Chapter 16 Dark Water #2
“I can assure you I was not swilling birthday cake vodka all night,” I correct him.
“Maybe not,” he says. “But you were swilling something. You have that puffy, irresponsible look about you. I know a good night out when I see it. Somebody finally got old Mr. Fuddy-Duddy out of her system.”
“Roger,” I correct.
“Whatever. I’m right, aren’t I?”
I just smile and he smacks my knee.
“So, tell me what kept you all hot and bothered last night,” Aaron says, taking another sip of his drink. “Or rather, who?”
“It’s hard to know where to start,” I say, dubious, and Aaron’s eyes widen.
“Let me guess … Threesome? Foursome? No, wait … Are we talking orgy?”
Between laughs I tell him, “I was going to say I made some new friends, but not like that.”
He looks suspicious. “Do these new friends have anything to do with the change that’s come over you lately?”
I feign ignorance because I’m curious what he’s noticed. “What change?”
Aaron waves at me. “You know. The money for Sue, the smack on the hand from HR, leaving early, calling in … An aggressive but not entirely disagreeable ballsiness that’s new for you.”
“Maybe,” I say with a pout and a shrug. “They took me to a club. It made me think of you actually. This wild place with burlesque performers and BDSM acts. Everything is black and green and gold and the music is a fusion of big band and techno, like Glenn Miller meets deadmau5. We drank something called a maiden’s prayer.
And clearly I had way too many because—”
“Wait,” Aaron stops. “I think I’ve heard of this place. Is it in Pioneer Square? With the green doors?”
“Medusa,” I concur with a nod.
Surprise steals over him. “Jude, that place is really exclusive. I’ve heard some crazy stories. Who are these new friends?”
“Like what?” I ask. Of course Aaron would have heard of Medusa already. Unlike me, he’s had a life for the past fifteen years.
He balks. “Like, people going in there and coming out different. Rearranging their whole lives. Leaving their families or careers. Changing their names. One guy said he actually got the idea to found his tech company while he was dancing there one night. He’s a billionaire now.”
“That sounds like a good thing,” I remark.
“Sure, but what about the others who piss through every cent they have trying to maintain a membership? Or the ones whose partners leave them once they see where they’ve been spending their late nights instead of the office?
It’s like a drug, that place. My friend’s sister went in there a saint and came out with a heroin addiction,” he tells me.
“I didn’t see any drugs.” I don’t mention the ones Arla put in my drink. THC is mild enough, but adding it without telling me? Although, I guess she’s right, I could have put it down, refused to drink it.
He rolls his eyes. “Jude, clubs and drugs are the peanut butter and jelly of nightlife. There are always drugs. But you misunderstand. She didn’t get the heroin there.
She turned to it when she couldn’t get back in.
” When I’m too shocked to respond, he says, “Christ on the cross, you really are in a demonic sex cult, aren’t you? ”
“No, no,” I insist. “It’s not like that. Really. It was just one time.” I don’t tell him Arla owns the place, that I spent the night there, that they live over Medusa like cats in a barn loft.
Aaron becomes genial. “Look, you know I love to see you getting out as much as the next guy. Just … maybe stay away from there. Leave the deep end for the Olympic swimmers and the daredevils. I know it’s supposed to be amazing, but there’s something not quite right about that place.”
“Yeah. Of course,” I say, embarrassed, all the things I didn’t tell him burning a hole inside me. I decide to change the subject. “Anyway, I met someone. He runs a bookstore near my condo.”
Aaron presses his splayed hand against his chest. “Oh, I love a sexy introvert. They’re the cannoli of singles, crusty on the outside but full of yummy surprises. Tell. Me. More.”
I smile thinking of Levi stretched out next to me on the floor of his locked room. He was definitely full of surprises today. “He’s smart and charming and so unexpectedly sexy.”
“Was it a one-and-done event or will you see him again?” he asks.
I bite my bottom lip as I grin stupidly.
“Very subtle,” Aaron says with a sarcastic shake of his head. “You know,” he tells me, “you never talked about that other one this way. Never lit up like this when I asked you about him. He was the relationship equivalent of a lobotomy.”
I swallow. Aaron’s right, but it still throws me off guard how clearly he sees me, even with as little as I give him.
“Anyway, it’s good to see you returning to the land of the living,” he goes on. “There’s nothing like a long overdue orgasm to knock someone out of a rut.”
A rut. The word stings. I never thought too much about how other people saw me.
I was too focused on keeping them from noticing at all.
But hearing Aaron speak so candidly is like viewing myself from the outside.
What a small, sad front I must have presented.
I finish my vodka and set the empty glass on Aaron’s rattan coffee table.
“I thought Roger was safe,” I tell Aaron now that I’m full of liquid courage. “But I think he was just another asshole after all.”
Aaron looks sympathetic. “It’s the quiet ones you gotta watch out for.”
I meet his eye. “I was flattered at first. He so readily pushed himself into my life, and I mistook that for caring. But looking back, it was never really me that he saw himself with. And once he got a look at who I really was, he couldn’t leave soon enough.”
Aaron lays a hand over mine. “My mom has a saying— When they see themselves out, that’s just God doing you a favor.”
I can’t help laughing. I’ll always grieve what might have been between my child and me. But when it comes to Roger—from his flat, lodestone stare to his monogrammed socks—there’s nothing to mourn.
“I’ll bring you a pillow from my room. There’s a blanket just across the arm there,” he says, pointing to the end of the couch. “Tomorrow night, real drinks. There’s a tiki bar near Madrona Park I’ve been dying to visit!”
“Oh, I can’t impose on you again.” I don’t know how long it’ll take to get the condo in order, but I can’t ask Aaron to take me in indefinitely.
Though I’m not sure how I’ll pay for a hotel.
I do still have the charge card I stole from Calvin, but I’m already regretting my impulse purchases of the painting and food.
My larceny buzz has turned into a hangover.
“Nonsense,” Aaron insists. “You promised me, and I’m not letting you wriggle out of it. We’re getting cocktails with exotic names and umbrellas, or I’ll go to Calvin and tell him you’ve been sexting on the job.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“Try me,” he says with a dark chuckle.
“Okay,” I agree. “One more night.”
“It’s decided then,” Aaron says, rising. He goes into his room and comes back with a spare pillow.
As I take it from him, I ask. “Can I invite someone to come with us tomorrow night? He’s a friend.”
Arla’s special request hangs in the air around me, daunting. If Brennan has drinks with us, I can tell her I’ve done what she asked. And with Aaron there, he’s less likely to drag me away for another night with the Fathom. I need a chance to clear my head.
“Sure,” Aaron concedes. “As long as he’s hot.”
AARON’S TIKI BAR does not disappoint. Tiny straw-and-bamboo huts cover dark booths glowing with colorful candles, and a long bar down one wall is painted in a wave pattern lit with blue lights.
Nets drape from the ceiling clustered with faux crustaceans and enormous shells, a bubble machine burps happily in the corner, and a warbling vibrato sings over the twang of a ukulele.
Aaron fits right in wearing a purple shirt with tiny red flowers.
I order something called a walk the plank and feel ridiculous when it arrives in a fishbowl with spears of harpooned fruit sticking out.
Aaron laughs at my discomfort, completely at ease with his clamshell-shaped blue martini.
“So, this friend of yours … Is he single?” he asks from across the table inside our private little hut.
“I don’t know. I think so,” I answer with a shrug. Truth is, I have no idea. I barely know him, but I can’t tell Aaron that. I wasn’t even sure Brennan would agree to come, but I was relieved when he messaged back with a thumbs-up emoji.
“Give me five minutes with him and I can tell you,” he says. “I’m not ashamed to admit I’m a little bit psychic about these things.”
I wonder if he’s really joking, considering how well he’s been able to peg me, but I just laugh. A second later, his face lights up and I hear a familiar, “Juuuuude!” from the direction of the front door.
Brennan, still dressed in black, stalks toward our hut with a giant smile and squeezes into the booth beside me.
I look down at the gray slacks and green sweater I’m wearing and wonder why Brennan chose to stay in uniform even though this isn’t a Fathom meeting.
I get the sense they all take the group more seriously than I do.
It’s not that I don’t believe Arla. It’s not even that I don’t like her.
Maybe I’m naturally more reserved and Solidago is to blame.
I just know that as much as it feels like some long-dormant part of me has awoken, and as much as I recognize Arla’s role in that, I don’t trust her. Not completely. Not like the others do.
“Ooooh,” Brennan exclaims, eyeballing my cocktail. “How very Little Mermaid of you.”
I pull a face. “Aaron talked me into it.”
At that, Aaron waggles his fingers. “That’s me. I’m the brains at Pacific Creative.”
“What’s that?” Brennan asks.
Aaron looks a little surprised. “Jude’s work? We’re both in creative there, copywriters.”
Brennan raises his brows. “I didn’t know you were a writer.”
“I’m not really,” I say quickly. “Just copy. And Aaron is actually a senior copywriter, so technically my boss.”
“I thought you two were friends,” Aaron says over his clamshell.
“We are,” I rush to answer.
“We’re still in the getting-to-know-you phase,” Brennan adds.
Aaron nods but doesn’t look convinced. “So how did you meet?”
Brennan flags down a waiter and orders something with coconut milk and rum. Then he turns back to Aaron. “A mutual friend introduced us,” he says coyly, giving me a look I can’t decipher.
Aaron sips his drink. “Mm … another mysterious friend. Where have you been keeping them all, Jude?”
I smile nervously. “I’m kind of shy at work,” I tell Brennan, as if he doesn’t already know.
His drink arrives and he takes a long, exaggerated sip through his straw. “Pity,” he says, winking at Aaron. “You sure weren’t shy on the dance floor the other night.”
“I knew it!” Aaron shouts, slamming a hand on the table and making our cocktails jump. He grins conspiratorially at Brennan. “I’d pay good money to see Jude Clark actually dance.”
Brennan breaks out in a devilish smile. “Oh, I can arrange that.”
“Yes, please,” Aaron says. He couldn’t look more thrilled. “I heard you took our shrinking violet to Medusa last night. That’s a very exclusive club. How’d you get in?”
“Brennan knows the owner,” I blurt, increasingly uncomfortable with Aaron’s sharp gaze.
“Is that right?” Aaron asks, leaning back in his booth. “What’s he like?”
Brennan smiles. “Jude can tell you. She knows her.”
“Aaron says there are rumors about Medusa,” I tell Brennan, more to avoid eye contact with Aaron than anything. “That it’s … bad for people.”
He acts unsurprised. “Medusa is a club like any other—a good DJ and a hot aesthetic, a few signature drinks, and the right people slinking around the bar. The illusion of exclusivity.”
His description puts me at ease. Maybe I’ve been making too much of everything, reading too much into every detail and gesture.
Maybe Medusa is a normal, if exclusive, club and Arla is a normal, if unusual, person.
Maybe we have a little bit of magic that will someday be explained by science.
Maybe we’re just a circle of friends and nothing more.
“It’s what’s underneath that counts,” he continues.
At that, my skin goes cold and clammy, the breath of the underground not forgotten, the poster on the wall. Brennan’s signet ring glows orange under the colorful lights, the dragon twirling like the symbol on the note cards, like the many tails of the woman on the poster.
“I like you,” Aaron says with a laugh, oblivious to my unease. “You’re a bad influence. Jude needs more of that in her life.”
For a second, Brennan seems to blush, but it’s hard to say in the strange, rainbow lighting of the bar. “I like you too,” he says to Aaron. “Not every man can wear purple.”
They spend the rest of the night swapping stories about ex-boyfriends and requesting increasingly deranged mixed drinks from the menu.
By the end of my second fishbowl—which I’ve been nursing slowly but steadily—I’ve put Brennan’s eerie words behind me, and I’m starting to feel like a third wheel.
And then Aaron pulls Brennan onto the floor so they can slow dance to a cover of “Tiny Bubbles” by Don Ho, and they never come back.
In all honesty, I’m just glad they’re getting along.
I close out our tab and leave a tip on the table before sliding out of the booth.
At least I can tell Arla I completed her little task, spying on Brennan in the wild.
He’s harmless, unless you count the intense fuck-me eyes he’s leveling at my coworker.
Though, who can blame him? Aaron is an eight on a bad day.
I tap Aaron on the shoulder on my way to the door and explain I’m heading back to his place for the night. When he makes a pouty face, I reassure him. “Have fun! We’ll catch up over coffee in the morning.”
Brennan flashes me a thankful grin. We all know I won’t be seeing Aaron again this evening.
He hands me a key and waves me along, turning back to Brennan.
At the door, I blow them a parting kiss and Aaron laughs, pretending to catch it.
Brennan sends me one in return, and just as his hand leaves his mouth, a slew of bubbles glug from the machine and ripple across the dance floor, spinning thickly around me where I’m clutching the handle of the closed door, eliciting shrieks of delight and alarm along the way.
My smile falters, my grip tightening. Was that intentional? Is he drunk? A full-body tremble courses over me as I open the door.
What am I going to tell Arla?