Still, she had to be close. Something she’d written had gone viral—surely that couldn’t just be down to dumb luck. No, she didn’t want JB’s job. She was going to be a writer, a real one. One who got bylines and paychecks.
She felt a blast of warm air cut through the air-conditioning and looked up to see a couple of guys walk through the door. She tossed the rag under the bar and started pulling a couple drafts of Bud.
“Hey, Caity.” Ken took up his usual stool at the bar, Nick sliding in next to him. “How’re you doing this fine evening?”
“Bored out of my skull,” she said, placing the cold beers in front of them. “How about you?”
“Ah, you know,” Ken said, taking a long pull from his drink. “Same shit, different day.”
“I hear you. You want a chaser to go with that? Two for one on whiskey shots. Thirsty Tuesday.”
“Why the hell not.”
Cait poured out two shots of Jim Beam, and the two men sank them and placed the empty glasses upside down on the bar. She tossed them in the dishwasher and wiped the bar top clean again.
“Where’s the big man?” Ken asked. He meant JB.
“Up in his office, I think.”
“Working hard or hardly working.”
“You’re telling me.”
It went on like this for a while, Ken tossing patter across the bar and her tossing it back while Nick sat nursing his beer and staring silently at the screen above her head. Nick wasn’t much of a talker, and she’d known him long enough not to try to force it. That was her job, more than pouring drinks. She was there to either talk or not talk, and to read her customers well enough to know which one they wanted at any given moment.
Ken always wanted to talk. He’d been coming in most weeks for the past year, sitting in the same spot and drinking Bud drafts with whiskey chasers until his eyes went a little hazy, at which point he’d climb down from his stool, slap a ten-spot on the counter as a tip, and make his way back to wherever it was he came from. He talked a lot of hot air, Ken, but she liked him. He kept her occupied, especially on the slow shifts.
“Hey, you heard about this whole thing with Jake Forsythe?”
She arranged her features in what she hoped was bland disinterest. “No. What’s that?”
He shook his head. “You know he’s a musician, right? I saw him down on Fourth Street a few months back, pretty good, too, though the guy needs a haircut and he was wearing his jeans a little too tight.” He flicked a glance at Nick. “Not that I was looking at his ass or anything. Anyway, this chick goes home with him—completely willingly, by the way, she even says so herself—and they have sex—again, completely willingly—and the next thing he knows, she writes some article claiming she’s been violated or something.” He threw his hands up in the air. “Call me crazy, but I just don’t think that’s right. I mean, the poor guy’s just trying to get laid, and this girl uses him to get attention for herself.”
Cait tried to swallow her pounding heart. “Maybe she didn’t like what happened when they were having sex. Maybe it wasn’t a good experience for her.”
Ken pulled a face. “If I complained every time I didn’t have a ‘good experience’”—he put air quotes around the words—“I wouldn’t have time to go to work or brush my teeth in the morning. Jesus Christ, Caity, how often does anyone have a good experience in this world?”
“That’s a pretty cynical view.”
“Hey, it is what it is, and I’m not complaining. These two people wanted to have sex with each other, so they had sex. That should have been the end of it. Instead, just because this girl didn’t see stars during it, or wasn’t showered with roses afterward, she goes off and writes some article tearing him a new asshole and puts it out there so the whole world can read it.” He shook his head. “If a man did that to a woman, there’d be hell to pay.”
“Yeah, well, if a woman tried to choke a man during sex, it probably wouldn’t have been as traumatic. He had fifty pounds on this woman. He could have killed her.”
He looked at her sharply. “I thought you said you hadn’t heard about it.”
She turned her attention back to wiping down the bar, but she