LYDIA: Shut the front door! Of course I’m in. You want to come over to get ready?
ME TO BONNIE: Awesome, meet you outside the club at 9:45?
ME TO LYDIA: Abso-fuckin-lutely. Who else would I trust to glam me up?
BONNIE: Perfect. See ya then!
ME TO BONNIE: See ya!
LYDIA: Haha, no one. Lord knows what you’d end up looking like on your own. Probably the same ducking thing you wear to work.
LYDIA: duck auto-correct
LYDIA: ducking
LYDIA: FUCKING! Fuck auto-correct
I’m almost pissing myself I’m laughing so hard. The Uber driver probably thinks I’m a crazy nutjob. Oh my God, I love Lydia. My self-defense instructor turned best friend is seriously my saving grace in the shitstorm that is my life lately.
ME TO LYDIA: Omg, LMFAO. You are my special snowflake.
LYDIA: Fuck you. Get your ass over here.
I’m still laughing as my screen goes dark.
* * *
Several hours later Lydia and I are glammed up and looking fab as our ride nears Chandelier.
“Stop that,” Lydia lightly swats my hand as I tug down on the bright red miniskirt she chose for me from her closet.
“It’s just so short,” I whisper back.
“You’ve got great thighs. The world wants to see them.”
I feel my cheeks heat up. Does she not see the Uber driver glancing back at us in the mirror every few minutes? He’s totally listening in on everything we say.
“The knee-length maroon dress would have worked just fine,” I say, continuing my argument from earlier when she was picking out my look for the night. I should never have given her carte blanche to choose my outfit.
“Booooring,” she sing-songs. “What’s the point of torturing yourself at CrossFit if you don’t get to show off your hot bod?”
I bite my lip, glancing down at my bared thighs and tugging down on the miniskirt and the sparkly halter Lydia paired with it. The truth is, the outfit is hot and I look hot in it. I also don’t know why I feel so embarrassed since I’ve been going out in outfits that reveal just as much if not more for weeks now.
But that’s different. I’m not… me when I do that. It’s like I’m playing a character. I’m The Vixen. The Siren.
But now?
I’m just me. Out with my friend. But I’m wearing Siren Callie’s choice of outfit.
I pull my silken wrap a little tighter around my shoulders. Finally, we pull up in front of the club.
It’s a newer place on the outskirts of downtown San Francisco, a refurbished theater built during the late twenties that was bought by restauranteur Kennedy Benson. He turned it into one of the hottest hot spots anywhere in the Bay Area. I watched this whole Netflix documentary on Chandelier and Benson a while ago and have been in awe ever since. A real rags to riches story, he’s also the owner of several very popular restaurants in town.
Lydia pays—I already gave her my half of the fare—and I step out onto the sidewalk. I’ve always wanted to come check out this club, but looking up at the sparkling lights of the façade and the line that goes around the block, I’m reminded of the reason I never have before.
“Callie! You made it!” Bonnie’s high-pitched squeal is hard to miss and when I turn around, I see her grinning as she stumbles toward me on heels that seem too high for her to handle. I look down to inspect more closely and shit, those skyscraper heels would be too tall for anybody.
“Damn girl,” I laugh as I catch her in a hug, stabilizing her as she battles for balance. “You gonna be able to stay upright in those ankle breakers all night?”
Lydia steps up beside me and lets out a low whistle, checking out Bonnie’s footwear.
Bonnie just laughs me off. “That’s what Jamaal is here for.” She gestures back to her boyfriend who just caught up with her. She grabs his arm and leans into him. He’s tall with crazy-wide linebacker shoulders. Even though the rest of him is pretty thin, those shoulders give him a hulking appearance. He stands almost a head taller than Bonnie. She grins up at him. “He’ll hold me while we dance.”
“I told you before we left the house.” Jamaal shakes his head. “You’ll break your neck. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Those things are deathtraps.”
She turns her head and glares at him. “That’s not all you said. And I quote,” she drops her voice and gives it a slightly growly quality to imitate his, “but damn, baby, you look sexy as fuck in ‘em.” She looks back at the rest of us. “And then he proceeded to—”
Jamaal covers her mouth with one of his large hands and turns to Lydia with a bright smile. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced.” He holds out the hand not covering Bonnie’s mouth.
Lydia laughs and it’s her throaty, bighearted laugh as she shakes his hand. Bonnie yanks away from Jamaal’s grasp and smacks at him. He pretends to wince in pain, even though beside him, she looks like a tiny kitten swatting a bear.
Finally she turns back toward us. “Hi Lydia, I’m Bonnie. This caveman over here,” she jerks a thumb toward Jamaal, “is my boyfriend, Jamaal. You can ignore him, though. It’s what I do.”
“Oh no you don’t, woman,” Jamaal growls before wrapping his arms around her waist and lifting her off her feet, swinging her in a circle. Bonnie’s shrill giggles fill the night.
I roll my eyes at Lydia. “Yeah, they’re disgustingly adorable like that pretty much all the time.”
“Aw,” Lydia says, still watching them over my shoulder. “It’s sweet.”
I make a choking noise with my finger down my throat. Lydia laughs and smacks me on the arm.
The next moment, though, Bonnie’s back and waving our VIP passes at us. “Come on, I’m desperate for a drink. These passes let us skip to the head of the line too. Isn’t that epic?”
Lydia shoots amused eyes at me and I grin. Bonnie and I are the same age—maybe it’s being a mom, but I feel about a decade older than her. Lydia is a decade older than both of us, so she and I click perfectly and I find myself making fun of my generation to her regularly.
“Totally,” Lydia says with a wink at me after Bonnie’s turned around.
We each take a VIP pass and then Jamaal is ushering us all toward the bouncer.
For a second when the bouncer eyes each of our passes, I’m sure they’re fakes and we’ll all get rejected. After all, how reliable is it that Jamaal just happens to be friends with a guy who knows the owner? Now that I think about it, it seems pretty sketchy to me. Not to knock Jamaal, but this place is super swank.
But within seconds, the bouncer has the velvet rope raised and is ushering us through.
“Sweet,” Lydia says as she heads into the club. Totally echoing my thoughts. Way to go Jamaal.
“I have a good feeling about tonight,” she continues.
“Maybe you’ll meet somebody,” I lift and drop my eyebrows at her several times.
“Ha,” she says, then holds her hands up dramatically. “Oh please, ye club gods and goddesses. Let the perfect single woman be inside looking for love just like me. And let her have a thing for small, athletic women with sub-standard hair weaves and half a college education!”
“Oh shut up. You make a great living doing what you love,” I shoulder bump her. “And your hair looks fabulous. YOU are fabulous.”
Lydia just got the weave done a couple weeks ago, after a recent breakup. She said she felt like the extensions she previously had looked cheap. I thought she looked great, but God knows I get how refreshed a new look can make you feel. We all need it sometimes. It still seems crazy to me the always kick-ass Lydia could feel self-conscious about anything.
I’m not lying either about her looking fabulous. My girl looks hot with glossy, layered hair down to her mid-back, perfectly applied makeup and bright, intelligent brown eyes. And oh yeah, did I forget to mention the kick-ass minidress that shows off her wickedly toned arms and thighs? Teaching self-defense and kickboxing classes at the local gym wi
ll do that for a gal.
She closes her eyes and then looks back up at me. “You know what? You’re right. I am fabulous. And screw anybody who can’t see that.”
She grins at me, her genuine smile that shows all her teeth. There’s the Lydia I know and love. It just threw her for a loop when she and her girlfriend of eleven months broke up a few weeks ago. We’ve had several Ben & Jerry’s action movie binge nights. No chick flicks for these ladies. No, the more blood, guts, gore, and explosions the better. And Lydia’s not the kind of girl to spend hours doing postmortems of everything she thinks went wrong with the relationship.
Which was good because then she might have expected me to reciprocate. Lydia knows there was a guy who I thought for a while might be the guy. And that things went bad right before she met me. She got super pissed when I mentioned him and started crying one of those nights when the wine had been flowing, bullets were flying on screen, and I broke down.
She thought he was the reason I showed up in her self-defense class. No matter how much I tried not to think about Jackson, I couldn’t bear to have her believing that. Not about him. He was so good and amazing and—
I cut off the train of thought. How the fuck did I start thinking about this anyway? My sister Shannon is always talking about meditation now that her boyfriend’s this Zen master guy. She says the hard part is stilling your thoughts because they’re not only running a hundred miles an hour, they’re chaotic like a puppy. One second here, the next there. You can barely grab hold of them and then they’re gone again.
Trying as hard as I have these past few months not to think about certain shit, I wonder if there’s not something to what she’s saying. Well, I don’t know if frickin’ meditation is the answer.
Me? I go for the grown-up version of shiny toys. Distraction. Get my mind off it. I take Lydia’s hand and drag her farther into the club.
Already I can see the flashing lights. Bonnie grabs my arm and starts jumping up and down. I don’t know how the hell she manages on those heels she’s wearing, but there she goes, making her boobs bounce with great effect. This is not lost on Jamaal, who’s staring at his girlfriend’s chest like all the answers to the questions of the universe can be found there.
Aww, even him ogling her is cute. They’ve been together how many years? And he still can’t take his eyes off her.
When the small, dark entryway finally opens into the main club area, it’s fucking insane. Laser lights flash out from the raised platform at the front of the room where a DJ spins. Music blasts from a speaker that feels like it’s right above me.
People dance everywhere, illuminated only by the flashing lights and columns throughout the room that are studded with tiny neon lights like constellations of stars. The lasers scatter across the crowd in patterns that match the beat of the music. More lights spin and flash from the giant chandelier that hangs over the center of the dance floor.
Even with the alternating lights, though, the atmosphere is dark. Heavy. Sensual. Immediately, it makes me want to go on the prowl.
But damn, that’s not what tonight is about.
“Isn’t this great?” Bonnie grabs my arm and screams to be heard in my ear.
I wince and shrug out of her grasp. Suddenly I wish I hadn’t taken her up on her offer, VIP passes or not. My eyes keep getting caught by everyone dancing on the floor. Yeah the line was long outside, but I could’ve handled the wait. This place… My gaze continually wanders back to all the bodies pulsing on the dance floor to the music.
Like that hot guy over there, dancing by himself. I bet he wouldn’t mind following me to a dark corner… My gaze strays to the wall. The club is huge and from what I’ve heard, even has multiple levels.
So many places to get lost—
“Cals?” Lydia asks loudly. I jerk my gaze away from scanning the edges of the dance floor to look at her. From the expression on her face, it seems like she might have been trying to get my attention for a while.
Fuck. What am I doing? This is exactly why I didn’t come here alone. I didn’t want to deal with any of my messed up shit tonight.
“Yeah?” I zero in my attention on Lydia.
“Jamaal said the VIP section is up there,” she shouts, pointing to some roped off stairs that lead to the extended loft-like balcony that circles above the first floor. I saw all about it on the documentary I watched last year.
It’s a VIP section with a smaller dance floor and small exclusive rooms that can be rented out. All of it overlooks the central dance floor and whoever’s performing or DJ’ing for the night. As we head toward the stairs, I realize just how crazy it is that Jamaal got these passes.
At the top of the stairs are more columns lit with dotted neon lights. They aren’t an obnoxious neon, just a barely-there scattering of light. Without the laser light show flashing directly in your face like it is downstairs, these columns make it almost feel like you’re dancing among stars.
The pumping music rattles through my entire being more up here on the suspended platform. I know it’s safe. There might be empty space underneath the floor beneath my feet, but the columns beside me run all the way through, from the ceiling above down through the platform all the way to the floor below that. You know, as columns do. I’m sure we’re very secure and it’s all an illusion of danger. But still, when the floor shakes beneath your feet with every beat of the bass, it adds a sense of wildness and thrill to each moment.
A waitress in a pair of silver glittery mini-overalls and high heels that rival Bonnie’s in death-defiance pauses when she sees us standing at the top of the stairs. “Would you like to open a tab?”
Jamaal starts to pull his wallet out of the back of his pants. Lydia and I do the same, though we grab our credit cards from our bras.
“Nah, ladies, I got this tonight,” Jamaal tries to say.
Lydia and I both shake our heads firmly.
“Thanks,” I say, “but I’ve got a policy, even when it comes to friends.” I smile so I don’t come off looking like a dick. I hand my card to the waitress. “Double vodka tonic.”
Lydia rolls her eyes at me and orders a Sex on the Beach.
“Seriously, you have got to start ordering better drinks,” she says, eyeing the people around us and not bothering to hide that she’s sizing them up. “You think anyone overhearing you ordering a vodka tonic is gonna think, now damn, there’s a girl who lives on the wild side?”
I roll my eyes right back at her. “And you’ve got to stop ordering drinks based solely on their names. Do you even like how that thing tastes?”
Lydia cracks a grin and raises her hand in a so-so gesture. I shake my head at her and we all head to the banister to look down at the revelers below while we wait for our drinks.
It’s just a few minutes before the waitress is back with our cocktails. Gotta say, service in this place is impressive. Maybe it’s just for VIPs, but still. I’ve never gotten my drink so fast.
I take a sip and it’s good. I raise my eyebrows and nod at Lydia. She seems similarly impressed with her drink. She certainly downs it fast enough.
I laugh at her, but I drink mine just as quickly. The club soda is just enough to take the bite off the vodka. I did come here with a plan tonight after all.
Get drunk. Dance. Forget my life for a while.
Have fun.
I know, a fucking foreign concept for me.
Bonnie and Jamaal must be on a similar page because in the blink of an eye, their drinks are gone too. We pile our empty glasses on the tray of a passing waitress and then Bonnie throws her arms around Jamaal’s neck and starts grinding her body against his in what I can only call a loose attempt to mirror the beat of the music. The next minute they disappear into the thick of the crowd.
The dance floor here isn’t large—it’s just built on an extended rectangular platform that overlooks the light show below. It’s not as packed as the downstairs, but it’s busy.
Lydia laughs at Bonnie and Jamaal and then gra
bs my hand to pull me in after them. I give in to her tugging and follow her. Already, I can feel the vodka lighting up my veins and loosening me. My limbs feel lighter. More liquid.
Lydia starts dancing and she’s fabulous. Like, she’s actually taken lessons. Started out with ballet when she was a little girl and then when she got older, she did contemporary and jazz. Now she just does whatever the hell she wants. Hip-hop, whatever. She does Lydia.
At the moment, she’s bustin’ it all out. I dance beside her, just appreciating the beauty of her movement. She embodies the music. In her hips. Up to her torso. In her chest and out through her arms. She pops her hips back sharply and drops to the ground. The next second she’s back up and a sensuous wave works through her entire body, shoulders to knees. I whistle and clap and I’m not the only one.
She does a three-sixty spin on her heels before brushing some non-existent lint off her shoulders and continuing on. I laugh more and it feels so good, so goddamn good that I throw my head back and dance and dance and dance.
We keep at it for another twenty minutes. Several guys try approaching Lydia and she smoothly shuts them down each time, most often by coming over to me. We start dancing seductively together for a while and most guys get the picture. They aren’t welcome.
Well, except for a couple that just start whistling louder. One actually tries to move in between us like he thinks he’s gonna be the meat in our girl sandwich. Lydia not-so-accidentally stomps on his foot. She’s a self-defense instructor, so she knows exactly where to land to make it hurt. He jumps away from us so fast, shouting something we can’t hear above the beat of the music. Probably a good thing if he wanted to leave with his balls intact. Things stay copacetic after that.
God, I love Lydia. She’s always so kick-ass.
A redhead who’s been dancing near us pulls out some sweet moves. She sidles a little nearer and starts to breakdance. There’s just a small space that opens up in the crowd, but she still manages to show off some wicked skills.
Lydia slows down her own dancing, bobbing her head to the beat as she watches the redhead. Red culminates with a headspin and then does one of those body flips to get back to her feet. Day-um. I clap fervently. Most people in the surrounding circle are equally appreciative.
Break So Soft: Break So Soft Duet Page 4
