I WANT the Bartender Explicit Erotica #7
“I meant it in the moment. I also have to sit on a stool that I now know you watch.” She stared at the ceiling. Her pulse was still trying to find a normal job. “You last longer than is reasonable.”
“You complain a lot for someone who just came until she lost count.”
She elbowed him, weak. He took it. The bird on his chest rose and fell under her shoulder when she shifted closer.
Up close the ink looked different in daylight, less mystery, more work.
Tiny scars where a line had blown out. A patch on his ribs that was slightly raised. She traced it with a fingernail.
“What does the date under the compass mean?”
Marc was quiet long enough that she thought he might not answer. “Day I left the last place I lived. Not dramatic. Just the day I stopped pretending I was staying.”
“And the ones on your cock?”
A tired huff that might have been a laugh. “Drunk courage and a tattooer who did not flinch. I wanted to know if I would regret it every time I got hard. I don’t.”
Linda considered that. Cum cooled on her thigh. She should have gotten up, should have been the woman who offered water and a rideshare and a clean exit. She stayed in the wet spot instead.
“I leave the kitchen light on so the hallway looks occupied,” she said. “You already know that. What you do not know is I stand in that hallway sometimes and listen to the quiet like it might change its mind.”
“Does it?”
“No. That’s why I drive to a bar and talk to a 26 year old who remembers my floor number.”
Marc’s thumb moved on her hip, a small absent stroke. “I count bottles twice because I hate walking into the apartment before it feels like mine. Then I lie there and think about the woman on the third stool who drinks like she is punishing a good day.”
“It is usually a fine day. I just like the way you pour.”
“Liar.”
“A little.”
They listened to a truck far below. The gray at the window strengthened. Linda felt the leak between her legs with every small shift and did not get up to deal with it. She wanted the evidence. She wanted to know, later, that this had not been another conversation that ended at the register.
“You work tonight,” she said.
“I work tonight.”
“I will be on the stool.”
“I know.”
She turned her head on the pillow. His mouth was soft now, the mean focus fucked out of it. She kissed him once, slow, tasting salt and her own skin.
“If you look at me like you looked at me in that elevator, I am going to make a fool of myself in a public place.”
“Then I will look at the well until last call,” he said. “And then I will look at you.”
Linda closed her eyes. The ache between her legs was already turning into the good kind of sore. His cum was a warm secret she was going to carry through a shower she did not want to take yet.
“Stay until the sun is actually up,” she said. “Then you can walk home to the apartment that takes ten minutes to feel like yours. I will leave the kitchen light on when you go.”
Marc’s arm tightened across her middle.
“Deal.”
They did not sleep so much as drift in the wreckage of the sheets, talk tapering into breathing, the city getting louder under the glass.
When the first real gold hit the buildings across the street, Linda felt him kiss the ink-free skin of her shoulder like a man marking a place he intended to come back to.
Linda almost drove past the garage.
She sat at the light with her blinker on and thought about going home to the kitchen light and the sheets she had stripped at noon and the dull sweet pull between her legs that a long shower had not erased.
Then the light changed and she turned in anyway, same numbered space, same walk to the door she had used for three months like it was nothing.
The bar smelled like citrus and fryer oil and someone else’s Friday.
Early still. A baseball game on the mute television.
Two regulars she knew by drink and not by name.
Marc was behind the wood with his sleeves rolled, compass showing, swallow on the back of his hand flexing around a bottle of the rye nobody ordered.
He saw her before she reached the stool.
Nothing obvious. No smile that would have given the night away to the man two seats down.
Just the half-second where his pour paused and his eyes dropped to her mouth and then to the way she sat, third from the end, bag on the hook, like her body had not spent the morning reminding her what he had done to it.
“Usual,” she said.
He built it the same. Two fingers. One cube. No garnish. He set it on a fresh napkin and this time their fingers touched on purpose, a brief press hidden by the glass. His skin was warm. She felt it in the place that was still tender.
“Long day?” he asked, same words as a hundred other nights, except now she knew what his voice sounded like when he came.
“The kind that makes a person sit in the same place.” She took a sip. The burn landed different. “Yours?”
“Inventory again. Still short that rye. I counted twice.” A flicker at the corner of his mouth. “Apartment took the full ten minutes before it felt like mine. Maybe twelve.”
Linda looked at her drink so she would not look at his throat.
She had kissed that throat with the city going gold.
She had felt him pulse inside her while he said her name like it was the only word left.
Sitting here in tailored slacks with a thong she had chosen because the other option was worse felt like a private joke.
“Kitchen light was on when I left,” she said. “Occupies the hallway. In case anyone is listening.”
“Good policy.”
He moved down the bar for a pair of drafts.
She watched the ink at his neck disappear into the collar and reappear when he bent.
She knew where the small bird sat under the scapula.
She knew the chain at his hip and the thorns that wrapped the cock currently hidden behind denim and a bar apron.
The knowledge sat in her like a second pulse.
When he came back he brought olives she had not asked for. She took one. Salt. Oil. She did not suck her finger this time. She wanted to. He watched her not do it and the look was worse than if she had.
“You walked,” she said.
“Weather was decent.” He wiped a ring that was not there. “You drove. Parking tax.”
“Some habits survive a night.”
“Some don’t.”
The baseball crowd on TV scored. Nobody in the room cared except the man at the end who grunted. Linda turned her glass and felt the cube knock. She was sore in a precise way. Sitting on the wood made her aware of it. She crossed her legs and the pressure drew a breath she hid in a sip.
Marc’s gaze flicked to the movement and away. He knew. Of course he knew.
“Busy later?” she asked.
“Friday always is. Last call around the usual time.” He said it like a schedule and like an invitation. “Drawer still has to get counted twice.”
“I might stay.”
“I know.”
A woman in a blazer claimed the stool on Linda’s other side and ordered a vodka soda with the fatigue of a person who had also had a fine day. Marc made it, smiled the professional smile, and came back to Linda’s end like the other end of the bar was a rumor.
“You look like you slept,” he said, quiet.
“I didn’t. I lay there and listened to the quiet change its mind. It didn’t. Then I washed the sheets and came here anyway.”
“I walked past my own door twice before I went in.” He braced his hands on the inner rail the way he had the night before, ink and tendon and the date under the compass that meant he had left somewhere. “The ten minutes felt longer.”
Linda’s throat tightened around nothing.
She was 34 years old on a familiar stool with a 26 year old bartender who had filled her until she leaked and was now discussing inventory like that was the whole story.
It was not the whole story. It was the part they could say out loud while other people asked for lime.
“Don’t look at me like the elevator,” she said.
“I’m looking at the well.”
He was not. He was looking at her mouth again, one second too long, then at her glass, then at the door, a circuit that would have been invisible yesterday.
The blazer woman paid and left. The game went to commercial. Marc topped Linda’s drink without being asked. The cube was smaller. The pour was the same. Everything else had shifted one inch to the left.
“Third stool is still yours,” he said.
“Good. I paid for the view.”
“Of the well.”
“Among other things.”
His laugh was just air. He picked up a clean glass and held it like a prop. “If you stay until I lock the door, I still have to check the bolt twice. Habit.”
“I remember the ice well story. Romance stays honest.”
“Something like that.”
Linda drank. The bourbon tasted like last night and like every night before it. She set the glass down dead center on the napkin and left her hand there, close to where his had been.
“I’ll wait,” she said.
Marc nodded once. The swallow tattoo flexed when he reached for the next ticket.
“I know.”
He went to work. She stayed on the wood.
The bar filled in pieces, noise rising, citrus and bodies and the ice machine cycling on.
Linda watched his hands and the ink she could see and thought about the ink she could not.
Between her legs the ache had settled into something she could sit with.
A reminder. A decision she was going to make again when the bottles went back on the top shelf.
Last call was hours away. The stool was hers. He knew she was not leaving early.
When he glanced over the next time, he let the look land, brief and clear, the same look from the hallway on the fourteenth floor. Then he turned back to the well like a man who intended to finish his shift.
Linda smiled into her glass.
She already knew she would be here when he locked the door.
Raw. Messy. Keep reading.