one asked him… which with his ball cap pulled down tight and his posture scowling for him, nobody was going to ask Rory shit.
"I'm on a diet," he remarked of not watching the stage or the girls sashaying past with bills tucked into the rubber band tight grip of thigh high stockings that were streaked sad with more than a couple runs in the nylon. His explanation was a metaphor, mostly. But diet or not, when the girl made mention of the nearby liquor store, Rory gave her a confused and sideways glance, like he was trying to solve advanced calculus in the dark. Was she asking to get out of here? He raised one of those bushy, dark eyebrows at her from beneath the brim of his cap.
He shrugged when she guessed Boston, not admitting but not denying either. Then he laughed, just real fucking surprised when she explained that it was the afternoon. Had she never drank the entirety of the day away? "Oh, you're a young one," punctuated by him knocking back what remained of the amber in his glass. He hissed the burn of it from out between his teeth.
She knew the sour aftertaste of a drink when the night drifted like flotsam out into the morning after. The men in the club (not this club: that one) brought them out and dandled them like dolls, coaxing sips of spirits for the hell of it from fingerprint-sticky glasses, mussed lingerie in muted colors. They weren’t legal, but none of what went on in the basements of reputable establishments like those ones was exactly legal. Other girls picked their poisons, sucked a heavy off to get a needle, a free pass to fuzzy-headed apathy. Holly? She liked things clear-cut or amped up, she liked shit happy or fast. So she didn’t want to drink until the club got soft at the edges. The rum-soaked cherry slid down her throat with a coca-cola fizzle and she ran a finger around the glass rather than sipping at it. Her American Dream? She had one, once but it had acquired a patina of grease and grime over the years and now Holly didn’t dream big. Cash under the floorboards and her own locks on the doors, ones that fastened from the inside. Her dreams were intermittent, they were temporary. The club wasn’t a crossroads, it was a waystation on the way to somewhere else.
He was sour. Maybe that had something to do with the booze, it wasn’t very good even if it was over-priced. He didn’t look like the kind who played pool with the cops so maybe this was the only stop in town. Holly took a seat because Marcus was in conversation at the other end, and she swung her boot back until the heel knocked grubby chrome. Sour but she didn’t care: Marcus would move if he made a move and she was insulated. Boston couldn’t do shit and Holly perched, highlighter-bright and laughed.
“Diet, right. Liquid? Are you here because you like the atmospherics? They don’t have a write-up in the guide-book, I checked.”
But she shrugged in his eyeline when he said she was young, the imitation of his own up-down refusal to confirm-or-deny city of origin. Yeah, and so what?
What was it about the young ones? It was like his own personal curse. Wren had been younger, but she hadn't exactly been a glittered up teenager who smelled like grenadine and three layers of Dr. Pepper lip smackers. That bird? Rory had stupidly thought she was a turning point for him, gear shifting up from his weaknesses… but that hadn't been the case at all. She'd just been another soulless thing that the dog in him wanted to tear into. It was like a sickness to reflect on now, how it'd felt so much like love. But it hadn't been, the dog didn't want Rory going down on one knee to propose during a candlelight dinner, the dog wanted to chew his way through the soft middle of pretty things. That kind of sacrifice was better than lamb's blood, who gave a fuck if he wasn't a wolf?
So maybe buying drinks for little miss barely of age was all fifty shades of a bad idea, but a man was a man was a dog was a fucking piece of shit. Besides, he was already going to Hell, no matter what Claire said about the potential for changing tides.
The reason Rory liked strip clubs had more to do than the girls. They were an obvious perk, but he wasn't fucking delusional enough to believe that they cared about anything in his pants aside from his wallet. Which was cool, everything was a fucking hustle. Life, death, sex, everything. At this point, salvation and damnation were a hustle. Besides, where else was one of Satan's lackeys going to kick it in this town? This was the least depressing spot on the whole fucking block. And Rory's favorite part? No shitheads were aiming to hassle him for conversation in these kinds of spots, they were too focused on their own erections to try and bullshit with Rory. Which was fucking A-okay with him. He hated small talk.
The kid, though? She was alright. Even the questions she asked didn't feel too important, like it didn't matter if whatever answer he gave her was truth or lie. They could play this game all day, really. She could lie too, if she wanted. But for his latest trick? When she asked why he was here? Rory opted for the truth, "Because I'm a piece of shit, cupcake." Where else was he going to hang out? The fucking library?
She wasn’t anyone’s poor decision-making. The club? Maybe that featured in somebody else’s choices that kept them up at nights, but it wasn’t a millstone or an anchor or whatever around Holly’s neck. She’d decided, long long ago that whatever men did (women too, but lbr, mostly men featured in the walk-on, walk-off theater parts that were sex work when you were too young, too locked up, too controlled to pick who you made money off) it wasn’t hers. That was bullshit they took home, like crumpled tissues in a pocket, morality screwed up into a little ball somewhere, guilt in their wallet like a business card. Holly was a living, breathing person and nobody making a shitty decision gave a shit about that.
So she figured he thought this was a place to crawl under. It was sticky floors and a bartender who deliberately poured glasses that weren’t full measures and who made you pay upfront if he thought you were the kind to run a tab. It was glitter and shimmer that looked tacky in strong light, but all of that was okay if you looked at the people in it. Boston, he wasn’t looking. He wanted to see a rock to crawl under, so all he saw was dirt ground in long-term.
Nobody was going to hell over an overpriced mixed drink and it was only half-gone anyway. No one had given Holly booze out of the generosity of their hearts or whatever, mostly it had been entertainment or the guilt kicking in about the set-up and she wasn’t looking to get wasted. That experience was on the overall chalkboard of shit she wanted to hit, but there were way better places to give it a whirl.
“That so sounds like bullshit, Boston,” she told him, and she didn’t care who was in earshot. “That makes it sound like you gotta be to be here, or that this place is something for assholes. It’s just a club, Boston. Just a bunch of people making a living off tits and ass.” Matter-of-fact, and it wasn’t like they were banging people in a back-booth or whatever. It was a little glitter and shaking it and Holly shimmered with the last of the sweat and certainty that she was right.
The kid was probably right. This conversation had taken a nosedive into something vaguely resembling philosophical. That was just the nature of conversation shared over sticky bar tops, whether it was between patrons or bartender and customer or, like now, customer and off-the-clock stripper. She said that it sounded like bullshit, and Rory shrugged with his shoulders still hunched like he was trying to avoid some vengeful husband from across the room. He kept his head down and his teeth clean, and when the bartender walked by again, Rory ticked the shot glass with his index finger. A little tip of his head toward Young & Sparkly suggested another for her too, even though she didn't seem even half finished with the first.
"There aren't a whole lot of places that I'm able to drink in this town." He thought that explained a lot, but the kid had proven to have a whole lot of questions so far. It wasn't unusual for a dancer to make chit chat with a customer at the bar, maybe walk them to the back room for a little dance where the tips were bigger than the dollar bills left behind on the main stage. But Glitter, here? She was supposed to be off the clock, and yeah she was waiting for her pay, but she still could have done that while cold-shouldering an old man like himself. The fact that she was chatty, it wasn't something he minded. Rory was a cautionary tale, the general concept of which he shared freely(being a piece of shit, for example). It was all of the details that he glossed over like they didn't matter.
They got their new drinks, and Rory began sipping at his once again. "I've never been kicked outta here, so it's homey." Of course, he hadn't engaged in any bar fights or sex in any of the bathroom stalls. Basically, he hadn't destroyed any furnishing or broken even a single glass. "The tits and ass aren't so bad either."
She licked the saccharine-sticky off the web of finger and thumb as Holly traded one glass for a second. Holly had known a chick named Philosophy once, she’d put out on street-corners for ten bucks for a blow but that was about as close as her acquaintance got. Holly wasn’t trading on the now for big-picture thinking, the now was where it began and it stopped. The club was a club: it was a place you drank and you watched girls hit it and maybe you brought your shit with you, a broken marriage or a bullshit job or maybe you just liked looking. It wasn’t cogito-ergo-sum, Holly didn’t trade in Latin.
“Why, you get kicked out everywhere?” Her grin was white flash of incisor-sharp entertainment. Yeah, she could see Boston getting tossed from the Cat, maybe a steady diet of Johnny Cash wouldn’t go with the baseball cap and the life mantra he had going for him but the other bar in town? After evicting herself from Dahlia’s place, she’d gotten enough from diner-conversations and in the lobby of the ice-cream store to know that Dahlia’s gym used to be a place to get shit-faced. “What you do?”
Boston could have been a prospect. He looked like the type, not the one with a wedding ring in his pocket and a sepia-faded photograph of a life beyond the door of the club but the other kind, the kind who never figured the first part out. Her teeth squeaked with sugar-limned rum and glitter dusted off from her elbow to the bar-top and adhered to the sticky remnants of whoever had been drinking here before.
“Most of ‘em are even real,” she tipped her chin into her hand, amused in spite of herself. “I never saw anyone in here who was less interested in the point of being in here.”
"Eh, not everywhere. Just one place really." Cue up the sage old Irishman advice, whiskeybent toward the dark side of reality because his lucky coins always fell ass up when he was calling heads. "The problem with getting kicked out of one bar in this town, Sparkles, is that word…" He made a circular, almost elliptical motion with one of his gnarl-knuckled index fingers, "... gets around." Despite holding that shot glass in the same hand, he didn't spill any whiskey with such a grand performance of both alcoholism and dexterity. This man was a true professional. "Not that you need worry your head over the likes of me," he assured her while taking another sip of that burning straight liquor. Normally, Rory wouldn't assume anyone to go worrying about shit that involved him. It was most definitely better if they didn't, because anybody who knew enough about Rory to go worrying about his actions specifically? They were in bad shape or a real bad fucking place, Rory's antics aside. The crowd he rubbed elbows and ran wild amongst? They weren't exactly straight and narrow. Those that weren't tied to demons or his old life, the rest that he crossed were just unlucky. Which might have been bad news for Sparkles here because cursed dogs were bound to bring things worse than fleas with them.
"You might say that I've turned over a new leaf. Old dogs really can learn new tricks," and that bit made him chuckle into the rim of his little glass. As for what he did? He didn't seem to be telling. This wasn't that kind of sharing circle, and he wasn't near drunk enough to go praising his own hellraising.
Sparkles said some of them were real, and Rory twisted curiously in his seat to look around the floor at the modest supply of girls working. "How can you tell?" Maybe he was giving away the truth of himself with that one, because our shit-heel hellhound was no Romeo. Most of the tits he got close enough to study by the handful, they were being viewed through a powerful prescription of beer goggles. When it came to the female body, he liked them any way that he could get them, whatever shape or size. But as for telling the difference from a distance? He wasn't sure he knew. Actually, he wasn't even sure he cared. He ordered another shot while trying to decide.
“I’m not,” Holly said, blithely worry-free for Boston. Boston wasn’t struggling against the tide, he wasn’t sweltered in over his head and drowning in a dark-dim tide of something bigger than him. The strip-club wasn’t the kind of bar you found in Jersey, neon and floors sweating-sticky and if you didn’t pay the bill, you found yourself in a back-alley with muscle. Boston looked like he spent time in back-alleys, grime-limned and gravel-voiced and the rough skin over his knuckles on the bar that made it easy to guess he’d given as good as he got. Jersey, Boston would probably survive. Maybe if the girl had a house in the neighborhood, a kid to think about, warm fuzzies about predictable safety, she would clear off the bar stool and head out, leave Boston as a thickly-accented remnant of a city that didn’t shroud itself in weird and call itself safe.
But Holly didn’t like predictable. And the club was safe. It was flat champagne, all the fizzle squeezed out until what was left behind was a little tawdry and a little naked, with a bass line intended to take your mind off of it. It was harmless and Holly glittered on her seat, assuredly self-confident in the absence of anything approaching real harm.
“Bullshit,” she said as he chuckled into the edge of smeared glass, the dark sound diseased with bad intentions, and Marcus summoned for another round of ambered poor decision-making, which splashed over the side of the glass and onto the bar. “You remind me of the people from home. Nobody learns a new game, they just play at it.” It was old, perhaps, for the girl in glitter and fishnets, who looked cherub-fresh and under-21 but they were on home ground. When it came to the dirt, to the vices of life that nestled mold-close to all the clean laundry Repose liked to air, she was older than she looked.
“Nobody here is making enough to fund a boob job.” She watched the slant of his gaze catch on the girl on stage shaking it. She had a kid, the picture was shoved in the side of her bag. She wouldn’t say what her man did, but with the kind of nervous silence that said whatever he did, it wasn’t earning a paycheck regular from some solid, upstanding business.
She called him on his bullshit and Rory just shrugged, his tongue and morals too swathed in a fresh coat of liquor to protest. Besides, she was probably right. It was Rory's latent life knowledge(one actually only acquired in this afterlife of sorts) that unless it was about guns or hard liquor or the Boston Red Sox, he really didn't know much of anything. That small and itemized list of things that he did know certainly weren't new tricks, they were all older than the dog himself. "Maybe I just learned how to cheat the game," he said with a sidelong wink to Sparkles. Maybe it wasn't exactly cheating, but Rory had certainly managed to stack the odds in his favor.
"Kind of a seasoned outlook…" He looked at her then, trying to suss out if he'd heard her stage name at any point in the evening. He remembered her up there on stage, but any name escaped him. He wasn't good with stage names like he wasn't good with real names, maybe it was the whiskey to blame. Rory twisted an empty shot glass around in his hand. He balanced it on the tip of his thumb and rolled it across the back of his fingers like an old party trick learned in another life. "What do I call you? Mariah Carey already has the trademark on 'Glitter'."
"You'd make a lot fuckin' more in the city," he informed her. Not that the girl was complaining about money out-right, but she was here first of all. Rory wasn't one to go about judging the scales of reasonable and safe professions, but he couldn't imagine that anybody rolling in a bed of bank notes would be spending their days applying nipple tassels and baby powder to their inner thighs for the pole burn. Secondly, she was hanging around after her shift in wait of whatever cash the bartender was holding onto, so she must have needed it. Rory knew she wasn't sticking around for the conversation. Lastly, her remark on nobody being able to afford a boob job. That nobody included her, and Rory glanced down to confirm. Yep.
Boston shook off promises of new tricks like a dog shaking water, easier than a stripper cleaning off glitter at the end of a night-shift. All that shiny promise didn’t last one round of drinks, but Boston looked the kind of old that wore in hard. Scuffed edges, kicked-in doors, Boston didn’t look like he cared if his hometown went to shit, he was already on bottom waiting for it to sink. The girl made snap-judgments, and she’d pegged Boston, but she didn’t think he was mean. Holly had seen a lot of mean, in different flavors. “You get kicked out of bars, Boston, you really think you’re winning it here? If you’re cheating?” She leaned on the bar, stage-whispered for the couple guys at the end of the bar who were paying attention to the girl on stage and not the conversation, “You kind of suck at it.”
She hadn’t thought up a stage-name. There were Angels, and Heavens and all the kinds of names you found in a baby-book that belonged to a fifteen year old starry-eyed over true love or whatever on the set-list, but a stage-name Holly figured was a separation. Angel wiped off her make-up, zipped mom jeans over her g-string and she was somebody whitebread and normal with a guy with a 9-5 and a pick-up at kindergarten. It was a wall, built between perspex shoes and a pole and whatever normal you could scrape together, the kind in the sitcom TV shows watched with a laugh-track as background to the pre-evening entertainment in the brothel. Holly? Didn’t have normal to fence off and she didn’t feel guilty about stages and sparkles.
“My old city seasons you, if you survive it long enough.” Boston looked her over like it was a surprise to find jaded in a strip-bar. If he didn’t look old, the girl would have figured him new, first time driving and screwed for the last bucks in his wallet. “I’m Holly. And I don’t compete with Mariah Carey.” She grinned, flecked-gold and unrepentant, “She’s old.”
Career advice, from Boston. She leaned over, picked the sticky shot-glass up from his party-trick, lustered with the last remnants of whiskey under the sweeping violet of the lights on-stage. He dropped gaze, and Holly lifted her chin, slammed down the shot-glass with casual violence on the edge of the bar. Marcus, the asshole, finally paid attention, fished a key out from under the lip of the cash-register and directed baleful resentment in glittered-girl direction.
“Hey, Boston, you’re a little late to catch the floor-show. Eyes up when I’m not on the clock, they’re real.” It was spit-shined steel, cherry-sweetened, and she grinned if he looked up because she was banking on some kind of ashamed from the old guy in the strip-joint who took an old-fashioned view of what they were for.
Rory, if asked, wasn't sure that he looked old. There were a fucking lot of things to contribute to his aging, be it all the drinking and smoking and demonic stress and whatnot. Then there was the fact that he actually was kind of fucking old, that might of had something to do with it. But also, he hadn't aged in the last several years, so properly speaking and all, he didn't look as old as he actually was because he wasn't as old as he actually was. This concept was deemed vaguely scientific and therefore unworthy of Rory's time, but it was still generally acknowledged. Rory seemed older than most of the folks of Repose, but he was also aware that things were not always what they seemed in this town. The woman he lived with, for example, was way more decrepit than she looked. May didn't seem grouchy enough to compensate for those amount of years, but Rory was kind of doing the work for both of them.
"Oh, I'm winning," he told her with a sharktooth smile. Wide and carnivorous. Our man here didn't know loss, not the kind that he could prevent anyway. Yeah sure, he'd lost friends, and lost his own life, even lost his soul along the way… but he'd never lost a game of gin, or poker, or chutes and ladders. Anything that could be manipulated would be manipulated, and he was just a creature of the times. Rory won a lot, but the house was still weighing heavy over his head. He was more familiar with the sensation of losing these days. Which is why he kind of just shrugged when she said that he sucked. Yeah, he knew.
"Yeah she is," he laughed out loud at Mariah's expense and gave a quick cheers to Holly as he downed the rest of his fresh shot. She'd taken her's too prior to giving him the third degree, and Rory was left chuckling like he could still find amusement in the presence of youth.
Glitter, now known as Holly, was still hanging out bar-side, and Rory glanced down the row to where the bartender was tending to other people. He gave the girl a sideways look, brow angled up. "You want me to get him for you? Ya been waitin' awhile."
Boston was kidding himself. That skin was lived in, stretched to thin. Holly saw youth in the cracked mirror in back and she knew Boston wasn’t it. She didn’t care that he wasn’t as old as it got in Repose, it got really old, practically dead in Repose. It was an incubator of old people, all pinch-your-cheeks sweet to your face and bitchy behind your back. Holly trusted youth more than she trusted the old. Youth? Hadn’t learned how to make shafting you in the back not-obvious yet. But the point, Boston was that he looked like he’d lost more rounds than he won.
No shame from Boston. He sloped off poor performance at cheating the house like it was a music change, nothing to be noticed. But he laughed like a regular joe at a crack about some old singer Holly knew bare minimum about and he finished his drink as she leaned back to the bar and tried to work out how to murder Marcus from paces away across the bar.
“Yeah,” she wasn’t going to pass up on help. Boston looked like maybe he could murder Marcus with a death-stare, it went with the grizzled ‘seen it all’ shit. “It’ll be in the cash register. It’s always in the cash register. He could just come over here, but he’s pissed.”
Rory's help often afforded the receiver more new problems than solutions rendered. While self-aware of this aspect, he was bored enough to offer. Her yeah had him straightening up a bit at the bar, tight shoulders rolling back while he tongued the acidwash of whiskey off of the interior of his fangs. He knocked a couple of knuckled against the bar top with the realization that violence couldn't be the go-to that it usually was. Not because Glitter probably wanted to keep her shit-job, and not because he was out of practice. The fumes of hard liquor dissipated from his nostrils and Rory's shoulders slumped a little when he reminded himself that he was supposed to be lying low. There was also the little issue of whatever they'd planted in his head.
It didn't make for a great deal of confidence, but he'd already offered. So maybe he wouldn't threaten the guy, Rory wasn't looking for any reason to get kicked out of this place too. He was going to run out of Repose-centered drinking holes at this rate.
Rory pulled a clip of cash from his pocket and whistled for attention, much to the bartender's annoyance. "What do I owe ya?" He began peeling off twenties until hitting the approximated total mumbled off by Marcus. But the money was handed off sideways to Holly instead of across the bar to Marcus' extended palm. "Why don't you two make nice and trade?" Her money for Marcus'. Up from the bar and walking the comfortable, fuzzy edge of a buzz, Rory pulled the ball cap's bill down hard over the line of his eyes and made his way through the colorful strobe lights on his way to the exit. "Stay troublesome, kid." The exit opened to the outside world, where the sunlight of late afternoon seemed blinding by comparison. He was a tall shadow of contrast, blacking out the sun until the door fell short behind him again.