fic: her liquor's top shelf (2/2)
A doctor shouldn’t drink so much.
A doctor shouldn’t get fired and nearly lose his license.
He squints at the amber liquid and steals a glance at the pixie-haired bartender.
~
“Wanna go out?”
Her shirt is rumpled, his hair shooting in every direction.
They’re standing next to the trashcan and they can hear distant stray cats fighting.
“Seriously?”
~
Who the hell asks a girl out after groping her in an alley?
~
David never took her out.
He was always too scared of being seen.
Their dates ended up in her room, a used condom in the trashcan.
~
She wanted so badly to punch his teeth.
Almost as much as she wanted to punch herself.
~
“What’s your problem?”
~
It’s fun. She’s had some men in her bed, sweet lovers, rough lovers, awkward lover, even Ruby a couple of times.
But the good doctor is fun. His nose tickles when it roams close to her armpits and she laughs.
The sound is so unfamiliar that she wants to cry.
~
“A guy like you hanging around a place like this. Must be something wrong with you.”
~
A doctor shouldn’t be performing surgery in a back room, with almost no light and mould in the wallpaper.
But here we are, he thinks as he drinks his evening’s reward.
~
She paints her toenails blue.
You look so pretty, Mary, blue is your colour, her mother had said, now give me the other foot.
It’s been a while since she made an effort.
~
“It’s daddy issues, isn’t it.”
~
He shows up at her doorstep, every once in a while. His breath smells like liquor (it always smells like liquor) and he looks lost (he looks lost when he thinks she can’t see).
“Gerry.”
It sounds like he’s being ripped apart from the inside.
~
Maybe he is, she wouldn’t know.
She pretends she doesn’t care but the cigarette shakes in her hand.
~
He finds her in the kitchen and kisses her like he’s trying not to drown.
Sits her on the counter and tries to devour her inner thighs.
~
What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this, he wants to ask.
Princess with scars from somewhere between nowhere and goodbye.
There’s a million like her.
(No, there aren’t)
~
He laughs like a kid and says he found the Holy Land.
It’s right between her laughs, he says.
She kicks him and tells him he’s going to hell.
~
“My brother OD’ed. When he came back from the war.”
It had once been a boarding house, he’d been told. The rooms are small, damp and have seen far better days. The electric system is all shot to hell, and he can’t plug in more than two things at once.
A bartender named Mary Margaret is lying naked in his bed, running her fingers through his hair and he wants to die happy, right then and there.
~
“Maybe I just like the ambience.”
~
He always drowns.