The Last Best Tip

by Cassandra Duffy

  The three would-be-vampires strolled into her bar, and Lucy instantly understood Sasha’s position in all this; it was an easily recognizable situation as it perfectly mirrored her own. The trio was as hopelessly devoted to the notion of vampirism as the three couples she’d sent to Sasha were to the notion of being sexy. The two men and one woman were powdered until pale with dyed black hair and the better part of a Hot Topic store split between the three of them. The sheer amount of skull/bat/spider costume jewelry would take hours to remove to get through airport security and probably double that to get it all back on in the proper order. They spotted her and made their skulking way to the bar.

  “The fee is $2,000 per person per date, upfront, or the vampires will think you aren’t wealthy enough to sustain yourselves for eternity,” Lucy whispered when they were all huddled around a single stool.

  “How mammy dafes will it take?” the taller of the two men asked, slurring his speech a little around the huge fake, plastic fangs he wore.

  “It will take however many dates it takes,” Lucy hissed. “You’re dealing with immortal creatures. Human concepts of time and schedule are irrelevant.”

  The trio nodded as if they understood implicitly.

  “Do not, under any circumstance, sleep with the vampires,” Lucy continued. “It would be like having sex with a cheeseburger before eating it.” The three made the appropriately grossed-out face, more so among the two men; Lucy wondered if the woman’s reaction might not have been an act, and that she might have eaten an item at one point or other that had functioned as a sex toy—she was glad the script said cheeseburger, because cucumber might have been a little on the nose. “They’re going to look like average, everyday, suburbanites,” Lucy continued. “What better way to blend in with humanity for all eternity than to look like everyone else. Remember, vampirism has only been legal for about ten years.”

  The trio grumbled about this grave injustice, and reaffirmed that they were completely behind the creatures of the night achieving fully equal rights someday. As far as Lucy knew the only thing a vampire couldn’t do that a human could was adopt stray animals at the humane society.

  “Now that we are all clear on the ground rules, come back tomorrow with the money, and you’ll receive your itinerary,” Lucy said. “If I can give one parting piece of advice, dress for the job you want, not the job you have.” The trio all nodded and smiled like proper little bobble dolls; Lucy suspected by the end of the week they would have enough vampire related paraphernalia to choke an army of Anne Rice’s damned.

  The three marks walked back out of the Swing Set heads held high and fake fangs stuffed in their mouth. She felt the cool, tawdry presence of Sasha creep into her mind.

  “You should come home with me tonight,” Sasha whispered in her mind. “I want to make you feel dirty in a good way.”

  Lucy shivered at both the chilling voice in her head and the naughty words they spoke. “I’m all yours,” Lucy whispered, to Sasha’s great delight.

  ~€~

  Over the next few weeks the grift spread, expanded, and redoubled in effort. Before the leaves started turning that fall, Sasha and Lucy’s little enterprise had netted close to six figures. Surprisingly, none of the couples seemed all that put out by their apparent lack of success. The swingers appeared to enjoy the non-sexual company and the vampire-pretenders flourished under all the personal attention. Lucy theorized that both groups might just have wanted to be the center of attention at one point and everything they were doing, be it vampire chasing or swinging, was to feel noticed and important. She brought the theory to Sasha, who didn’t really seem to care why things were working so well, and proposed they have sex on the cash, which Lucy agreed readily to.

  Standing in the bathroom after, staring at herself in the mirror, plucking errant, sweaty $100 bills off her various parts, Lucy began to wonder if her relationship with Sasha might be getting a tad out of control. She craved having Sasha in her head, craved having Sasha’s teeth in her breasts, and craved having Sasha in bed or wherever else they could think to have sex, but she couldn’t really figure out if she even liked Sasha as their conversations usually started with ‘Wanna get naked?’ and ended in ‘Fuck yes! Right there!’ Lucy opened the bathroom door, stood in the threshold leaning against the doorframe, and watched a nude, also covered in a patchwork of money, Sasha collecting up the loot they’d just had sweaty sex on.

  “Do you even like me?” Lucy asked, immediately feeling like a catty loser for the tone of voice and the question itself.

  “Of course I like you,” Sasha replied without ever losing a beat in her collecting task. “I’ve spent days inside your head loving every part of who you are and how you came to be from your first day of first grade to the week you spent deciding to drop out of college. I like it all.”

  Lucy felt a lightning bolt strike her brain to turn on all the lights. Of course Sasha didn’t have to talk to her to know everything about her. She’d passed fifty dates worth of information across to Sasha instantaneously that first night. This weird connection they had wasn’t something organic; it was a vampire trick sharing thoughts and memories across a psychic-link that made Lucy feel like she’d known the vampire forever. Surprisingly, Lucy didn’t feel all that weird about it. In fact, when she considered the mental invasion and connection, she actually rather liked the idea. Immediately after this feeling, she wondered if maybe Sasha hadn’t put that thought in her head as well like so many others.

  “You’re bad with money,” Lucy said, picking up on a memory she didn’t think the vampire really wanted her to have. “You’ve always been bad with money.” Only after she made the observation did she realize that the sharing of information apparently had gone both directions.

  This stopped Sasha in her work of collecting up close to fifty-thousand dollars in cash. “Yes, but you’re not,” she replied. “In your mind, I saw how well you did in business and math classes before you dropped out of college. You’re a natural at the legitimate stuff and I’m a natural at quick bursts of easy money. We’re perfect for each other.”

  “So this is just a business arrangement?” Lucy asked, the catty feeling redoubling on her.

  “I’m sorry. Did we not just fuck like bunnies on a pile of money?” Sasha dropped the big armful of cash she had back on the bed and turned a slow, naked, pensive circle acting as though she were looking for someone else who might have done the nasty on the money, but really just to show off her naked form still decorated with Lucy’s sweat and $100 bills.

  “Okay, fine, sexual and business…”

  “I’m staying at your place, during the day, when I’m vulnerable, I have subsisted almost entirely on your blood for weeks now—this is as intimate as vampire relationships get!”

  Lucy knew that statement was close to true, true for their particular situation anyway, but lacking only in Sasha turning Lucy into a vampire as well. They’d discussed it, albeit briefly, and both enjoyed the notion of a vampire being with a human a whole lot more, but still including the caveat of leaving the topic open for discussion down the road.

  “You’re right; I’m sorry,” Lucy said quickly. “Anyway, with the two payments from Thursday, we’re well over the startup we need for our bar.”

  “Do you want to quit your job first or should I?”

  “I love it when we go at the same time,” Lucy said with a flirty smirk.

  “Oooooh, me too.”

  ~€~

  Their plan for an upscale lesbian sports bar in the fashion of the great Midwestern sports bars, seemed like a good idea on the surface, and with the abundant startup capital, they were able to do an amazing job of turning a former chain restaurant/grill into a fantastic lesbian facsimile of what might have been a Chicago Bears or St. Louis Cardinals hangout spot. Of course, the best laid plans of vampires and their girlfriends don’t always amount to much. After a month of slow or no business, Lucy and Sasha were wondering if lesbians in the greater St. Louis are
a just weren’t that into sports.

  Lucy leaned forward over the bar, half asleep, head propped up in her hand, vaguely watching Sasha at the basket-shooting game, sinking shot after shot, somewhere on her way to another high score rendered effectively meaningless as vampires probably never missed baskets. This was the other shoe to drop, Lucy decided. The wildly successful grift, the wonderful relationship, the mind-blowing sex, the cathartic quitting of the job she hated, it was all too perfect, and now she knew why—a Midwest lesbian sports bar was apparently a bad way to burn $150,000.

  “Easy come, easy go,” Sasha said, apparently hearing Lucy’s grim thoughts. “Think of it as playing with house money. It was never really ours to begin with.”

  “It’s just irritating that a swingers club and a vampire bar in a strip mall are both better ideas than ours,” Lucy said. “I thought we were smarter than that.”

  “That is exactly the type of thinking that always screwed up my plans,” Sasha said with a laugh. “We’re so alike we even mess things up the same way.”

  Lucy’s eyes flicked over to Sasha’s basketball game with herself, not the game in particular, but to Sasha and her painted on jeans. Every little jolt and tensing of the muscles in her legs and ass as she shot baskets was apparent through the tight denim. The repetitive swishing of mini-basketballs passing through the net stopped when Sasha picked up on Lucy’s involuntary thoughts.

  “Want to fuck me on the pool table before we have to sell it to pay the lease?” Lucy asked.

  “From the second I saw you in that skirt tonight,” Sasha said with a fangy-grin.

  Neither Sasha nor Lucy had thought to lock up the bar or turn off the signs; they hadn’t had a customer in days, so they didn’t really think it was necessary to do either. Lucy’s concerns about much of anything completely melted away when Sasha aggressively bent her over the end of the pool table, holding her chest flat against the green felt with her pencil skirt bunched around her waist and panties around her ankles. Sasha’s favored strap-on, which fit beautifully over her slender hips in the tight jeans, had a little arched knob at the top, designed to tickle Lucy’s clit if they were facing each other, but in the bent over, from behind position, actually vibrated and knocked at her backdoor with every powerful thrust her vampire girl made into her. Lucy screamed in delight as Sasha ravaged her, each scream brought either a tug on the back of her ponytail or a sharp swat on her increasingly red behind. It felt like a proper send-off for the pool table nobody had ever used.

  Lucy climaxed again for what she thought might have been the fifth time. An aggressive sweat rose on her skin, adding an additional sting to the harshly spanked red of her behind, and she felt her legs weaken to the point of giving out. Sasha, intuiting that Lucy wouldn’t hold herself up much longer, grasped Lucy’s legs, swept them off the floor into her hands and moved her into a modified wheel-barrow position that Lucy knew would leave rug burns from the pool table felt across her forearms, but couldn’t imagine a reason why she would care.

  Sweating and exhausted, but nowhere near done with whatever Sasha wanted to do with her on the soon to be departing pool table, Lucy had to wonder why the aggressive thrusting suddenly stopped. She picked her head up from its resting place on her outstretched arm, and glanced up to the doorway where she found essentially every customer they’d had in their little dating racket collected around the entrance, watching the show with bemused grins on their faces.

  “Would you like us to come back later?” Mr. Crane asked, his pronounced Adams apple bouncing above the frilly collar of his restoration era vampire shirt.

  “No, no, we’re open now,” Lucy said. She made a move to get out of the precarious position of laying stomach-down across a pool table with her legs wrapped around Sasha’s waist.

  Sasha pressed a hand to the center of her back, gently, but firmly, holding her in place. “Is this a friendly visit?” Sasha asked, seemingly having no intention of stopping if the angry former marks were planning on being thrown out in short order anyway.

  “Of course,” one of the wannabe-vampire boys said. “You guys quit in such spectacularly bitchy fashions that nobody at either of the bars was allowed to even say what became of you.”

  “It took us weeks to find out where you’d gone,” the gin-and-bitters drinker said. “Now that we have though, we want to be patrons at your new bar.”

  “I have to tell you something,” Lucy said, dropping her forehead back to her folded arms, losing the embarrassment of her compromised position in the overwhelming embarrassment of having to come clean with the fairly nice people who would probably press charges on a really nasty fraud case once they heard the truth. “We were running a scam—none of you are vampires.”

  “We know,” one of the wannabe-vampire girls said. “We figured it out on the first date, but it was all so much fun indulging in the fantasy that none of us wanted to stop.”

  Finally, Sasha slipped the strap-on from Lucy and allowed her to regain her feet, smooth down her skirt, and pull up her underwear.

  “So you’re not mad?” Sasha asked.

  “Only if you say your plan all along wasn’t to open a vampire-themed swingers bar,” the wrestler man said, looking to his diminutive for reassurance.

  Lucy opened her mouth to say no, but Sasha quickly clamped her hand over it.

  “That’s exactly what we were doing,” Sasha said.

  An Eternal Night of Overtime

  Barrow, Alaska, well above the Arctic Circle, the furthest north city in America, was by far the worst place Brooke had ever been for work. At 27-years-old, she had thrown too much of her life into the bottomless pit that was her boss, Vendela Myrdal, to not follow through with yet another ridiculous demand.

  Born and raised in Torquay, arguably the surf capitol of Australia, Brooke had aspirations, like everyone born in Torquay, of becoming a professional surfer. When that dream fell through, as it most often did, she shifted her focus to bikini fashion design. To truly be in the fashion game, she had to move from Australia to Los Angeles, which was the only obvious choice as the surfing in Milan, New York, and Paris was either non-existent or terrible. This was where she’d met Vendela Myrdal: Ice Queen of Scandinavia, fashionista extraordinaire, and notorious weirdo. To her knowledge, Brooke was the longest lasting personal assistant Vendela had ever had. Her predecessors were rarely, if ever, fired; Brooke suspected the majority quit after a month or so, a few might have stuck it out long enough to be driven insane, and, as Brooke’s plane touched down in Barrow, she suspected the rest probably froze to death or were eaten by caribou.

  Brooke was a typical surf city beauty with her short, sandy hair cut into a layered bob, skin uniformly (and likely permanently) baked to a golden brown by time spent in the sun, with half a dozen or so sun-caused beauty marks spread over her body, which tended toward the muscular side of tomboyish—strong shoulders overshadowing athletically small breasts and abdominal muscles obscuring the curvature of her hips, but with marvelously toned, muscular legs, and defined arms. She was the polar opposite of her boss, not only in looks, but also in personality; Brooke’s laidback surfer approach to life clashed often with Vendela’s demand for perfection and precision. At 5’7”, Brooke towered over her boss, who might climb to 5’4” while wearing 5” heels, which she often did, but, unmodified by footwear and clothing, clearly hovered somewhere in the range of five-foot even and around one-hundred pounds.

  Brooke didn’t hate her boss, per se, that was, until she stepped off the plane and was struck full in the face by the coldest, driest air she’d ever encountered. She’d read up on Barrow during the interminably long flight. It technically, despite the colossal snow drifts and ice everywhere, was a desert. Another interesting tid-bit she’d learned—Vendela’s private home was the largest foundation-set structure for five-hundred miles; it would also be Brooke’s home from November 18th to January 23rd.

  She picked up Vendela’s Range Rover from storage near the airport. Drivin
g the sleek, black SUV through the frozen streets of Barrow, Brooke quickly realized the British-built, ultra-luxury vehicle probably cost more than every other vehicle in the 4,000 person town combined. The road to Vendela’s mansion/compound/fantastically-creepy steel and stone tower had blessedly been plowed, although Brooke was made to understand that such luxuries might vanish at anytime over the next two months. Once inside the cavernous, underground parking structure, empty save for the Range Rover she’d driven in, Brooke held out hope that it would be her last cold, barren experience for awhile; after all, Vendela was an artist, seemed to adore vibrant colors and lush fabrics, surely her home, even one on the furthest edge of arctic hell, would reflect that. As Brooke rode the elevator up to the main floor of the compound, she found she was sorely mistaken. Each room was larger and more barren than the last. Dark stonework or burnished metals comprised the walls and much of the furniture. Brooke couldn’t, even with an astounding amount of imagination, think of anyplace less welcoming or potentially deadlier to the blind or clumsy. Free-standing, spiral staircases, a dozen in all, led up to the various floors from the main hall, which didn’t have a stick of furniture in it excepting an enormous black rug, forty feet by probably twice that, laid out in front of the colossal fireplace dominating one wall. Upon closer inspection, Brooke found the fireplace was not just functional, but apparently pivotal in heating the entire mansion; she also discovered the black rug was comprised of a hundred or so black bear pelts sewn together. Neither discovery was particularly welcome.