Tangled Hearts: A Menage Collection

by Various

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like to drink. I did. The difference was that I didn’t need to. Starting in the summer before middle school, it wasn’t uncommon for my friends and me to sneak into my mom’s stash and replace it with a little tap water. I’m not sure that she ever noticed, though it also could’ve been that she just didn’t care. Even so, drinking got old to me pretty quickly. Things picked up a little once I told my parents that I wouldn’t be joining them in Nebraska and secured my cramped apartment and job at Hungry Pete’s, but the burden of actual, adult responsibilities made it difficult for me to live it up in any real sense. On my twenty-first birthday that had just passed, all I wanted was a cup of coffee, a cigarette and some alone time.

  My ability to stay behind in Collins--a town that I had grown to love and admire for its simple appeal--wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance of Horace Short, the owner of both the restaurant that I worked in and the tiny, humble apartment that I had been renting since my folks skipped town. Mr. Short was something of a businessman, but was the kindest one that I ever met. Though he wasn’t in town a lot, he managed to become good friends with many of the town’s residents, including my family. When word got to him about my situation, he took me aside as I biked back home from school one day and offered me a place to stay in exchange for keeping an eye on his restaurant. It didn’t turn out to be the easiest arrangement, but I’m still convinced that it was the right decision. Once Mr. Short bumped me up to assistant manager and started sending me a small check every week, things weren’t so bad, actually. I knew that I couldn’t live that way forever, but it was miles ahead of anything my parents ever could’ve given me.

  There were times when I wished that I had finished school and maybe even went to college, not the least of which on those occasions when I had to stick around to close up shop until nearly midnight. It was one of those nights that I stood there, with my screaming back hunched over and my elbows pressed down into the hard counter, that my eyes were locked on the tarnished napkin holder. I squinted and furrowed my brow. It was the only time I looked like my dad, though it wasn’t something that I did for fun. Sometimes, I just couldn’t resist remembering what he looked like.

  The dangling bell over the front door of Hungry Pete’s chattered through the empty air in the restaurant and drew my gaze upward. It was almost time to lock the doors, but it wasn’t like us to turn someone away. My coworkers and I--there were three of us there at the time--depended on our meager paychecks to survive. If we pissed off the wrong person and something happened to the restaurant, something would surely happen to us, too.

  Alan, a gangly young man in his early 20s, was the first person to greet Old Man Winters as he hobbled through the creaky front door and shuffled to his usual seat near the end of the counter.

  “Hey Mr. Winters! How’s it going?”

  The old man sighed as he lowered into one of the red vinyl-topped barstools and slapped a newspaper onto the seat next to him.

  “It’s been better,” he said and then turned to me. “How about fixin’ me a coffee, sweet cheeks?”

  “You got it,” I replied curtly. It was hard to do as I bit my tongue, but I somehow managed.

  Our older customers (which was most of them), were still stuck in some kind of time-warp; like it was eternally the 50’s. They were no stranger to a condescending tone or a “friendly” pat of the rear. Even their wives--the ones who were still around--looked the other way as their ornery husbands pinched and eyed the waitresses.

  Considering that I’d only let a couple of guys take me all the way, the last thing that I needed was some sexist, walking wrinkle touching my ass. But, at the end of the day, I needed my job more than I needed my dignity.

  I dragged myself into the kitchen and was met by the cook, Alonso’s, tired eyes. Though it wasn’t usually the case, the dark bags under them and wide-open stance that they maintained made him look concerned. Alonso had been working for Mr. Short for longer than me to faithfully to support the wife and two kids that waited for him in a small cabin just down the road. In a way, he looked out for me in the earlier years just after my parents left. Thanks to him, I avoided some injury, a few tickets and more trips to jail than I’d be willing to admit. Always the rational voice, Alonso was the kind of guy that I was comfortable with, no matter what.

  “What do they want?” He pointed to the grill with a greasy scrub brush. “I already shut it down and scrubbed it.”

  “Just coffee.”

  “Oh.”

  “Oh what, Alonso?”

  He hesitated for a moment.

  “I scrubbed that, too,” he said. I rolled my eyes. If there was one thing that I hated more than waiting on creepy dudes at work, it was going out of my way for creepy dudes at work. “I didn’t think anyone would want coffee at eleven o’clock at night.”

  “I got it,” Alan said as he zipped by me so fast that it blew some of my loose hairs back. If nothing else, the kid was always full of energy. In the time that it took me to glance out the service window and eye Mr. Winters as he carefully unfolded his paper, Alan already had the machine brewing.

  “Thanks,” I said and sank back against the wall near a humming ice machine. “I owe you one.”

  “If I make it to-go and get Old Man Winters out of here, will you owe me two?”

  I looked over in time to see him wiggle his eyebrows. He was so tall and thin that all of his features seemed exaggerated like a caricature. With his bushy eyebrows and narrow, cut jaw line that were just as perfectly animated as the rest of him, I couldn’t help but chuckle. Alan might’ve been a little weird to people who didn’t know him, but I was pretty sure that the idea of bad intentions never entered his large, sometimes clueless skull.

  “Two of what?”

  He yanked down a foam cup, pulled the glass coffee pot out as the hot liquid started to drip down, and filled the cup directly from the machine. From the inside, long threads of steam wafted up into the still air.

  “How about two beers?”

  When the cup was full, he replaced the pitcher and deftly pressed on the lid, circling it with his thumb one time to make sure that it was on tight.

  “Oh come on,” I groaned and stripped off my dingy, wet apron. With the flick of the wrist, it joined dozens of others just like it in a bin near the back door. “You know I have to be in for prep tomorrow morning.”

  “Don’t act like you don’t want to,” Alan said and ducked into the dining room to deliver the coffee without waiting for an answer. Truth was, I did want to. Though I wasn’t in a hurry to get stupid drunk and make a fool of myself, the prospect of getting out of the house was too tempting to let pass by.

  From the dining room, I heard Mr. Winters bellow and laugh from deep within his gut, along with the hasty crinkling of newspaper. With a free muffin in his hand and a pat on the shoulder from Alan, the old man hobbled out of the front door, seemingly pleased with himself. For all the trouble that customers like him caused me, it didn’t take much to shut them up.

  I pulled the clip loose from my long, curly locks, allowing them to spill down over my shoulders like a waterfall. Right away, the brewing headache at the base of my neck started to disburse.

  “You coming, Alonso?”

  He eyed the clock over the service window and shrugged his shoulders.

  “I suppose Lucy won’t mind an extra hour or two.”

  “That woman is too good for you, you know.”

  “Si.” He smiled and flashed a mouthful of misaligned teeth. “She reminds me every day.”

  I reached up to the wall and clicked all but one of the humming halogen lights off.

  “Well let’s not keep her waiting.”

  The three of us made our final rounds through the kitchen and dining area before we headed out in a hurry. As I slammed the front door shut and twisted the screeching deadbolt, a flickering, blue shimmer of neon light spilled onto the ground just across the street. It had been a couple of years si
nce ‘Ink & Co.’, a tattoo parlor, opened up, but I still wasn’t used to seeing any businesses bustling late at night in Collins. We had always been a sleepy kind of town, but times were catching up. Some of the locals’ kids ended up serving as the founding members of a small offshoot of a biker gang up in Portland. To be honest--other than the addition of the tattoo parlor and the heavy, deep rattle of engines as they wound their bikes slowly through the old trees--nothing really changed in the wake of their presence. I even suspected from time to time that people liked having the handful of leather-clad, rough-looking men scattered through our neighborhood. I never got to know any of them personally, though. There were always just enough new faces to keep me confused as to who was who.

  Alan ducked into his brown hatchback and flipped the passenger side lock from the inside.

  “Let’s get this show on the road.”

  Chapter 2

  The rough smoke from near the end of my cigarette raced down my throat, though the usually warm tingle from it that I enjoyed was masked by the effects of four beers and a shot of tequila to boot. I never intended to get drunk, but after a solid year of doing nothing but work, it didn’t take too much of Alan’s nagging before I gave in. Besides, even Alonso was down to party, and that was saying something.

  I leaned back against the bar and let my lips hang slightly open. From between them, smoke spilled out like water and curled in neat spirals around my head before joining the general haze that sat over us. Oregon went smoke free for businesses years before, but modern legalities were lost on all who entered Lucky’s Tavern. For them--and me--time stood still as the clattering of glass and the hum of a dozen different conversations carried on at once. Every so often, the twangy lamentations of country music broke through the din, but never for more than a few, sad words. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy the place, but sometimes I wondered about what else was out there. What was I missing?

  “Your shot,” Alan slurred and sloppily handed over a cup full of plastic darts. The only metal parts on them, the barrels, scraped the sides of the clear glass. If it wasn’t for the pile of loose tips at the bottom that kept them in place, I’m sure they would’ve fallen out long before. Alan was plastered.

  I turned around to Dale Biggs, an older man with dyed-dark hair and a moustache that was peppered with gray and tapped the counter in front of me.

  “Uno mas.” He nodded and reached under the bar as I finally freed the dart cup from Alan’s precarious grip. “You sure you want some of this?”

  “You know it, princess.”

  I patted his cheek a little rougher than I normally would and grabbed a fresh beer. I mashed out my smoke and stepped up to the line with three red flights sticking out from between my knuckles. Eight feet back from the electronic board and the flickering lights of the scoreboard above it, a tattered strip of yellow electrical tape marked where to stand. Its edges had been ground down into the wooden floor and were tinged with the dirt of countless shoes that had drunkenly shuffled over it.

  With my toe roughly in place, I was careful not to spill my beer as I slipped one of the darts free and leaned forward. I was sure the board never used to move, but it danced back and forth in front of my eyes like we were on a ship at sea. Before I was able to let my first shot fly, I was blindsided.

  A man, who I didn’t get a very good look at right away, turned around too fast and stumbled into my arm. Before any of my darts even hit the dirty floor, a wave of stinky, foamy liquid sloshed up from the mouth of the glass beer bottle and splashed over my neck and collarbone.

  “Hey,” I said and tried to stay upright. “What the hell?”

  The man held both hands out and stopped just short of grabbing my shoulders to keep me stable.

  “Oh shit,” he said and pulled off his sunglasses. “I’m so sorry.”

  By then, Alan and Alonso were by my side. Alonso took the bottle away and handed me a few napkins while Alan wedged his way between us. I knew that he was just trying to protect me, but I didn’t want him to start a fight that he wouldn’t be able to finish. Besides, I was pretty sure that it was an accident.

  “What’s the big idea?” Alan said and backed me up a little.

  Fortunately, the man looked totally calm. I watched his dark, almost black irises while he sized Alan up and the thick lines of ink on his hand as he stroked his goatee. The little bit of his skin that was actually visible was darkened by the sun, including his face and the very front of his neck. Almost everywhere else was covered in tattoos, from the middle joint of his fingers to the flesh that peeked out from beneath the collar of his plain, gray shirt. I was fortunate, in a way, because that same shirt was just tight enough for me to make out his large, powerful arms and tell-tale ripples that ran the length of his stomach.

  “Relax, man,” he said to Alan and ran a few fingers through the closely-shorn, black hairs on his head. “We’re all friends here.”

  “He’s right, bud,” Alonso added. “Chill out.”

  Whether it was because of all the liquor or adrenaline, Alan didn’t budge. Though I appreciated the effort, I wasn’t about to sit back and watch him get his ass kicked, so I stepped between them and put both hands on his upper arms.

  “Calm down, champ.”

  He eyed the man suspiciously but eventually relented softly, “Fine.”

  When I turned around, the man was still there with a whisper of a smirk showing on his face. Under eyes that were hard to read, he had a slightly crooked nose and what I thought was an early hint of dimples.

  “Look,” he said and helped dry me off. I’m not sure if it was just in my head, but he seemed to dip a little closer to my breasts with every pat. “I’m really sorry. I wasn’t watching where I was going.”

  “Well, obviously,” I replied sarcastically.

  He laughed, swiped a few last drops off of my collar bone and tossed the napkins aside.

  “The name’s David, by the way.”

  I looked to my friends, who had retreated back to the bar. I knew they were watching, but I could only hope that Alonso would keep Alan under control. He usually did a good job, but one could never be certain with that kid.

  David asked, “Is there anything I can do?”

  Of all the things that I wanted to say to the sexy biker in front of me, not many of them were appropriate. I wasn’t sure what it was about him, but there was a silent, simmering kind of mystery he exuded that I couldn’t pull myself away from. I wondered, as we stood eye-to-eye in the middle of Lucky’s, about the kinds of things that he might do to me. It had been years since I was so strongly attracted to a man, making it difficult for me to not look like a drooling idiot.

  “You can get me another drink, for starters,” I forced out.

  “Tell you what. I’ll buy you and your friends another round if you can beat me at a game.”

  Whether or not they were, it seemed like all eyes were on me. I could feel them drilling into my back as I stammered and searched for an intelligent answer. I don’t know if it was because of the pressure or the fact that my second wind was starting to kick in, but I suddenly felt a lot more sober.

  “Sure,” I said and tried to keep my eyes from wandering south of his ripped abs. “But what happens if I lose?”

  He smiled.

  “We can talk about that later. What do you say?”

  For a moment, I hesitated and looked to Alan. He didn’t seem mad anymore, but it was clear that he still had a bit of calming down to do.

  “Alright, tough guy,” I said and nudged his arm light slightly. “Let’s dance.”

  I walked back up to the frayed line on the ground and opened up the game with two of three darts stuck into the black that surrounded the board. With an angry groan, I watched as David sunk a triple eleven on the first throw. Was I that nervous, or was he just that supremely confident? I suspected that it was the latter, but I was never willing to count myself out of being a hot mess. I didn’t even know the guy, but I felt entangled in t
he mystery that his shadowy eyes held.

  Despite the distraction of my new friend, I managed a little rally near the middle of the game, putting us neck-and-neck. By then, I wanted to win the game almost as much as I wanted to run my hands over his tight, naked chest. Almost.

  “You’re killin’ me,” I cried loudly as he stuck his dark in the dead center of the bull’s eye, effectively ending our game of cricket almost a half hour after we started.

  David ripped the dart out of the board, dropped it into the cup and set it onto the counter. The whole time, I couldn’t stop watching. From the way that his biceps flexed with every subtle movement he made, to the slick, always cool look on his face, I was spellbound.

  “Nice try, though,” he said and patted the back of my arm. The way that he did it was reassuring, but there was definitely a lot of strength locked away in his muscles. It was easy to feel his restraint. “Now about our arrangement...”

  “I guess I owe you a drink now, huh? Dale,” I called to the bartender. “Two more shots down here, please.”

  David guided me back to the bar and wrapped his arm around my waist.

  “I guess that’ll have to do.”

  I just about melted into the floor. Every one of his fingers rested on the front curve of my left hip and I could feel all of them in agonizing detail. It had been so long since I was with a man, but that wasn’t what made me go crazy. Instead, the brazen nature with which he took control of the situation made my body ache for him. When he dipped two fingers under the hem of my shirt so that our skin met, I wasn’t sure how much more I could take.

  Before the shot glass ever hit the counter, I grabbed the drink and knocked it back. The hot burn of alcohol raced down my throat and made a chill rack my body. David’s fingers gripped a little tighter when he felt my body shake.

  Once he was done with his shot, he looked around and asked, “What happened to your friends?”

  Sure enough, Alan and Alonso were nowhere to be found.