Girl In Pieces (4 page)

Sometimes, on those strange late nights, he’d seem lonely and distant and so unlike him. At the time I thought it was because he had to come home alone again when he should have had companionship, affection, sex, just like everyone else in the world. He certainly deserved it. I knew now that when he came home late it was most likely from a party where he’d played someone’s Master. Michelle, maybe, or someone else just as lovely and experienced.

Now I wondered if his loneliness was because he had this huge secret and no matter how good he was at it or how happy it made him, he could never tell us. He couldn’t bring his playmates home like dates and for whatever reason he couldn’t find both submission and companionship in the same person. That would make anyone lonely. Instead he only had me in the hours after and I was obviously a rather poor replacement for the extraordinary physical bliss that bondage and submissive gifted those who played the game. I’d tasted that world for barely a second and I still craved it in the days and weeks later. I couldn’t imagine how difficult it was for Josh to come home to such a poor consolation prize.

Miss you.

“Gross.” I wrinkled my nose at the message and smiled despite the ache in my chest. “Does he always send you perfectly sweet, loving messages randomly on his own just because?”

“Yes. Sometimes when I am working late at the lab, he has dinner delivered from one of my favorite restaurants. Just because.” Julie wrinkled her nose back at me. “Should I be worried?”

“He’s obviously a robot. Or an alien. Something unnatural and tentacle-y beneath his human shell.” I handed the phone back to her. “You must kill it with fire before it’s too late. I’m afraid it’s the only way.”

There was no rum.

No Captains or Sailors or the cheap chemical tasting shit I kept on hand in case patrons behaved badly. I crouched behind the bar opening cabinet after cabinet where there ought to have been enough rum to float in, but there was nothing. The whiskey looked low. Vodka too.

No rum. Not a drop.

It had been a long few weeks. Long and very, very lonely and it was entirely possible I’d let some of my duties slip. But in my entire career bartending for my father and then owning South River, I’d never run out of an entire line of alcohol before.

When one last check proved I wasn’t imagining things, I headed back to the storage room behind the manager’s office in search of the lost rum. It was always possible the shipment had been delayed. Or never unboxed. Certainly there was some obvious explanation other than we had just simply run out without anyone noticing.

I flicked the switch inside the door and the overhead light buzzed to life, illuminating the long, narrow room. The storage area wasn’t so large you could lose a shipment in it. It was big enough for shelves on both sides, crates stacked in the back and as high as the fire marshal allowed. Bits of crushed packing peanuts and brittle wood pieces littered the floor where the delivery guys dropped the new pallets, but there were no new pallets waiting to be unpacked. The room hadn’t been swept or straightened in a while. The shelves were a mess, labels hidden or missing entirely, nothing in a straight row. Someone had abandoned a half empty bottle of water and pile of peanut shells next to an overturned crate.

I’d clearly let a lot of things slide lately.

Each section was labeled with an old fashioned, whiskey bottle inspired chalkboard plaque. They were marked with their distributor, brand, and last inventory count. The chalkboard made it easy to adjust numbers and make notes when a vendor had changed orders unexpectedly. The signs should tell me what happened to my inventory.

The signs were one of Kat’s ideas, of course.

I’d discovered a lot of little Kat things hidden around the bar in the last few weeks. Post-it notes asking for a pony and better jukebox music hidden in my desk drawer. Old email messages. Graffiti in the girl’s bathroom I was sure was her doing no matter how many times I’d scolded her for it. When I’d discovered obscure Joy Division lyrics doodled across a table top in slanted, girlish cursive I’d felt irritated, then paralyzed with an intense longing like I’d never experienced in my life. I’d imagined dragging her over to the table in the middle of the night, bending her across it so her cheek pressed prettily to the dark lyrics, and punishing her for misbehaving. My hand on her bare skin, making her scream and beg and
moan
…the image had overwhelmed my better senses, wrecked my control, left me shaking and badly missing her. No girl had ever screwed with me like this. I didn’t know if I hated her for it or…or something else just as impossible.

On Halloween, trying just to get through the night without losing my mind, I’d tried to take a picture of costumed regulars celebrating over shots at the bar and discovered a string of selfies of Kat making faces into my camera phone. The last picture was of her blowing me a kiss, red lips and dimples and holding a napkin with a warning in black Sharpie.

“
What’s yours is mine.  p.s. Use a better password. XOXO.
”

The last straw was when I found one of her t-shirts in my laundry. It was a band t-shirt, their signatures in faded ink on the back where they’d signed her. One night, after a big football game, a tipsy fan spilled buffalo wings on her. She’d tossed the shirt in my laundry and stolen one out of my closet to finish the shift.

In true Kat form, she’d never given it back, but I’d long since stopped asking for anything she made off with since it was largely a futile effort. Kat must have had dozens of my shirts in her closet from over the years. Some boxers too. And hoodies.

Despite her kleptomania, I didn’t mind. Not really. Truth be told, I even kind of liked seeing her in my clothes, lounging like a tom cat across my couch at two in the morning watching infomercials because she couldn’t sleep or didn’t want to go home.

Her shirt didn’t smell like her anymore, but I’d still stood there like an idiot trying to convince myself not to go to her apartment, push her against her front door, and kiss her for the rest of her life.

Instead I’d shoved her shirt into my closet and put it out of my mind.

But that was a mistake of course. I might as well have had her hidden in my closet instead for how much it haunted me late at night. If I had any sense, I’d have thrown it out and saved myself a lot of madness. I’d never been a masochist in my life, but I couldn’t stop punishing myself with memories of her. Couldn’t and didn’t want to if I could.

On Mondays, knowing I’d be back here counting and checking inventory logs and doing other housekeeping tasks, sometimes she’d show up with take-out and a new playlist and helped herself to helping me. She never asked for anything in return, though sometimes I’d take her upstairs afterwards and cook her dinner. She liked procrastinating her own responsibilities with mine.

Without realizing it then, Mondays became my favorite days. Mondays it was just me and Kat in this tiny room, me on the ladder counting the top shelf boxes while she made the chalkboard signs fancier than stockroom labels ought to be. She did most of the talking, naturally, the cadence of her voice coinciding with the numbers I was reading off. That was how everything was with us, guessing each other’s next move and compensating.

Damn, I missed her.

I touched one of the chalkboard signs and ran a thumb across the smudged white powder. The handwriting wasn’t hers. It hadn’t been hers for three weeks now.

Three inventory Mondays had gone by where I avoided the stock room and asked Brian or one of the waitresses to do it. The girls came kicking and screaming about how boring inventory was, and were so little help they might as well not have been there at all. They wanted to know where Kat was, when she was coming back to do this awful task. I’d remind them she wasn’t an employee, but they’d complain that it wasn’t the same without her. They demanded to know what was keeping her away.

A new man. That was the rumor. She was hip deep in a new lover and couldn’t be bothered to come up for air. It took all my power not to deny it outright and it made me crazy feeling jealous of her fake boyfriend. But I couldn’t tell them the truth. Shit. I couldn’t admit the truth to myself let alone anyone else.

I shook my head. The rum. I had to find the fucking rum. And I had to get the girl with the ridiculous pink hair out of my head. I had a bar to run. Employees to employ. And none of that was going to happen if I didn’t have any rum.

Except as I searched the shelves, I didn’t find the rum. I didn’t find anything.

Well, not nothing exactly. Each slot had boxes and crates and canisters that had once contained bottles, but they were all empty. Every last one of them, as if South River hadn’t received a shipment in weeks.

Now. Now I wanted answers.

The bar was quiet enough that I could hear Brian arguing with someone inside his office, but couldn’t make out the exact words, only that his tone was terse and slightly desperate. During the week, South River opened only in the evenings so the only two people around in the middle of the day was me and Brian, my bar manager and best friend. And Kat’s older brother.

I knocked once before pushing the office door open. Brian jumped and quickly clapped his phone shut.

“Hey,” Brian said as he tossed his cell on the desk. He rubbed his hands against his jeans, then through his hair until it stood up every which way. “I was just on the phone. What do you want? What’s wrong now?”

Despite the puff of stress evident in his hair, Brian looked good. Better than I’d seen him look in months. Clean, shaved, dressed up. The last few months had aged him, left him looking a little wild around the edges, but this was the Brian I used to know. The one who loved to look good for women.

Finally. Maybe things were starting to change for him.

I dropped into the corner of the 1970s couch, the side that wasn’t half collapsing. It was maybe the ugliest couch in the world, brown and orange and covered with a flocked woodland scene long since worn threadbare. It had belonged to Brian’s father and wound up in the manager’s office after his death. It still smelled vaguely of 30 year old pot.

Brian paced behind his desk. Sat down. Shuffled papers pointlessly from one pile to another, all the while sneaking glances at his phone where it had clattered to a stop against a stapler. Then he stood up and paced to the credenza, fiddled with the knobs on the record player, then back to his desk. In less than 60 seconds, Brian’s agitation even left me feeling slightly paranoid and jittery.

“Wow, you look like your sister when I had to ban her from drinking espresso ever again. Everything ok?” I asked, glancing at the door as I mentioned Brian’s sister. Not by name, of course. Saying her name out loud was out of the question.

“Kat.” Brian spat her name at one of the piles of papers he’d just relocated. “My personal pain in the ass. Rachel’s called in again. Last week it was Sarah. I’ve been calling Kat for weeks to help fill in. Every time I leave a message begging her to take a shift, do you think she has the decency to call back? Shit no. Ever since she skipped out on Halloween she’s been even more irresponsible and unreliable than before. I’m so tired of chasing after her. You call her. She always comes running for you. Get her ass in here.”

Brian had always been slightly annoyed with having a little sister, like she was a new toy he hadn’t expected to be so busy and noisy and now that he had her he didn’t know how to turn her off. But before their father passed away it had been in the general, affectionate sort of way. There was a good five years between them, which was practically a life time when you’re young.

When they got older, everything she did drove him crazy. When she got her eyebrow and bellybutton pierced. When she changed her mind and took them out. When she dyed pink streaks in her hair when she turned twenty-one. He complained about her boyfriends, her clothes, her job, her degree, her age. He hated when I gave her free drinks or took her side or invited her anywhere on purpose.

But as much as he complained he also called to check on her when she lived in the dorms, threatened her boyfriends if they hurt her, and showed up to all her art shows.

At her first gallery show when none of her pieces sold, he’d purchased three of them anonymously. He loved her more than he didn’t.

But when their father died, his affection evaporated. I didn’t know if it was grief or what, but suddenly her life wasn’t charming, it was
charmed
and it wasn’t fair. Suddenly her happiness became a personal insult. I’d been sure this irrational anger was a phase, something Brian would get over when he moved on with his own life. Only he didn’t move on. He kept simmering in some defeat he didn’t want to talk about.

“She doesn’t work here,” I carefully reminded him. “She’s not an employee and do you blame her for not answering your calls? All you do is yell at her. Let it go. Call someone else in.”

“Boy has she got you on a leash. You and my father, man, she’s got the life doesn’t she? Bat those big eyes and everyone scrambles to take care of her.” Brian’s nostrils flared as he rambled. The very idea that anyone had me on a leash was amusingly ironic. He plowed forward undeterred. “It’s just Kat being Kat. Isn’t she adorable? No one forces her to act like an adult. No one but me and when I do, I’m the bad guy. I’m the villain.”

There was a vibration in Brian voice, a hint of malevolence towards her unrestrained delight. I recognized that need for control over something that refused to be restrained. I’d heard it sometimes in the voices of Doms who played for all the wrong reasons. It wasn’t because they felt strongly about getting their way, it was that they wanted to punish someone for refusing to give them the power they thought they deserved. And it always, always ended badly.

While I’d spent the last three weeks brooding and antisocial, I’d missed the fact this anxiety was now infecting Brian’s mannerisms. He certainly looked better on the outside, but everything he did was high-strung and aggressive. He ground his teeth as he spoke. He twitched and shifted and fussed with his fists, calloused and clenched.

Under no circumstances could I let Brian anywhere near his sister.

“Are you ok?” I asked him carefully. “You seem really on edge.”

Brian ignored my question and stared at his phone instead, silent and taunting. He picked it up and turned it over, back and forth, as if it were the most interesting thing in the room.

We both jumped when it rang and he damn near dropped the thing.

“I gotta take this. Give me a second?” Brian nodded at his door in a not so subtle way of saying
Get the fuck out
.

I suppressed my annoyance and stood up. “Fine, but hurry up. We have a problem.”

He flipped the phone open, already turning away from me in his chair. “Don’t we always.”

This time when Brian said,
Hey
, it wasn’t in his terse, desperate voice he’d been pacing around his office with before I’d walked in on him. This one was softer, like he was talking to a baby animal. There was a little bit of begging in his voice and for a moment I wondered if he was talking to Kat, but that seemed doubtful. It wasn’t their mother either, who was half-suburbanite, half-pterodactyl. If Brian had cooed at her, she’d have slapped him across the face. I’d known ex-Navy Doms who were less alpha than Mrs. Koile.