It was Friday evening and I was single again. As a logical conclusion I sat in the Girl's World, sipped a Mojito at the bar and let my eyes wander over the crowd.
The night was still young, so there wasn't that much of a crowd yet, but that was okay. I was perfectly fine just enjoying my drink and the atmosphere for a bit. The dimmed lights, the dark red upholstery, the unobtrusive, only slightly sappy music, those were the perfect ingredients to get me in the mood.
One women in particular piqued my interest. I estimated her a few years older than me. She wore a stylish business suit and had her hair, which were of the same dirty blond as mine, tamed in a strict ponytail. From the first impression it was already clear that she knew exactly what she wanted from life and had already achieved most of it. Sadly that also included a girlfriend, which I thankfully noticed before I could make a fool of myself.
"From the two ladies over there."
Ivana, the waitress, interrupted my musings by putting a Caipriniha in front of me. She nodded in the direction of the booths in the back. Since it was still early, most of them were empty. In one of them two young women were smooching in the shadows. Two booths further sat two more women, a small brunette in comfy clothes and a tall darker one, whose crop top showed off her lean body. The brunette waved at me. It was the first time someone bought me a drink when they already had company, but I wasn't going to complain.
"Best of luck!" Ivana winked at me and went of to the next customer. With a last slurp I finished my Mojito and took the Caipriniha over to the two women.
"How do I come to that honor?" I asked them.
The tall one shuffled over to make space for me. The booths in the Girl's World doubled as love nests, so they were designed for two people to comfortably sit in them. With three it got a bit cuddly. I had no problem with that and neither did the girl in the crop top. Our arms didn't touch all that much, but I could already tell that her skin was deliciously smooth.
"Well, we saw you sitting there all alone and we thought, it would be a shame if someone else caught such a pretty girl away from us," said the brunette.
She sounded a bit tipsy. Not really drunk yet, but judging by the number of glasses on the small table they'd been at it for some time already. They were cute enough, especially the one next to me, so I didn't mind playing their game.
"Well, what are you going to do with me now that you caught me?"
"We just wanted to get a better look at you. For now."
I liked her aggressive flirting style. She knew what she wanted and, after all, this was the place where single ladies came to find other single ladies. It only confused me that she did the flirting and not the tall one, who was much more dressed the part.
"So, are the two of you together?" I asked.
"Meg here belongs to me, yes. Doesn't she?"
The tall one, who was apparently named Meg, put her head on her friends shoulder. She had to bend down considerably do this, but it was nonetheless cute how she purred when the brunette stroked her hair. Also, that possessive language made me tingly.
"But if you already have a pretty girl, what do you need me for?"
"One can never have enough pretty girls."
She followed that up with a cocky smile and I regretted disregarding her in the beginning.
"Do you often ask women to join you for a threesome?"
I asked it half jokingly, to hide my nervousness. The brunette seemed less like a harmless shy girl, as I'd originally suspected, and more like a predator that had lain its eyes on me. She'd already claimed Meg as her trophy and if I wasn't careful I'd be next. Which was the best incentive to be careless.
"Not often. Only when we find someone who looks like a good match."
She stopped the head-scratches and for the first time Meg joined the conversation. Judging by her voice she was well past tipsy. "We've seen you here a few times and we heard that you have a reputation."
So they actually had preyed on me. If I'd seen the two of them before, I couldn't remember. Not that I remembered every couple that came to the Girl's World, but still.
"And what would that reputation be?"
Meg must've realized that she could've phrased herself better. "Nothing bad, no. Just that, well, that you like it when your girlfriends take control."
I took a long sip from my Caipirinha to gain some time. Admittedly, it wasn't wrong. It just wasn't something I openly talked about and especially not to the point that it should've become common knowledge.
When I didn't answer immediately, the brunette lost a lot of her confidence. "Hey, sorry, Alex, we should've really started that in a better way. We didn't want to call you out or anything. It's just, we saw you coming here a few times, just from afar, but you seemed nice enough and then a week or so ago we talked to that girl Dora and somehow you came up and... yeah, we thought that we wanted to get to know you a bit better. I'm Sid, by the way, and this is Meg. I think we haven't introduced ourselves yet."
I took another sip that left the glass half empty. That would've explained how they knew my name and these personal details. I still wasn't sure how to feel about it, but they looked so worried about my reaction, that I had to say something.
"I see. How is she?"
"Oh, she's fine. She found someone else about half a year ago and they looked very much in love."
"Happy to hear that."
It wasn't an empty platitude. Dora and I'd been together for a couple of weeks, about a year ago. She hadn't had a real girlfriend before me and as cute as she was, due to her timid nature she hadn't been able to give me what I needed and vice versa, so we'd parted on good terms pretty soon. I hadn't thought about her in a while and would've never expected our break up conversation coming back to haunt me like that.
"So..."
With the pleasantries done an awkward silence fell over the booth. The flirty mood was pretty much gone and I had to do something about that. The initial conversation had sounded as if there was an adventure to be had and I didn't want to give up on that already.
"About what you said earlier-"
My phone vibrated three times, long, short, then long again. The individual setting for messages from Tanja.
"Sorry, just a second."
The message was short enough to fit on the preview screen. Late shift again. Need your services.
"Okay, I'm really sorry, but I have to leave now."
I slid my phone back into my pocket and got up. As much as I wanted to find out how serious Sid and Meg had been with their flirting, Tanja had to take priority.
"Hey, we didn't mean to be rude. We might've had a drink too much. I'm sorry if we came off as creepy or anything."
The two of them looked pretty remorseful about the whole situation and I felt bad for leaving them like that.
"It's not that," I ensured them. "I just got a text from my friend. She's had a long day and needs my skills as a masseuse."
"I didn't know you've got a girlfriend. Coming here alone and all."
By Sid's tone she clearly thought I was just fishing for excuses. Which was good, because I might've been able to hide my embarrassment this way.
"She's not my girlfriend. Just..."
Meg's face lit up a notch. "A girlfriend in the making?"
"Maybe."
I didn't want to get into it with the two of them, especially not with how much they seemed to know about me already. Instead I pointed at the half finished Caipirinha. "I can pay for that if you want, since we didn't really get to talk."
Sid just waved me off. "Don't worry about it. Go and give your girlfriend some love."
"She's not my girlfriend," I repeated, a bit too quickly.
"Yet. But she would be crazy to say no to a woman like you. And with a job like that on top, you're the perfect girlfriend material."
A sly smile had returned to her lips. For a moment I felt that adventurous atmosphere again and it would've been a lie to say that I wasn't tempted to stay. However, I wasn't going to leave Tanja hanging, so I said my goodbyes and left them to enjoy the rest of their night.
***
Sid didn't have to know that this job that allegedly made me 'perfect girlfriend material' was in reality just the culmination of my failures. Originally I'd wanted to study medicine and become a doctor. Turns out that to do that you need to remember whether or not minocycline is a tetracycline or not, amongst a gazillion other fun facts of that sort. So I dropped out during the second semester and became a physiotherapist. That is, until I learned that working with people who were in serious pain made me a drained mess. Good thing I never became a doctor, I suppose. So I had to quit that, too, and retrained as a masseuse.