Dirty Little Midlife Disaster by Lilian Monroe
Mac
As I tipa bottle of beer into my mouth to take a sip, my eyes drift to the door for the millionth time tonight.
She’ll show up. I know she will. Her friends wanted to come here, so she has no choice. She’ll be here.
Another sip of beer; another glance at the door.
“You got it bad,” my brother says from behind the bar. He’s taller than me by an inch and has the same thick, dark hair, usually messy from the way he runs his hands through it. Lee sees one of the regulars jerk his chin and is a good enough bartender to know that means the man wants another drink. As he pours the pint, he arches a brow at me. “Dad told me about your woman.”
“She’s not my woman.”
Yet.
Wait. No.
She’s not my woman, ever.
My father claps me on the shoulder. “Help me change a keg, will you?” He jerks his head to the storeroom where we keep the spare barrels.
I nod, slipping off my stool to follow him across the bar. My father has a bounce in his step that I haven’t seen in a long time, and I wonder if it has anything to do with the long phone calls he’s been taking in his office with a certain refined, sophisticated older woman he recently met.
The thought makes a void tear open in my chest. My father is a man of contradictions, but he’s always been predictable. Steady. He owns a bar, but doesn’t drink. He rides a motorcycle, wild as anything, then goes home to spend long hours reading by the window that overlooks his backyard. He flirts with women, charms them within moments, but he doesn’t get attached. Never has.
Not since my mother left him with us boys and never came back.
It was me, Lee, and Dad against the world. I learned early on how easy it is for women to walk away. I felt the pain of those wounds like bloody, ripped blisters on my feet. Constant, throbbing aches that got worse with time, not better, and I learned it by seeing my father drink himself to near-death, then crawl his way back to sobriety.
When he bought the Grove, I thought it was some awful form of torture, some penance for the years he spent drowning in his own pain, but it was just another of his contradictions. Being near alcohol didn’t make him relapse. It’s like he needed the constant reminder of what would happen if he did.
It always made sense to me that Dad was on his own, the same way it made sense that I was on my own. Like the sun rising in the east. It was the only way we could be.
But my father glances over his shoulder, a broad grin on his lips. “Don’t look so worried, son. She’ll show.”
I pretend not to know what he’s talking about. We keep the new kegs near the back of the building, in a room where the delivery truck can easily access the door. My father, wisely choosing to drop the subject of who may or may not show up at the Grove tonight, tells me which beer needs to be changed, so I grab one of the big silver kegs and start rolling it across the floor to get to the keg room behind the bar. From there, I swap an empty for a full one and haul the empty keg over my shoulder to take it back to the storage room.
It’s a trip I’ve made hundreds of times, especially as my father has gotten older and struggled with the weight of the full kegs. I know every step of the journey from the keg room to the storage room by heart. I could walk this path in my sleep.
And it’s when I’m halfway across the bar that I see her.
Trina walks in wearing tight jeans, the hottest fucking knee-high boots I’ve ever seen, and a white top that’s somehow not revealing while leaving nothing to the imagination. Holy fuck. My brain stops sending signals to the rest of my body and everything inside me malfunctions. I trip over a chair, my body pitches forward, and the keg clangs against a table. Beer goes flying everywhere.
Screams, flailing arms, empty kegs rolling away, and then I’m on the floor. There’s a chair on top of me and a table descending toward me, until a hand reaches out and catches it—but not before every bottle and glass on the table comes clattering down around and on top of me. One of them smashes nearby.
Great. Wonderful. I blink, afraid to move in case I cut myself on broken glass. Also, I might be in shock.
My father’s face appears in my field of vision, his eyes glimmering with humor. “That was quite the dismount.”
“Be quiet and help me up, yeah?” I extend an arm, which my father grabs to help me to my feet. Thankfully, the glass that smashed was a couple feet away from me, but I still brush out my hair in case of shards.
“Are you okay?” a sweet-as-honey voice says from behind my back, and I brace myself before turning around.
It doesn’t help. Trina is still as drop-dead gorgeous as she was a minute ago, when I wasn’t covered in dust and spilled beer and a sheen of hot embarrassment. Her long-sleeved white top hugs every inch of her tight, curvy body. I run my eyes down to those mile-long legs, internally groaning again at the sight of her heeled black boots. I can’t help but imagine asking her to wear them for me—and only them—somewhere more private.
When my eyes slide back up to meet her eyes, I have to fight the instinct to shift my pants against the growing tightness near the placket of my zipper. She did something with her hair, her makeup. It makes me hard as hell, as if my body knows this is the woman I’ve been waiting for. This is the woman I want.
Then I realize I’ve been staring at her for a really, really long time. My father clears his throat as someone sweeps up glass nearby.
“Hey,” I manage.
Her lush, pink lips—glittering with some kind of shiny gloss that makes me want to lick her mouth clean—curl into a smile. “Hi.” Her gaze slides to my father, standing to my left. “Reporting for duty, Hamish. I brought a few willing students with me.” She points her thumb over her shoulder, and that’s when I see her friends.
Battening down the hatches might have been a good idea.
Simone, the redhead, has her arm around Harold, a grouchy regular that’s as much of a fixture as the stool he sits on. But the weird thing? Harold is laughing. I’ve known the man eleven years, and I’ve never seen him laugh.
The dark-haired woman—Fiona, from memory—is passing her card over the bar to pay for a round of drinks while Trina’s sister, Candice, has drifted over to the electronic jukebox by the wall. Then, “Fantasy” by Mariah Carey starts blaring over the speakers, causing every regular patron—all male, all older than me—to snap their heads up in confusion.
But the women—including the quiet one, Jen, that barely said anything at the pottery class but made the best bowl I’ve seen from a beginner—throw their hands in the air with a collective scream and immediately start singing and dancing. They know every word. Every little trill. And they’re singing at top volume—and not necessarily in key.
“Oh, God…” Trina looks horrified.
It makes me laugh. I pick up the chair I’d crashed into while my father replaces the customer’s spilled beer, and when I grab the empty keg, I clear my throat. “I need to put this away,” I tell Trina. “Don’t… Don’t disappear, okay?”
Her smile spreads wide across her face as she tilts that pretty head of hers. “Where would I go? I have very serious business to attend to.” Her eyes slide to my father, who nods.
“Damn right you do. First thing’s first, grab a pool cue. I’m going to show you how to chalk it up.”
With a grin, Trina follows him to the back of the bar where the pool table resides. I watch her walk away and nearly stumble over that damn chair again when I see the back of her outfit. There’s her ass, which is glorious, cupped by those jeans like they’re painted on…
And then there’s her top. Somehow, by some female fashion voodoo, there’s no back. Her hair cascades down in golden-brown curls to mid-back, and when she takes a hand to lift it off her neck, I groan at the sight of her spine, the creamy expanse of flesh on display.
The woman’s back is making my cock throb, for fuck’s sake. I readjust my belt, but I can’t tear my eyes away from Trina as she grabs a pool cue, chalking it up under my father’s watchful eye. Then he demonstrates how to prop the cue against his left hand, and I’m the luckiest man in the world, because I get to watch Trina lean over the green felt, her heart-shaped ass and exposed back glowing gold under the lights above the pool table.
That pose…
I stifle a groan. I’m not going to make it through the night if this continues.
A face appears at my side. Fiona. She squints at me, then lets a slow smile spread across her face. Then she just starts laughing. “It’s a lobotomy, ladies!”
The rest of them cheer, then go back to singing and dancing.
I glance over my shoulder and nearly fall over again when I see Harold bopping along to the music, his feet shuffling beside his stool as Simone swings his arms from side to side while she sings Mariah’s lyrics off-pitch in his face. And Harold loves every minute of it, judging by the broad, gap-toothed smile on his face.
Shaking my head, I grab the keg and make my way to the keg room for a moment of peace. I put the empty barrel with the rest of them and pause before exiting the small room again. It’s a long, rectangular room with an exterior door at one end and an interior door to the bar at the other. Empty kegs line the wall on one side, with full ones on the other. I stand between the silver barrels, hand on the interior door, and I drop my chin to my chest.
Trina… She looked… I’m not…
I can’t even form coherent thoughts. My cock is so hard I feel like I’m fifteen years old instead of forty-five. I squeeze my eyes shut and press my palm to my shaft against the zipper of my jeans, willing it to go down—but it only swells in response, throbbing against the pressure of my touch.
Fuck.
I can’t go out there like this. I already tripped over my feet and nearly knocked a table over. How am I supposed to watch her bending over the pool table every few minutes while my body feels heated to the core?
And—look, I’m not proud of this. But I either have to wait for this to pass, knowing my shaft will grow painfully hard as soon as I walk out there again, or…
Ah, fuck it. I hunt through my pockets and, not finding what I need, I kick off a shoe and pull my sock off. Then, like some sex-crazed hormonal mess, I lean my back against the door and unbuckle my belt with quick, jerky movements. My cock is a heavy iron bar when I pull it free from my pants.
Fisting myself with a tight grip, I close my eyes and think of those shiny, pink lips. Of that body leaning over the pool table, hair spilling over her shoulder with her back on display. Of Trina’s bright eyes, and how good they’d look if they were lazy with pleasure. I think of notching my shoulders between those thighs while discovering what kind of noises she’d make with her legs wrapped around my head. How she’d taste, earthy and sweet and fucking perfect. I think of spreading her wet heat with my hardness, feeling her milk my cock with every hard stroke—
My orgasm rips through me, pulling heat to my groin and spurting it out in thick, long ropes. I grunt low and rough, catching my seed with my fucking sock, of all things, wishing it was her skin. Her mouth. Her soft, pink folds.
I lean against the door, panting, letting my head fall back with a soft thud. I should be fucking ashamed of myself for this, but all I feel is relief. A few gulping breaths, and my heartbeat starts to slow. When I close my eyes, I still see her, but I no longer feel like I’m about to burst out of my skin.
Then I tuck myself in, zip myself up, slip my shoe back on, walk out of the keg room, and throw my soiled sock away in the first available trash can. Finally, with a deep breath, I walk back out into the bar.
