Trying something different this time round..trying to get rid of the writer's block going on for the other fics i'm working on...as usual, inspired by a song.
Her brain had stopped registering the bitter taste of the lager as she lifted the bottle to her lips and took a long swig. She felt surprisingly bold and more comfortable with her lack of company and the occasional stares from the other patrons here, Sam Adams being the only one she needed tonight. She held on to the bottle tight, her weapon against the pitiful glances from the women there with their girlfriends, the suggestive leers of the other men in the bar hoping she would be their easy lay tonight. She smirked. She was not drunk, she was feeling way too good to be. And no way in hell was she going to go home with one of them desperate horny bastards here, though she wished one of them had the guts to ask her. She had had enough of men for the night, and god was she itching to kick one of those men who saw and treated women as property right smack in the balls.
It started out as a pretty good morning. She had woken up with ease, had a delicious meal before leaving for work. She was not caught in a traffic jam, and she was having a good hair day. Not that she would have told anyone that she was concerned about such things..well. Not that anyone would have guessed, either. But the point was, the day started out pretty good. She felt she was ready for anything that the shift threw at her. Hodges' sarcasm and the sexual tension between him and Wendy. Nick's cover of over-optimism, to deal with his near-brush with death. Warrick's growing dejection about the problems in his marriage to Tina, and the longing looks he shot Catherine (and Catherine's ass) once in a while. Grissom's hot and cold (lately leaning more towards the cold side) game with their feelings, and his unconscious flirtations with Sofia. Greg's flirtations with her and his (and she would only grudgingly admit it) annoyingly endearing behaviour as her protege. She was up for it all.
Until she got to her scene. Another abused-till-finally-dead woman, another unrepentant "That-whorebitchslut-deserved-it" partner in handcuffs (and in this case, it was her fiance, who was himself bangin' the blonde, double-silicone-Ds waitress two houses down). She stared at the bottle of her now lukewarm beer in disgust as she swirled the remaining liquid and downed it all in a gulp. "Hey Marty!" The small, still somewhat sober part of her brain told her that it was not a good sign that she knew the bartender by name, or that he immediately sat down another opened bottle of cold lager in front of her just by her calling out his name. She smiled her large winning smile at him, and sat down to enjoy her beer. She frowned in slight concentration as she swallowed the cool liquid. Where was the other empty bottle? She looked around and saw Marty throwing around liquor bottles and attempting to catch it behind his back. He saw her and gave her a smile. Right, she remembered now. She had pulled him closer as he had sat her new beer down and told him very nicely that he was the only man whom she could tolerate at this given moment. She also remembered Marty behaving rather strangely, flinching away from her, rubbing his ear and grabbing the empty bottle away, shaking his head. Men. She never understood them. She couldn't decide whether she found that strangely amusing, or absolutely enraging, and hence the accompanying facial expression to said emotions. That increasingly small, somewhat sober part of her brain was telling her that fluctuating between emotions was an even worse sign for her state of being, but she just shrugged to that and took an even longer sip, just to show to herself that she. was. NOT. drunk.
Small, sober brain-Sara told her that challenging your own rational self was a cause for doubting one's sobriety.
She wondered, really, what was so wrong about how she was feeling now. She was certainly feeling less hurt and angry and pissed off with every fucking thing. She was ready to throw a punch at the nearest person who dared to tell her to come down. She was ready to wipe the smirk off the sorry asshole's face when they barred her from the interrogation room for being too hostile. She was ready to tie him to a chair and burn his balls off with her cigarette when she was at autopsy with Doc and Greg, and was told the extent of abuse and injuries the poor woman suffered at said asshole's hands.
Cigarette...why not have one now? She fished around for her pack in her purse, and found that she had none. Damnit, of course, she had promised herself that she would quit smoking this month.
"Hey Marty!"
He came over with another bottle of beer in his hands, and looked questioningly at the still half-full bottle in her hands,
"You gotta cigarette?"
Marty shook his head at the woman. He was new to the bar, but had already seen her a couple of times the whole two weeks he was working here. Sara Something, that's what his only other colleague and boss Norma-the-waitress told him the first day on his job, which was also the first day he saw her. "Always alone, always sits at the bar, always drinks beer. Works in law enforcement, graveyard shift. On a good day, she'll have one or three, and smile politely at everyone, pay and leave without saying a word. On a bad day, she'll have more, and start telling me or the bartender about work before ending up chatting away about her men problems. There was a Hank and a Griss-something, and now its between Griss-something and a Greg. On a rough day, well, we have her home address in our lil' black book of shame for you to give to the cab driver after she falls off her bar stool."
Looks like it was going to be one of those nights. And if Norma was right, and Marty was starting to believe she was spot-on, he was going to need to familiarise himself with her address. He sighed. Surely, her life could not be that bad to lead to this? He hoped she had sorted out her men troubles to have someone taking care of her and that massive hangover she would get the next day. He looked up as he heard a crash and a giggle. Drunk Sara Something who works in law enforcement had fallen off her bar stool, as Norma said she would. He put the bottles he had been practicing his tricks on down. She had not sorted out her men troubles, then. There was no way in his world that a lady who had a man waiting for her at home would get this drunk alone.
"C'mon sweetheart, up you go." He picked her up from under her arms and propped her back onto the stool against the bar. She looked at him all confused, and started blabbering about a Nick, and Texas, and that she was sorry he almost died and that she loved him like a brother. Then she looked confused, and started telling him his accent was all wrong, but only Nick would call her sweetheart. He tried telling her that that's because he was from New York, and then she started to blab on about that Greg that Norma told him about. Marty grew even more concerned and panicked, and quickly got back behind his bar to find that lil' black book of shame. He was still young, had just dropped out of college. He had never worked in a bar before, and had just turned legal a few months before getting his bartender qualifications and getting hired here by Norma. Comforting and dealing with stone-cold-drunk adult women police officers with men problems was not something he had ever encountered in his twenty-one years.
As he looked for the book - where the hell did Norma put that damned thing?- he heard snippets of her surprisingly still-clear voice. She had a relatively low and gravely timbre, something he suspected to be the result of years of smoking. He recalled his Grandma Jane, who had a similar tone.
"..and he would never hurt me the way Grissom does, he never has. And yet, I find myself strangely more attracted to this greying, bespectacled, thick-around-the-waist, middle-aged boss of mine. I mean, who knows if he could still get it up, right? And Greg is fine. He is..no Warrick is fine. But taken. Nick, Nick is fi-ine. But Greg..Greg is, Greg is..God, sometimes when we're alone I just want to shove him against the wall and tear his clothes of and rub that mineral oil and liquid latex he is so fond of all over that Godalmighty fi-ine body of his..."
Marty gulped. This was way to much information, especially for a twenty-one year old who dropped out of college because he was having sexual fantasies of his girlfriend's twin brother. He had to find that book, pronto!
"..and ride him like a cowboy. Or cowgirl. Whichever, gender doesn't matter anymore in this day and age, does it? And can you in actuality ride someone against a wall though?.." Here, she paused, and looked pensively and meditatively at the bottle of Bols Blue behind the counter. She was starting to attract the sniggering and interested attention of the rest of the patrons in the bar. Marty was starting to feel hot under the collar from all the stares, and threw a murderous glance at Norma, who was standing in the corner behind the till watching the scene with amusement and no offer of help to find that book whatsoever. Thank God he worked the dayshift, there was hardly anyone at this time in the morning, except for old lonely men and hardcore alkies and winos. Then Sara looked away from the Bols Blue and straight at Marty, and started talking again.
"My counsellor told me I sought validation in inappropriate places. I think he was just trying to find an academic-sounding and convoluted way of saying that I had the female version of an Oedipus complex. I suppose that had something to do with the fact that my mother killed my abusive father in front of my eyes when I was barely a teenager.."
Marty stopped dead in his search for the book. Her mother killed her father, in front of her? Holy shit, no wonder she's so screwed up..Ah! He found it, finally. Norma had left it taped to the wooden panel of the bar, behind the bottle of Bols Blue. Damn that woman.
"..and when I found out what that asshole did to his fiancee, I flipped. But I didn't want to be home alone in an empty apartment brooding about it the whole night, so here I am, drunk and in a funk. Have you found the book yet Marty? Why do you look so surprised? I know how it goes, God and everyone here knows I've been doing this often enough in this forsaken place. Good day guys, goodbye Norma, I assume you've called the cab..."