Chapter Two #2
“I live near here? The Pineapple?” Bennet indicated around with the glass.
“We talked about this last night? Although, I guess there’s no possible way you’d remember that.
Thanks Jackie, start a tab.” He snapped a black card onto the stone bar top, and Elliot glared at it.
Pineapple – right; he knew it was familiar.
Bennet tipped his glass to the bartender as she retreated, and Jackie grinned and made a face like poor little Elliot’s hangover was still visible from the outside.
Bennet pulled out the stool beside him and sat. “How hungover were you this morning?”
“Not bad. You?”
“Felt great. I had water all night.” The burger arrived and Elliot picked it up and took a bite. “Plans tonight?”
“Sleep. I gotta get another flight tomorrow.”
“Sensible.”
Elliot went about inhaling the burger as Bennet swiveled on his stool and set his elbows on the bar behind him.
Elliot followed his gaze to a high top by the window where a blonde with a bubble butt was showing her friend something on her phone.
She looked easy enough. Too bad he had to be sensible.
“Bet I pull her before you do,” said Dustin. Elliot frowned and looked at him. Dustin sipped his beer again, looking amused. “Oh, you don’t remember that, either.”
“Remember what?”
“How bad you got beat by an old man last night. You wanna take a shot at redeeming yourself?”
Redeeming himself? Elliot went back to his burger. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”
“Ask Reef. Actually, I bet he doesn’t remember either.”
Chewing, Elliot picked up his beer and ignored him. “So you live here,” he said, sipping and setting down the glass.
“In the off-season. Apartment? In the Pearl District?” Dustin looked sympathetically over his beer. “Remember?”
“Obviously not. And what do you do around here all summer? They got bingo and–”
“Early bird specials? You already used that one last night.”
Elliot stabbed a fry into his ketchup. “Alright, what did we do last night? Arm wrestle?”
“Funnily enough, that’s the one thing we didn’t do. Although, I’m sure it would’ve gone that way eventually, if I’d stuck around.”
The blonde at the high top on the other side of the room laughed. It carried all the way across the bar, and Elliot winced. There was too much exposed brickwork magnifying all the noise in this hipster hellhole. It was like drinking at the gym.
“Maybe this’ll jog your memory,” said Bennet, and pulled up his sleeve to show Elliot the inside of his forearm. Next to his watch was a smudged and nearly invisible phone number.
With a horrible jolt, Elliot remembered. The Windex. The miniskirt. Had he burped the alphabet? No: he’d made it as far as ‘Q’ and then the girl in the miniskirt had called him a pig because he’d been so fucking drunk. In front of Dustin Bennet.
Elliot briefly shut his eyes, and instead of letting that humiliation sink through him, he sniffed and pulled his mouth down at the corners and turned back to his food. “No one writes a number down with a pen anymore, Abuelo. So was she any good?”
“No idea.” Bennet rolled the sleeve down. “I left, remember? Figured you would’ve gone home with her.”
“Nah. You don’t wanna take a girl like that home.”
Dustin looked sharply at him sideways. “Like what?”
Elliot lifted one shoulder, tonguing french fry out of his canine and dipping another into the ketchup. “You know. Fleje.”
He could feel Dustin watching him. Probably judging.
Bennet was probably a feminist. Guys who said they were feminists liked to talk over Elliot about how enlightened they were about women.
They used words like ‘regressive’, and they were always white, and always lived in places like Portland.
They usually accused Elliot of being ignorant, or even MAGA, which was fucking ridiculous, because why the fuck would Elliot vote for a guy who called his abuela’s home a ‘floating island of garbage’?
Dustin said nothing, and turned his gaze back to the room.
The blonde woman laughed, and Elliot looked over his shoulder at her.
Her eye caught his. Nice smile. Her laugh was too loud, but that was fine – it was generous, and his uncle Sal always said a generous laugh meant a generous woman.
Her friend was taller with dark hair, looked a little quiet.
He leaned toward Bennet without taking his eyes off them, finished the mouthful he was chewing, and swallowed. “Fine,” he said. “You take the tall one.”
Bennet whipped his head around. “Excuse me?”
“Thought you were giving me a chance to redeem myself.”
“I wasn’t serious.”
“Why not? What else you doing? You gotta get home to watch Golden Girls?”
Bennet scoffed. “You don’t even know what Golden Girls is.”
“Fuck you, my abuela learned English from the Golden Girls. You take the one on the left, I’ll take the one on the right.”
“I’m not doing that. It’s gross. I don’t know how I let you talk me into it last night; I must’ve been drunker than I thought.”
“You don’t wanna play? Why? Cause you know you’re gonna lose?”
Bennet squared his jaw and looked away. Elliot grinned. He was remembering something else about last night: how fun it was getting under the old man’s skin.
He dipped another fry in his ketchup, grinning. “No, no, disculpa, you’re right, Papi. You shouldn’t get into such a strenuous competition at your age.”
“I’m. Twenty. Nine. Amigo.”
“Okay. So it’s no problem.” Elliot shrugged, chewing. “So you’ll just go over there and ask for her number.”
Bennet glared across the bar. “Why do I get the tall one?”
Got him. Elliot followed his gaze. “Because you’re tall.”
He put his last fry in his mouth, brushed off his fingers, scooped up his beer, stood before Bennet could argue, and walked over. He didn’t look back to see if Bennet was following.
“Hey,” he called. He pitched it warm and leaned into the Puerto Rican accent – which he didn’t actually have, but liked to put on in moments like this.
“I’m so sorry to interrupt. My friend and I just got here and we don’t know anyone, and I was wondering if you could tell me if this bar does food all night? Or if they cut it off?”
It was such a bullshit question. But it was a question so obviously bullshit that it was obviously something else too, and the girl seemed to know it. She smiled and said, “I think eleven?” and her tall friend said, “It’s eleven, I checked,” and Bennet materialized at Elliot’s elbow.
“Hi,” said Bennet.
“Hi,” said the tall woman.
“This is Dustin.” Elliot turned to open the circle. “I’m Elliot.”