The staff - whichever ones were left from when I'd walked out - avoided talking to me, looking at me when I walked back in and headed to the bar. I sat heavily on one of the stools, and couldn't find a reason to switch from scotch. I sipped on some horrendous Red Label and played with my phone and tried to avoid thinking about the last three hours. Or the next dozen.
I wasn't going to go back up to the hotel room, not until Jessie was gone tomorrow. We'd have words tomorrow night.
I had no fucking clue where I was going to sleep tonight.
Probably the Suburban. Wherever that was. The hotel had my truck. And my keys.
So I sat, grief and pain and rage chewing on my heart like a police Malinois dog. Rage at Jessie, pain for the way she'd unraveled our life together, grief for the sight of Tori, the life I'd used to lead. The life that was over and never coming back. Grief for my dead friends, for the rifle bullet that had destroyed my arm. Tonight I even missed my old teaching job. I missed Sienna. I missed Jessie. I wanted to hold her pale body in my arms until I fell asleep.
I wanted to make her believe I still loved her.
I wanted to hurt her for threatening me, for forcing me into a meeting with Tori.
I wanted someone to walk through the hotel door and shoot me in the head, just to make the pain go away.
"Hey there, sailor." I looked to the left as McKenna hiked herself up on a stool. "Whatcha doing?"
I gaped at her. She'd changed out of business clothes and into something... Else. A fuchsia sheathe dress, to be exact. Black and purple striped stockings disappeared under the short hem, and a stylish leather backpack rode her shoulders. Her mane of cocoa hair had been piled up in a messy bun that tumbled locks down her back and around her face. And her makeup was impeccable, glossy, colored lips, dark sparkly pink around her eyes, lightly rouged cheeks.
I shook my head at the vision of - sometimes bratty - beauty and turned back to my scotch. "Drinking. You?"
"Going out looking for a fun time."
I drained the abusively harsh drink and set it down with a clatter. "Have fun."
"Wanna come with me? I'll buy the next round."
I contemplated the empty tumbler and my own sobriety. Not incapacitated yet. "Sure. Why not?"
I paid my tab and followed the little programmer out into the warm night air. She walked confidently with a long stride, and I hurried to keep up with her. She slowed down as I reached her, and after a moment, reached out to take my left hand. I shook off her grasp, and we kept walking. "Got somewhere in mind?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?"
"Yeah, I would, Mickey."
"Then yeah, yeah I do."
"And do you know how to get there?"
She stopped and turned. "Do you have anything better to do tonight than follow me?"
She had a point.
The night was cooling and the humidity was settling, a warm but sticky feeling that was slightly alleviated by the errant breeze that occasionally navigated down into the metropolitan labyrinths. The city had turned black and dark blue, acidic orange streetlights illuminating harsh cones of pavement, storefronts and neon signs eye-hurtingly bright in the gloom, high above windows shining softly as minimum wage workers pushed carts between cubicles and hotel rooms. Bars bumped the latest rap tunes, and conversations drifted to me half-formed as we passed hurried knots of nightlife moving between the lights.
We walked into the very modern lobby of a towering, multicolor hotel, walked past deep, soft furniture and wait staff waiting to serve us under dim, spidery LEDs, and took a metal and glass elevator up, up, up. McKenna fidgeted the whole way.
The rooftop bar looked and felt like it was about eighty stories up, and it surprised me that there were still buildings rising up around us. The bar was built into an overhang of metallic roof, chairs around a lighted bartop, the darkened interior looking like some kind of undersea grotto. Orange LEDs lit shelves of expensive booze, and pretty girls wearing pencil skirts and white button-ups and black vests filled glasses or shook shakers or dropped cubes of ice into tumblers.
We took seats at the bar and the tiny brunette started scanning the bottles. "What were you drinking before?"
"Shit scotch. Why?"
She waved over one of the bartenders, a redhead who looked like she was right out of college. "What's your best scotch?"
She brought over a green bottle with a white and green label. "La - Laf - Lafra - fuck if I know," McKenna read off the label. "Two, on my card." She lithely shrugged out of her backpack and retrieved a credit card from an interior pocket, handed it to the bartender, and then we took our two sweating glasses of amber liquid to the roof's edge, stared out through the chest-high glass wall at the night-darkened city lit with specks and spots and streaks of orange below.
The scotch was cold and tasted even more like seawater and smoke than the last glass. We both coughed at the same time, and McKenna laughed small.
"Why don't you like me?" she asked eventually.
"What? I do like you."
"Bullshit. You constantly treat me like an annoyance, and you won't call me by my nickname like everyone else. You know I hate to be called Mickey."
"You constantly act like an annoyance, and no comment."
McKenna cocked her hips and gave me a cute little giggle. "But that's my personality. Bratty but adorable and precocious."
"Can't be a brat and not expect to be treated like it."
"Is that why you like spanking me? You want to put me in my place?" Her voice was taunting. And lusty.
"No, I just like spanking women in general."
"And calling me... Mickey?"
"One of my best friends ever was named Mike. I grew up with him, played basketball with him, committed crimes and saved a life with him. Those guys I killed, they crushed his skull flat on a highway in Minneapolis. Every time I say the name Mike..." My voice trailed off and I remembered the pound pound pound of his basketball on my driveway, the way he loved to dress like the Lone Ranger at every holiday where dressing up was appropriate. Fuck, now I was depressed about another dead end in my life.
"Oh. I'm... I'm sorry..."
"You only get to be sorry if you could've stopped it."
