The day I meet Katrine, I know I am going to struggle: do I want to fuck her, or do I want to *be* her? Or, as is the rare, tragic case, both? Behind her vintage glasses is a pair of twinkling, cobalt blue eyes that seem to be telling a joke even as the house burns down around her. Something in the way she flips her ebony, shoulder-length curls suggests she started the fire herself, on a day she knew to be dry and windy.
We work together, tending bar at a place with a screen door entrance and three illegal poker machines along the back wall. Well, I work. She sits behind the bar and blows smoke past the shoulders of men in alternating John Deere and Colts caps. She flirts with the younger ones, and puts Folsom Prison Blues on repeat for the old guys in the same ironic spirit. Both result in tips for the smallest of mercies; she's making money simply by passing the pretzels.
"Where ya from, darlin'?" They often ask, taking her in with a lot less subtlety than I do every shared shift. She is tall and thin and unmarked by the hard living and high fructose corn syrup of rural Indiana. In her lilting, vaguely European accent, she lies that she is from just outside of Paris. About fifty percent of our regulars mistake Paris for its own country, so she doesn't bother to tell them she's really from Luxembourg.
During slow times when I'm trying not to stare at her, I look up Luxembourg on my phone. It is a tiny speck surrounded by more important places with a population half the size of Indianapolis. They speak three languages there, and I ache to hear her say something in any of them. I want to watch her lips forming the foreign noises and pretend she is telling me things she'd never tell anybody else. I stabbed my green card husband with a corkscrew and had to flee Chicago, she'd intimate to me in German. In the softer Luxembourgish, she'd confide that she's actually a duchess with a dark past.
Meet me in the back office in five minutes. Take your skirt off. This daydreamed directive is naturally in French.
Reality is a walk-in cooler, however. The only source of heat is her breath on my neck while she helps me maneuver the keg. I shiver being so close, and she confuses this for something else.
"Silly girl. Why do you not grab the jacket if cold? He is right behind the door." Her smirk, though rendering her face terribly asymmetrical, makes her even more attractive. I feel goosebumps forming along my shoulders. Her softer, larger hand grazes my own while we wrestle the Miller Lite onto the dolly; a second kind of warmth spreads between my legs. Do I gasp aloud or is it only in my head? I have my answer when she flashes that crooked grin again.
"Anna, do I scare you a little bit, yes?" She pronounces my name "Ah-na," and it conjures up an image of a much more sophisticated person. Ah-na does not wear a frayed jean skirt and a Ramones t-shirt on the busiest night of the week. Ah-na buys makeup that actually suits her coloring instead of pilfering it from her much-fairer roommate when she's not home. Ah-na would press this slightly older, intensely sexy woman against the back of the cooler with her smaller frame, look up at her defiantly and tell her that after all these weeks, she's tired of the teasing and the broken English innuendoes. She would bite the woman's bottom lip and ask if she seems scared.
But Anna flushes, stammers something that sounds like "no" and wishes, for maybe the tenth time today, that she was somebody else.
***
Five minutes before last call on Friday night, the place buzzes with what I have come to think of as the Mating Rituals of the American Midwest. Middle-aged patrons lean their heads together, kicking off their long night of regret with sloppy kissing. The younger set hangs boozily on one another, rubbing each other through their jeans on the dance floor to a 90's power ballad. I watch Katrine watching it all, a wry smile condemning it even as she mirrors it. She leans her considerable cleavage over the bar and pouts playfully at a regular who is insisting she do a shot of Jack with him. She'll do the shot, but only after she puts his ten in the register and sinks two singles into our tip jar without asking first.
"You as well!" she motions to me with one hand and with the other she taps on the bar until a five appears underneath it. She pours me a generous one, deposits the five in the register, fishes a one out and silently drops it into the jar. The fire goes down quick and hard while the horny patron looks on, nodding his approval.
"Another," he booms, and Katrine and I lock eyes. Because I am small and not a drinker, the whiskey warms me almost instantly, making me brave. As I pour three I feel her hand on me, sliding bills into my back pocket. She wants another embarrassed gasp; I respond by shaking my ass against her palm. This earns an appreciative hoot from the customer and two gentle swats from Katrine. Another shock between my thighs is quieted only by the second Jack Daniels.
Katrine rings the last call bell and we are both busy for several minutes, pulling drafts and selling half a bottle of Cuervo to the just legal crowd.
"Please for them to wait to vomit until they are out of the carpark," she mutters, and I laugh, too loudly. I feel targeted by that fucking sexy, lopsided grin and it undoes me. "She is a bit tipsy, no?"
"One more for the road?" asks the regular, gesturing towards the bottle still on the bar.
"You drink any more and you have—how do you say? Cock of whiskey."
He guffaws at this, charmed by the insult. "Darlin' when I get home, whiskey dick is gonna be the least of my problems." I cringe but pour the shot anyway. Domestic bliss and the bartender are natural enemies, after all. "You're not joining me?"
"I need to start closing up," I say, sliding the drink over.
"Buzzkill," Katrine shouts, correctly using the term I taught her last week. She grabs the Jack and pours two more, clinks them together and passes one to me. "I promise I do most of it, ok?"
The third shot doesn't even burn when it goes down. With inhibitions suitably lowered, I stare at Katrine as she knocks the shot glass back. I allow my gaze to linger at her lips, painted a light magenta that sticks to the rim. I know I am officially drunk because I can't stop thinking about her lips, and that color, marking my naked body.
***
We're empty, lights are back up and Katrine switches the stereo from Tom Petty to some European trip-hop that would confuse and anger the farmers around here. I don't mind it—the lazy haze it invokes makes me think of it as her soundtrack.
"Pass to me the mop?" she asks. I'm dumbfounded that she's actually keeping her promise. All I've done is close out the register while she fills condiments, washes glasses and sweeps up. I'm half-heartedly wiping the bar down when I feel her suddenly at my side.
"Men to me are very easy," she muses.
"Oh? Why's that?" Ah-na goes with it, because she is bold and because Katrine has positioned herself so very close.
She smiles and leans in even further, taking the rag from my hand. "He wanted very much to fuck us, no? We make a lot of cash from him tonight. When I say 'cock' to him I think he gets hard one."
