Friday Flash: Regional Were

Well, the first version of this post was on Friday! (Ah, the holidays—when one can spend so much time running around like the proverbial decapitated fowl that one completely forgets the celebratory aspects of the season.) After the jump, one wholly unedited excerpt of a story that just bloomed beneath my fingers yesterday. As yet unfinished, sigh. Did I need this? Apparently part of me thinks so.

Drinks are properly someone else’s territory, but I try never to ignore the breath of the muse. Hand that chica a breath mint and be prepared for long silence! Besides, drinks and raccoons are a natural match; that dipping behavior, don’t ya know.


“Ah. Wondered where you’d got to.” The bartender’s smile said more than his words, full of mischief again with a hint of—what? Sorrow?—something she couldn’t name. “Friend of mine wants to buy you a drink.” He pushed a martini glass across the bar.

Whatever that drink was, it was certainly no martini. Red and white, cocoa or something around the rim, with a tiny dried pepper floating on the top... Lacey blinked, looked again. Still there. “What in the name of Santa’s smallest reindeer is that?”

“Seasonal.”

“The drink or the curse?”

He only shrugged, but the tilt of his head suggested she look toward a certain table. For whomever had suggested that perversion of decent alcohol, no doubt. She didn’t, too appalled to move so much as her head. “Do I want to meet someone who would buy one of those?”

“Yes. Well, you want to meet this guy, at least. I think.”

She wasn’t so sure, but he’d turned away to serve someone else anyway. Sighing, she reached for the glass, holding it near the base of the stem lest it contaminate her. The smell of spice and chocolate rose as she moved.

The bar’s lighting could have won awards, a marvel of shadow and illumination, grace and mystery. Lacey stepped through pools of gold and silver, grey and night-black, feeling rather like she’d walked all inadvertent into a movie. Something definitely cross-genre, she mused, noir-ish atmosphere welded onto a Western setting and a perfect horror of a concoction in her hand.

As she neared the table the bartender had indicated, she added grunge to her list. There were two men at the table, both scruffy. The one seemed huddled within his oversized top and sloppy pants, and his hair hadn’t seen a barber’s shears in far too long.

The other, though, the one with his back to her...he wore his battered clothing like high style, his jeans torn beneath leather fetish straps, his shirt pure silk. The set of his narrow shoulders told her he knew she was coming. She had to laugh; was he so sure she wouldn’t dump the drink over his head? Not that he’d done anything to deserve it except have execrable taste, but that might be enough. Chocolate liqueur and hot peppers? And whipped cream?

He turned, and she trembled, caught.

No. No, no, no. Eyes so rimmed in kohl he looked like he was wearing a mask. Absolutely not.

...except...

Spirits of the season! He was so completely wrong it might actually be right. Fun, that was what she’d been looking for, right? Not a date for the company Christmas party, just...fun. This so-confident man might well be that, with his sharp-toothed grin and his self-assurance like a cloak. He hadn’t pushed, had waited for her. That said something, surely.

His table-mate rose and departed, murmuring something Lacey didn’t bother to hear. She looked, really looked at the man, trying to see beneath the leather and eye-liner. A small dun man who could have been almost any age, any race. Dark eyes rimmed in black like a Goth, but without that self-consciously dire attitude. Black-outlined lips curved in a welcoming grin, and his sharp nose twitched with humor. A diamond stud earring twinkled in the shadow of his thick hair, that wasn’t no-color, Lacey saw now, but rather several shades, black and brown and tan and grey. His eyes were dark, brown or black or simply accommodating the bar’s dim light. His skin was a creamy brown thanks either to his parentage or the sun’s kiss, hands and rope-muscled forearms darker than his face.

What shade might it be in those places the sun never touched? If there were any.

Lacey choked on a laugh. Hadn’t so much as said hello to the man, and here she was undressing him in her mind. Did it matter that she was clothing him again? Well, yes: she’d skipped over the fun part! He would be fun, she was as sure of that as she’d ever been of anything. Any man who could grin like that!

She was staring, she realized. As was he, but he, at least, was smiling; she was just standing there, mouth open like some drunken idiot. “I’m sorry,” she managed, “the bartender didn’t tell me your name?”

“Call me Rocky.”

His widening smile made the words a dare, and she spoke exactly what was in her mind. “Not while I live. And that’s two.”

“The drink being the first? Hardly fair, you haven’t tried it. You pass, by the way.”

“I wasn’t worried.” She admired his quick grace as he rose, held out a chair for her. When he resettled himself across from her, a clattering caught her attention. His nails were long, slightly curved, and painted black. Oh, boy. Sudden flash of them against her skin, teasing; sudden image of him, just as he was, at some business function as her date. She couldn’t decide whether to sigh or sob or giggle.

“Try the drink.” His musical tenor wove between, among, her thoughts, suggestion, not command, and she was so torn between reactions she actually did it, lifted the glass to her lips, felt the soft thick burn or spirits seeping slowly as she sipped.