Threads That Bind Us (Syndicate of Fate Book 1)

3. Gwen

Fuck absolutely everything.

Fuck Ben and his wine stained teeth, and his money, and his offer. Fuck Isabelle, and her inability to settle down when she had a child. Fuck the American healthcare system for bankrupting people when children get cancer. And most of all, fuck the cancer itself.

Ben’s willingness to write me a one-time, personal check in exchange for an open-ended agreement to be his mistress sits heavy in my stomach. Eighty thousand dollars in exchange for my conscience. After Ana’s treatment concludes, my vagina and other orifices would be beholden to him. I’ll call you whenever my wife is out of town or busy, he said. Wouldn’t want to schlep it to the city for his pay-per-lay and risk running into his flesh and fucking blood.

Separate and compartmentalized, I can deal with each individual aspect of this agreement. I knew making a deal with Ben would require some sort of extended contact with him. Infidelity is not the worst thing I’d considered doing for the money; I’ve done far worse for people I love far less. Sex work is work, and something I would have considered if starting a new career wouldn’t take more time than I had. But it’s the fact that Ben is forcing my hand in all of this when he should do this for his child.

Working through my rage, I make it as far as Union Station, the MARC and Amtrak passengers huddling together against the wind, scurrying toward the terminal with its shops and gorgeous ceilings and deep-seated smell of fast food. I’m on autopilot, a lifetime of navigating busy crowds keeping me from bumping into anyone. By the time I make it out to the grand entrance of Union Station, the dome of octagon windows reflecting murky skies through their glass, I feel like sinking into the floor and disappearing forever.

I can’t go home right now. Ana’s at Gray’s until Sunday morning, and I cannot be alone with my thoughts. I think about calling Kenzie. She’d rally the good waitresses, the event managers and sommeliers, and the bartenders who best toe the line between complimentary and creepy. They’d make me laugh, tell me how to be a bad lay so he cuts the deal off early and I still get my money.

But the impending doom is sinking into my bones, and I feel like I’m living the last night of my life as I know it, and I don’t want them to witness it. They’re the closest thing I have to family other than Ana, and as pathetic as it sounds, I don’t want to explain this.

I know my answer already. There’s no question, no hesitation. For Ana, I would do much worse.

I just need to mourn.

I’m staring at the ceiling like a fucking tourist, trying to summon strength from the pretty architecture. Just give yourself one night to grieve the life you thought you could live.One night to be selfish.

I’m making my way out into the cold before I really know where I’m going, wandering aimlessly around the lamplit streets until I stumble into NoMa. It’s a neighborhood I rarely visit, but maybe that’s a good thing. There are no memories of Ana and I here.

I pass crossroads tucked with coffee shops and tattoo parlors and restaurants, busy for a weeknight, but still so much quieter than the neighborhood around our apartment. I want the calm to be reassuring, to give me peace, but all it gives me is space to think. I try to keep walking, to rush through residential streets to get to the next busy corner quickly, but it’s not enough. My brain keeps humming the same tune.

Just like her. You’re. Just. Like. Her. Sure you have your reasons, and maybe you think they’re better than hers were, but what do you know? In the end, you’re making the same choice.

I’m about to give up and make my way to whatever Metro stop is closest when I’m halted by the sounds of whooping. Loud, frat-boy level whooping. I hear the telltale signs of a group of girls cheering before downing shots.

That sounds like an escape.

I make my way up the street and am greeted by the beautiful sight of chaos. Neon signs blending with the harsh light of street lamps. Sweaty, barely legal bodies slamming against each other. Someone in a large purple hat wandering around a corner to puke in a bush. Catalina’s is emblazoned in red neon cursive over the entrance. It’s perfect.

I show my ID to the bouncer and wade through the sea of people jumping up and down to some eighties rock song. The band is so loud my teeth rattle, and I’m indescribably relieved to be here. My bummer expression persists, and I’m not exactly going to get up and dance, but it’s nice to have the noise chase everything else away.

I make it to the bar at the back of the room just as a group of people in pink leather dresses get up from their stools at the very end of the bar. I take a seat, and the faded blue velvet is surprisingly comfortable.

There’s only one bartender, and he’s swamped at the other end of the room, so I swivel around and observe the bedlam that is Catalina’s.

The ceilings are tall, and from corner to corner, the walls are filled with music paraphernalia. The popcorn ceiling is painted with huge arcs of color, intersecting and blending through the texture.

There’s no formal dance floor, but between the yellow leather booths and black high top tables, people are jumping and dancing and swaying to whatever beat they can find. The band in the corner, whose banner is unreadable in the dim light, plays with the bass too high and the speakers too loud, and everything melds into one continuous thump of voices and guitars and scraping chairs and drums.

A tap on my shoulder pulls me out of my enamored stupor, and I turn to see the bartender smiling at me. His hair is bleached so blond it”s nearly white. Through his right eyebrow are three silver rings, making his bright green eyes practically sing. He’s got a smile like the Cheshire Cat, and I already want to be his best friend.

“How ya doin’ tonight, Baby Red?” The deep Boston accent surprises me, but all I can do is smile wider.

“I’m here to do better,” I reply, fishing my card out of the bottom of my purse and handing it to him with raised eyebrows. “A French 75 on an open tab, if you can.”

Without missing a beat, he leans across the bar, snatches my card out of my hand with his teeth, and turns to one of the registers dotting the back counter. I try not to stare open-mouthed, a giggle caught in my throat. Even though there are tons of people here, no one seems to be annoyed that there’s a bit of a wait for drinks.

“You don’t have someone helping you out?” I ask as he slides my card back to me and grabs a bottle of gin from the case.

“Everyone who comes to Catalina’s knows you wait for your drinks, and you party while you wait.” He drops the bottle onto the counter and flings his arm to point at a sign behind a register. “Get rowdy, get rough, but don’t get rude.” He reads it like a command, which it probably is. I salute him, and his face splits into that grin again.

He mixes my drink, pours it into a champagne flute, and places it in front of me with a flourish. When I go to pick it up, he takes my hand straight out of the air and shakes it.

“I’m Sammy, Baby Red, and it’s wonderful that we’ve met.”

“I’m Gwen, Sammy baby, and it’s already been a delight,” I respond as he lets go of my hand.

I lift the drink to him and he blows me a kiss as I take a sip. Sweet and tart and bursting with bubbles, the drink is lemony and sugary and perfect. Seeing my look of pure bliss, he takes a bow, winks, and skips the other way down the bar to tend to more customers.

Sammy’s energy is infectious, and the good feelings brought on by the bubbles and the smiles make me want to chase happiness as far as it will take me. From the depths of my wildly disorganized bag, I pull out a book I’ve been dying to finish. There is no actual plot, no real structure. I lean my arm against the bar, tucking myself away from anyone who might want to engage in conversation, and sip on my drink as I enter another world.

An hour slips by as I page through my book. My glass stays full, Sammy swinging by now and then to top me off and peek over the top of the pages. But as the words start to blur, and the story winds down to its inevitable happy ending, my chest feels tighter and tighter. These two gorgeous vampire ladies get their happily ever after. I want that for me. And it’s not going to happen.

Even four-ish drinks in, I know I’m overreacting. First, Ana is worth it, one million times over. She’s my best friend, and my sister, and sometimes feels like my own kid. She’s my everything. I know I’m going to say yes. The rest of my drink goes down without me really tasting it.

And I also know it’s temporary. Ben’s offer is to sleep with him—gag—not marry him. Eventually he’ll get bored, as he always does, and then I can move on. Try to wash the memory of saying yes to my own mother’s ex off my body. Still, I know I won’t be the same person after, and I’m already grieving the person I am at this moment.

I don’t want to be like Isabelle. For so many years, I hated her for chasing after men with money, men who barely cared about her, while I was desperate for her attention. I never fully understood why she acted like she did, doing ridiculous things to secure the fleeting affection of whoever she was dating. Maybe she was incredibly insecure, or selfish, or just wanted things we never had. But every time one guy dropped her, she would dust herself off and find someone new to prove how desirable she was, showing her with gifts and trips.

At least this is different in one way. I’m not abandoning my personal sense of morals for attention and affection. I’m doing it for Ana.

My mind is racing again, and the music and booze are no longer beating the anxiety into submission. I want to take off my shoes and run through a forest until my body hurts so much I can’t think about anything but the pain. I want to drink myself to sleep at this bar.

Instead, I do something far worse.

I make a pros and cons list.

I find a pen tucked into a pocket of my bag and turn to the last page of my book, drawing a line down the center, marring the page forever. Annotating is one thing, but this is blasphemy. I probably could have asked for a bar napkin. Or grabbed one of the four notebooks also available in my bag. Too late now.

My fingers fumble for my drink until I realize the glass is empty, but I don’t look up. I scribble pros on the left side of the line and cons on the right, underlining them with the heavy ink. Okay. I can do this.

The first one on the pros side is easy.

Ana Lives.

That’s the ballgame, really. But I feel like I’ll get some sort of catharsis out of going through the rest of this exercise. So I start on the cons side.

Fucking Ben.

Helping a man cheat.

Letting Ben touch me.

Being like Isabelle.

There’s a lot more. I keep jotting them down until I’ve filled the cons half of the page with reasons that would keep me from saying yes to this under any other circumstance. There’s only one other thing I can add to the pros.

This is temporary.

I stare at the page, anger building up in me again, but this time it’s aimed at myself, for not saying yes immediately and needing time to process. I reach for my drink again, hoping for the comfort only your favorite cocktail can provide, only to remember it’s empty.

“God, are you gonna get me another drink or not?” I demand, not at all slurring and definitely not yelling.

Tears sting the corners of my eyes, and I need another French 75 to fix that, damn it. When I yank my gaze from the scrawled notes in the back of my book, I’m looking not at Sammy, with his cat-got-the-canary smile, but at something else entirely.

His hair is tousled and messy. His eyes are dark and pretty and almost familiar. He’s got a little more than a five o’clock shadow dusting his tanned skin, and the cut of his jaw makes me want to drool openly. And that’s all before you get to whatever’s happening from the neck down, which I physically cannot look at or I’ll evaporate on the spot.

He’s also looking at me with the kind of intensity that should feel scary. Like he’s seen a ghost, and he’s thrilled about it. Like he wants to consume me.

Oh my god, this is the hottest man I’ve ever seen.

“That’s a very kind compliment,” he says in a voice that might kill me. It’s quiet, low, and tilted with the slightest Mediterranean accent. Greek? Italian? Who cares? There’s a glimmer of something almost disbelieving in his eyes.

Also, he can read minds, which is crazy.

“You’re actually just saying all of that out loud,” he replies, and the little smile he’s sporting makes me break out in a cold sweat. Jesus Christ, when’s the last time I got laid?

“I’m not even sure how to apologize for that.”

Although I really do want another sparkly drink, I’m pretty sure assuming the hot bartender can read minds means I need to switch to water. Ana’s old enough that I rarely worry about having a drink or two while she’s out with friends, but I haven’t been this drunk in ages.

“Actually, a club soda and lime is probably a good idea,” I amend, sliding my empty champagne flute toward him. He glances over his shoulder at Sammy, who”s busy chatting up three dudes in boat shoes and salmon-colored shorts, before shrugging, filling a glass with ice, and hunting for the soda nozzle.

When he finds it, he clicks a few of the buttons before filling my glass and setting it in front of me. I cock my head at him.

“Are you new here or something? Or new at bartending?” When he quirks an eyebrow, I take a sip of my drink and grimace. “You gave me Sprite. Is this your first time using a soda nozzle?”

He slides the glass from my hand, the back of his fingers grazing my palm in a way that feels intentional. I can see a hint of pink at the tip of his ears that makes me want to smile like an idiot.

“New bartender, yeah. Something like that.” He fills another glass, this time with the right setting, and places a little bowl with an entire lime’s worth of slices in front of me. His hands grip the bar, and I seal my tongue to the roof of my mouth so I don’t accidentally blabber about how fucking hot his hands are. What is it about hands? Clean nails, but calluses and scars. And tattoos. I can’t make out all the details in the low light, but there are delicate bird wings on his left, and a snake wrapped around some sort of staff on the right. I’m mesmerized by both the art and the canvas. Maybe it’s because I can imagine how they’d look against my body. Something I certainly shouldn’t be pondering about a stranger while he’s at his place of employment. I’m still examining his hands when he reaches across the bar and grabs my book before my brain can catch up.

“What’s this?” he asks, running his unfortunately sexy fingers over my writing. I try to grab my book back and nearly knock over my glass, which he catches before it can tip.

“I can’t be the drunk girl at the bar telling my sad life story to the hot bartender. It’s cliche, and despite being drunk off my ass, I’m still too sober for that.”

I clasp my hands together and shove them in my lap, hoping he gets bored quickly, or has more customers that he needs to talk to, or a meteor falls from the sky and kills us all. But instead of any of those things happening, he continues to study my little pro-con list.

“I can’t help but notice there are a lot of cons here,” he muses, leaning against the bar in a way that seems purposefully nonchalant. Do hot men practice that move? Do hot dads teach their hot sons how to lean against things? This should be a study in the American Journal of Medicine or something.

“It’s not the absolute number of pros and cons that matter,” I say, reaching toward the book. He holds it above his head, and I huff back into my seat. “Each item is weighted, and in this instance, the items in the pro category are weighted more heavily.”

He looks back and forth between the list and me, making some sort of calculation that my very sad, kind of drunk, and weirdly horny brain can’t deduce. Then he closes the book and slips it into his back pocket. Before I can protest, he turns around and grabs another champagne flute.

“We’ll come back to the book, but I think you deserve one more drink. What were you having?”

I should be annoyed that he’s stolen my list. Instead, the pleasant buzzing from the liquor has been intensified by bantering with a hot person, making me much more amenable to pushy tattooed bartenders sticking their nose in my business.

“If you insist, a French 75 please,” I say, letting myself flirt just a little.

He stares for a second, smile still barely there on his lips, before his expression goes blank. He looks around for a minute, turns in place, moves towards Sammy, and then seems to give up.

“I’ve got a confession,” he says, placing the flute on the lacquered wood in front of me.

My smile grows.

“You don’t know how to make a French 75?”

“I’m not a bartender.”

My jaw drops a little, and I wave my hands in his direction, half accusatory and half defensive.

“But you’re standing back there! Behind the bar!” I’m yelling at him a little, but I’m also laughing, and he seems embarrassed and oddly pleased. Color tinges his ears again.

“One bartender at Catalina’s, remember?” he asks, gesturing toward the sign Sammy showed me earlier. “Sammy’s a friend. I was just visiting.”

This guy and Sammy seem like exact opposites. I’ve known them collectively for like twenty minutes, but where Sammy is gregarious and fun and easily likable, this man seems more reserved and calculating. Like he wants to know you before you know him.

“If you’re just visiting, why’d you serve me the club soda?” I accuse playfully, running my finger over the rim of my water glass. His eyes flash as they follow the motion, and I can feel myself flush at the attention.

“Not sure.” He shrugs, backing away to where Sammy is now gawking at him. “But I’m going to keep serving you.”