Chapter 5 But There's Someone Who's Torn It Apart
It was in Cadiz that the mail finally caught up with the ship, and there were disappointments and elation as letters failed to arrive or came earlier than expected. Shawn, for once, was one of the lucky ones.
"So, Brady," Mark, who had had a single letter from his mother and three from various girls around the world, stared hard at the large package in his best friend's hands, his light brown eyes bright with the excitement of anticipation. "What's in there then?"
Shawn chuckled, the first time Mark had heard him even come close to laugh when he was sober. "Grandma's latest batch of cookies. Why?"
"Just wonderin'," Mark's mother sent him fruit cake that was as hard as a brick, or fudge that had mould on it by the time it arrived. Alice's cookies, on the other hand, in their vacuum sealed containers, were always as fresh and crunchy as they had been when she had first taken them from the oven. They were the envy of the entire ship. If Shawn was ever losing in a card game, all he had to do was put up even a single cookie and it would see the highest bid. They were like gold dust, only better because they were edible.
Shawn grinned and opened a box of oatmeal and raisin ones. "You want one?"
Mark's hand moved so quickly through the air, Shawn didn't see it pass from one place to the next. "Thanks," he answered, through a mouthful of cookie crumbs. "Damn these are good."
Shawn, another cookie in his mouth, nodded. "Says here," he added, glancing down at the rose scented paper his grandmother always wrote to him on, "she won the Salem Bake-Off."
"So it's official, these really are the best cookies in the world!" Mark joked, reaching out for another, this time one with white chocolate and orange zest.
There was a shout that interrupted the laughter and Shawn's reply. "Brady!"
He brushed the cookie crumbs from his fingers and grinned. "Duty calls."
It wasn't duty, however, but Chris who was yelling. She stood on the dock, hands on her hips, and smiled up at him, looking as fresh as the morning sun. "You ready?"
With tired, dark circles under his brown eyes from little sleep, Shawn nodded. She had promised to show him the sites of Cadiz. "Tired, but ready."
"Hey, beautiful!" Mark had followed Shawn up, now he stood with an enormous smile on his face, staring down at the beauty on the docks. "How you doin'?"
Chris sighed, and tossed her dark hair over one shoulder in a gesture of boredom. In her heavily accented English, she replied, "I'd be doing even better if your friend would get down here."
"Shawn," Mark slapped the guy's shoulder. "You got laid!"
Chris spat something at him in Spanish, and Shawn removed his friend's hand from his shoulder. "I did not get laid. I got a friend, and right now, my friend and I are going to see the sights of Cadiz."
"Dude," Mark said more quietly this time. "She is hot."
Shawn glanced down at Chris and then back up at his friend. By Salem standards, she was no better than average, and in Shawn's heart, compared to Belle, Chris was just another woman, and could have looked like one of Cinderella's step sisters for all he would notice or care. "Your point being?"
"You're telling me," said Mark slowly, as if talking to a backwards child, "you don't want her?"
"Get a grip on your libido, Mark," Shawn patted his friend, and ran down the gangway, then linked arms with Chris. "You're beginning to sound desperate!" he yelled, letting Chris kiss his cheek and giving her a slight squeeze of his hand.
"So what if I do?" his shipmate shouted down, "At least I know how to find a woman!"
"And who," Chris jumped in, "is walking away with a beautiful Spanish senorita and who is still on board ship all alone?"
Mark had no answer to that.
"Hey!" He lifted his head when Chris's voice reached him. "Are you coming or are we going to stand in the blazing sun until Gorgeous here turns as black as his hair?"
Shawn laughed as Mark shot down the side of the ship to them. "Aye, aye, el capitan!" he yelped as he ran. He put his very stylish sunglasses on the end of his nose and threw his arms around the shoulders of his two companions. "So where are we going?"
Shawn glanced at Chris and she smiled back. "Well."
Fifteen minutes of walking through the baking heat of Cadiz in the summer, and Mark was sweating, while Shawn and Chris looked as cool as if they were in England.
"What the hell are we doing here?" Mark whined, earning a quick slap around the back of his head from Chris.
"Don't swear," she hissed, "this is the market place, and my baby brother's right over there," she pointed to a small youth with her dark eyes and hair, and the cheekiest grin Mark had ever seen, not having seen Shawn's. She carried on in a light hearted tone, "I don't need him learning American from sailors or swearing scum like you that pass yourselves off as sailors. He knows enough Spanish swearwords already."
"We're here to buy my Grandma a present. I promised her one from every port I stopped in," Shawn explained staring down the busy market street and wondering if they sold jewellery.
"Well I promised my brother I'd leave a girl in every port remembering my name and the tattoo on my ass," Mark shot back, and gave Chris a lascivious look, "so when do we get back to the bar?"
"Four fifteen," she answered swiftly, picking up a cantaloupe and smelling it, then deciding it wasn't ripe enough. "First we buy Shawn's grandmother a present, then we have lunch, a siesta, and a walk to see Alcazar, then we get drunk and Shawn and I drown our sorrows, while you, you American sailor fool, you find a pretty girl to talk to and kiss for a night."
Mark grinned, brown eyes sparkling and hands shoved into his pockets. "Have I mentioned I love this plan?"
"Come on," Shawn muttered, moving forwards, trying to block the memory of stolen kisses in his Dad's old pick up truck, and hide from the pain. "Alice's present is waiting."
Mark stopped in his tracks. "The present is for Alice? As in 'I send my grandson boxes of cookies' Alice?"
Shawn ran an exasperated hand through his dark hair. "Yes, so?"
"If it's for Alice," Mark said confidently, "then it must be perfection. The perfect present for the perfect girl."
Shawn's heart stopped in his chest. It was a silly phrase, but it conjured immediate images of Belle that could not be dismissed as easily as the others that had been summoned by his friends' teasing speeches. Mark did not notice Shawn's paled face, but Chris did, and guessing the cause as she remembered his lover's nickname, diverted Mark's attention.
"Shawn's grandmother is hardly a girl," she argued. Then picked up a necklace of tiny pearls. "For your Honolulu whore," she held them up against her brown skin where they seemed even whiter and more beautiful, and Mark grinned.
"How about," he offered in return, holding up a gold ring with a single, tiny ruby set in the middle, "for my newest Spanish lover?"
Chris snorted and dropped the necklace back into the stall owner's hands. "How do you Americans put it? Oh yes," she gave a sparkling, fierce smile as full of teeth as that first lascivious one she had flashed on Shawn. "In your dreams, man."
Mark grinned in return, enjoying the flirting. "Only in the best of them, only the best."
As their playful banter continued, neither noticed Shawn fingering the ring Mark had offered to Chris, nor saw him buy it for an exorbitant price, and slip it deep into an inner pocket as an impossible dream. Chris could not read his mind as well as she could read his heart, or she would have known that to Shawn, that ring was to represent the hopeless fantasy of the day when Belle would come to him with words of penitence on her lips, love in her heart and serenity in her eyes, and he would slip a gold band, with a ruby set in the centre so reminiscent of that first ruby that had brought them into such peril on their tropical island, and make his one true love his wife.
Alacazar was a strange building, but Shawn liked it, lunch was delightful, he had found Alice the perfect gift, and Chris's siesta had allowed him to write his grandmother a postcard and post it. Now all that was left to do was find a bar, get supremely drunk and hope the ache of missing Belle in his soul would be soothed by alcohol.
"Brady?" Belle stared across the Loft floor to the couch on which her brother had been sleeping. "What the hell are you doing there?"
"What I'm always doing when you go out looking like that," Brady gestured to his sister's blatantly revealing outfit, "with the boys you know are no good for you."
"Brady, I go out every night," Belle threw down her purse and stretched upwards, her halter top stretching not quite as far with her, exposing a flat stomach that showed no signs of the child she so briefly carried, "with boys you think are no good for me."
Her brother winced. "I know."
"And I know you're not here on the sofa every night," she added, unhooking the clasps of her shoes, and dropping the high heels on the floor as she brushed her fingers through her wild mane of golden hair, releasing pins and clips as she went, "because I usually sit on it while I undo my latest hairstyle."
"I know that too." Another wince.
"Then are you going to explain to me what you're doing on our couch in the middle of the night?" Belle remained patient, she couldn't get mad at her brother when he was trying so hard to be her protector, and she needed one so badly.
"Because you need someone to watch out for you, and I spend every night lying awake in my room waiting for you to come home so that I know your safe." Brady ran a strong hand through his unruly blond hair. "Tink, I know Shawn's gone, but this is not the way to deal with it."
"It's the only way to deal with it," his little sister bit back. "I'm not going to wander around the Loft in a daze just because my lover left me! I will not do it!"
"Tink," Brady stood up, towering over his small sister. "Shawn didn't leave you. You drove him away."
"He ran away," Belle forced tears back, trying to make the anger take away the pain, "he ran away from me and JT and the whole god damned messed up situation, leaving me to deal with it by myself."
"No, Belle," Brady took one step forwards and grabbed her by the shoulders, "You drove him away, and now he's gone, you're punishing him for leaving."
Belle's back straightened, "I'm not punishing him for loving me!"
"Belle," Brady felt the small weight of his sister's body trying to pull away from him. "I didn't say 'loving'. You did."
"Bwady," Mark slurred after his fifth Tequila slammer. "Man, this is go.od stuff."
"You know what's better?" Shawn's voice was almost as incoherent as his shipmate's but not quite, though he was on his sixth shot.
"Wha?" Mark tossed back another drink, avoiding the tequila for a moment as he tried to count his friend's heads, and stared at him blearily.
"Whiskey," Shawn answered slowly, "my great-great-grandfather's," he waved his shot glass in the air, and Chris, almost as inebriated as the two boys, licked the liquor off his wrist as it spilled, "Irish whiskey, on the rocks."
"Ain't got none," the rather surly bartender replied. Though overweight, balding and well past his prime, he had a crush on the young and lovely Christina, and viewed her blossoming friendship with Shawn and Mark as a blight upon his own chances.
"But you should," Chris added in Spanish. "Add it to your stock."
She poked Shawn's arm, and he turned to stare at her. "I didn't know your great- great grandfather was Irish," she stated more clearly than he could have.
"He was," Shawn grinned, "Only he was really Greek, cause my Granda ain't my Granda, see?"
"Nope," Mark burped, "but I'm ready for a woman, how about you Shawnie boy?"
"Not drunk enough yet." He licked the salt off of Chris's hand, chucked down his tequila and sucked the lime quickly, not even bothering to splutter. "Chris?"
The senorita was staring off across the bar. "That bastard!"
Through a drunken haze, Mark managed a "What?"
"Who?" Shawn asked more correctly, and in a slightly less drunk voice.
"My ex." Chris searched for the word then remembered a Janet Jackson song she had loathed. "Honey?"
"Aww, sugar," Mark slung an arm around her shoulders and laid a kiss on her lips. "I knew you'd come round to my way of thinking."
She pushed him back so that he fell off his barstool and hit the floor laughing.
"Who?" Shawn asked again, searching behind the bar for the tequila bottle so that for a moment, all Chris could see was his back in its tight white T-shirt and the back of his legs, in their tight fitting jeans.
"Er." She paused, then caught sight of her old lover once more. "The son of a bitch is my old, American, bad boy boyfriend."
"And the obvious idiot's name is?" Mark asked, pulling himself off the floor with the help of the busty waitress he had flirted with the night before, and who was still distinctly interested. "And who's the very hot bimbo on his arm?"
"He is Eddie J. Wheeler, wannabe singer and all round jerk, but I don't who the girl is," Chris took the bottle of liquor from her friend and poured herself another shot.
"Let's go introduce ourselves then," Shawn moved forwards, feeling as though he was still on board ship, and linked arms with Chris, mostly to keep his balance but partly for show, so that she was forced to leave Mark to the tequila bottle and the busty waitress and confront her past.
"Christina?" Eddie moved forwards jerkily, and Shawn could scent the alcohol on his breath even more strongly than on Mark's. "Is that you?"
"Got it in one, Edward," she snarled, and then turned to stare down at the blue eyed, dark haired girl sitting in the chair opposite to her ex-boyfriend's.
"And who's this?" Eddie, ignoring the intended insult as Chris used his hated full name just as he had used hers, pointed at Shawn.
"Shawn Brady," Shawn said in a friendly voice and then looked past Eddie to the girl. "Chloe?"
"Hello to you too, Shawn D.," Chloe replied, being as deliberately offensive as Eddie had been.
"You two know each other?" Chris was shocked, she thought her Shawn had better taste than to hang around the low life opera wannabes Eddie liked.
"We met in high school," Chloe smirked.
"Unfortunately," Shawn bit out, and wondered if he could legally break a bottle over Chloe's head and stab it into Eddie's heart for hurting all the people they had.
Chloe was staring at him, wondering if she could make him forget about this girl Christina and Belle back in Salem enough to lure him into her bed. "So how are the Merchant Marines? A good escape from that cheap little tart of a girlfriend of yours?"
"Even better as an escape from your kind," there was a red mist in front of Shawn's eyes, and Chris could feel his heart rate increase in the pulse of his arm that she gripped more firmly than ever.
"Christina," Eddie drawled, "I see you found yourself a new piece of meat to hook up with."
"He's no piece of meat, Eddie, he's a real man," Chris snapped back furiously, and then it was Shawn's turn to calm her down. "More than you could ever be."
Chloe caught on to this and cattily asked, "Forgotten Belle already, did you, Shawn? God," she swore, "you two were so high and mighty in high school. The new Romeo and Juliet was what they reckoned you were back then. Well guess what? R & J crashed and burned, and from the looks of you, so did you two."
"At least Belle and I broke up before I started going after people," Shawn's fists clenched, he didn't know how much longer he could keep his temper. "Unlike you."
Eddie jerked his head at Shawn. "You serious about him, Chrissy?"
"As serious as a heart attack," she lied, using one of his favourite expressions. "What about you?"
"I'm just fooling," Eddie answered. "We had a concert here last night, and figured, why not have a fling? So we did. And if you're wondering, she's better in bed than you ever were."
A slow hiss escaped Chris's lips, and she squeezed Shawn's arm until he nearly winced from the pain.
Chloe wasn't listening, but continuing her own fight with Shawn. "Really? Haven't you heard the latest from the Salem Gazette?" Chloe's face was suddenly full of a wide eyed innocence far more dangerous than any straightforward malice. "It seems your little Miss Perfect is pregnant, and even she doesn't know who the father is!"
"You lying bitch!" Shawn's hands reached for Eddie's throat, not Chloe's, because as if by mutual consent he and Chris swapped fighting partners. She got a hold on Chloe's still luxuriant locks and Shawn felt his fingers close around Eddie's flannel shirt with a sensation of pleasure as his right hand balled into a fist connected with the guy's nose.
What should have been a simple bar fight between drunk patrons, Manuel thought sadly from his hiding place behind the bar, had turned into an all out slanging match as everyone in town had shown up to see Christina Milliera slug it out with her new boyfriend's old enemy and the new guy, who incidentally had a very sizeable set of muscles, attempted to murder Chris's old flame. Now her family was taking sides and half were blaming Chris for ever believing that Eddie was ever good enough for her and the other half defending her because her taste in men had so evidently improved since that last disastrous relationship. Barstools were flying, tables crashing over, fists were going everywhere, and Chris had been hacking handfuls of hair off the head of Eddie's new girl, and Manuel couldn't blame her. He only wished he had a bottle of tequila as well as a camera and the drunken American Merchant Marine sprawled behind the bar with him and Rosa, his favourite waitress.
He lifted his head in a moment of calm to see if it was safe to come out yet and was greeted by the sound of smashing crockery. Someone had started on the plates already. Damn.
"One tequila," he muttered, quickly fetching the bottle from one of Chris's uncle's hands before they threw it at another of Chris's uncle's heads. "Two tequila," he added, pouring a second into a shot glass next to the first. "Three tequila!" He gasped as a chair whizzed past his head and threw back the first two shots, holding the third and last tenderly in his big hand. Then as the police entered, looking stern and completely sober, he knocked it back and dove back down behind the bar, yelling as he did so, "Floor!"
It was in Cadiz that the mail finally caught up with the ship, and there were disappointments and elation as letters failed to arrive or came earlier than expected. Shawn, for once, was one of the lucky ones.
"So, Brady," Mark, who had had a single letter from his mother and three from various girls around the world, stared hard at the large package in his best friend's hands, his light brown eyes bright with the excitement of anticipation. "What's in there then?"
Shawn chuckled, the first time Mark had heard him even come close to laugh when he was sober. "Grandma's latest batch of cookies. Why?"
"Just wonderin'," Mark's mother sent him fruit cake that was as hard as a brick, or fudge that had mould on it by the time it arrived. Alice's cookies, on the other hand, in their vacuum sealed containers, were always as fresh and crunchy as they had been when she had first taken them from the oven. They were the envy of the entire ship. If Shawn was ever losing in a card game, all he had to do was put up even a single cookie and it would see the highest bid. They were like gold dust, only better because they were edible.
Shawn grinned and opened a box of oatmeal and raisin ones. "You want one?"
Mark's hand moved so quickly through the air, Shawn didn't see it pass from one place to the next. "Thanks," he answered, through a mouthful of cookie crumbs. "Damn these are good."
Shawn, another cookie in his mouth, nodded. "Says here," he added, glancing down at the rose scented paper his grandmother always wrote to him on, "she won the Salem Bake-Off."
"So it's official, these really are the best cookies in the world!" Mark joked, reaching out for another, this time one with white chocolate and orange zest.
There was a shout that interrupted the laughter and Shawn's reply. "Brady!"
He brushed the cookie crumbs from his fingers and grinned. "Duty calls."
It wasn't duty, however, but Chris who was yelling. She stood on the dock, hands on her hips, and smiled up at him, looking as fresh as the morning sun. "You ready?"
With tired, dark circles under his brown eyes from little sleep, Shawn nodded. She had promised to show him the sites of Cadiz. "Tired, but ready."
"Hey, beautiful!" Mark had followed Shawn up, now he stood with an enormous smile on his face, staring down at the beauty on the docks. "How you doin'?"
Chris sighed, and tossed her dark hair over one shoulder in a gesture of boredom. In her heavily accented English, she replied, "I'd be doing even better if your friend would get down here."
"Shawn," Mark slapped the guy's shoulder. "You got laid!"
Chris spat something at him in Spanish, and Shawn removed his friend's hand from his shoulder. "I did not get laid. I got a friend, and right now, my friend and I are going to see the sights of Cadiz."
"Dude," Mark said more quietly this time. "She is hot."
Shawn glanced down at Chris and then back up at his friend. By Salem standards, she was no better than average, and in Shawn's heart, compared to Belle, Chris was just another woman, and could have looked like one of Cinderella's step sisters for all he would notice or care. "Your point being?"
"You're telling me," said Mark slowly, as if talking to a backwards child, "you don't want her?"
"Get a grip on your libido, Mark," Shawn patted his friend, and ran down the gangway, then linked arms with Chris. "You're beginning to sound desperate!" he yelled, letting Chris kiss his cheek and giving her a slight squeeze of his hand.
"So what if I do?" his shipmate shouted down, "At least I know how to find a woman!"
"And who," Chris jumped in, "is walking away with a beautiful Spanish senorita and who is still on board ship all alone?"
Mark had no answer to that.
"Hey!" He lifted his head when Chris's voice reached him. "Are you coming or are we going to stand in the blazing sun until Gorgeous here turns as black as his hair?"
Shawn laughed as Mark shot down the side of the ship to them. "Aye, aye, el capitan!" he yelped as he ran. He put his very stylish sunglasses on the end of his nose and threw his arms around the shoulders of his two companions. "So where are we going?"
Shawn glanced at Chris and she smiled back. "Well."
Fifteen minutes of walking through the baking heat of Cadiz in the summer, and Mark was sweating, while Shawn and Chris looked as cool as if they were in England.
"What the hell are we doing here?" Mark whined, earning a quick slap around the back of his head from Chris.
"Don't swear," she hissed, "this is the market place, and my baby brother's right over there," she pointed to a small youth with her dark eyes and hair, and the cheekiest grin Mark had ever seen, not having seen Shawn's. She carried on in a light hearted tone, "I don't need him learning American from sailors or swearing scum like you that pass yourselves off as sailors. He knows enough Spanish swearwords already."
"We're here to buy my Grandma a present. I promised her one from every port I stopped in," Shawn explained staring down the busy market street and wondering if they sold jewellery.
"Well I promised my brother I'd leave a girl in every port remembering my name and the tattoo on my ass," Mark shot back, and gave Chris a lascivious look, "so when do we get back to the bar?"
"Four fifteen," she answered swiftly, picking up a cantaloupe and smelling it, then deciding it wasn't ripe enough. "First we buy Shawn's grandmother a present, then we have lunch, a siesta, and a walk to see Alcazar, then we get drunk and Shawn and I drown our sorrows, while you, you American sailor fool, you find a pretty girl to talk to and kiss for a night."
Mark grinned, brown eyes sparkling and hands shoved into his pockets. "Have I mentioned I love this plan?"
"Come on," Shawn muttered, moving forwards, trying to block the memory of stolen kisses in his Dad's old pick up truck, and hide from the pain. "Alice's present is waiting."
Mark stopped in his tracks. "The present is for Alice? As in 'I send my grandson boxes of cookies' Alice?"
Shawn ran an exasperated hand through his dark hair. "Yes, so?"
"If it's for Alice," Mark said confidently, "then it must be perfection. The perfect present for the perfect girl."
Shawn's heart stopped in his chest. It was a silly phrase, but it conjured immediate images of Belle that could not be dismissed as easily as the others that had been summoned by his friends' teasing speeches. Mark did not notice Shawn's paled face, but Chris did, and guessing the cause as she remembered his lover's nickname, diverted Mark's attention.
"Shawn's grandmother is hardly a girl," she argued. Then picked up a necklace of tiny pearls. "For your Honolulu whore," she held them up against her brown skin where they seemed even whiter and more beautiful, and Mark grinned.
"How about," he offered in return, holding up a gold ring with a single, tiny ruby set in the middle, "for my newest Spanish lover?"
Chris snorted and dropped the necklace back into the stall owner's hands. "How do you Americans put it? Oh yes," she gave a sparkling, fierce smile as full of teeth as that first lascivious one she had flashed on Shawn. "In your dreams, man."
Mark grinned in return, enjoying the flirting. "Only in the best of them, only the best."
As their playful banter continued, neither noticed Shawn fingering the ring Mark had offered to Chris, nor saw him buy it for an exorbitant price, and slip it deep into an inner pocket as an impossible dream. Chris could not read his mind as well as she could read his heart, or she would have known that to Shawn, that ring was to represent the hopeless fantasy of the day when Belle would come to him with words of penitence on her lips, love in her heart and serenity in her eyes, and he would slip a gold band, with a ruby set in the centre so reminiscent of that first ruby that had brought them into such peril on their tropical island, and make his one true love his wife.
Alacazar was a strange building, but Shawn liked it, lunch was delightful, he had found Alice the perfect gift, and Chris's siesta had allowed him to write his grandmother a postcard and post it. Now all that was left to do was find a bar, get supremely drunk and hope the ache of missing Belle in his soul would be soothed by alcohol.
"Brady?" Belle stared across the Loft floor to the couch on which her brother had been sleeping. "What the hell are you doing there?"
"What I'm always doing when you go out looking like that," Brady gestured to his sister's blatantly revealing outfit, "with the boys you know are no good for you."
"Brady, I go out every night," Belle threw down her purse and stretched upwards, her halter top stretching not quite as far with her, exposing a flat stomach that showed no signs of the child she so briefly carried, "with boys you think are no good for me."
Her brother winced. "I know."
"And I know you're not here on the sofa every night," she added, unhooking the clasps of her shoes, and dropping the high heels on the floor as she brushed her fingers through her wild mane of golden hair, releasing pins and clips as she went, "because I usually sit on it while I undo my latest hairstyle."
"I know that too." Another wince.
"Then are you going to explain to me what you're doing on our couch in the middle of the night?" Belle remained patient, she couldn't get mad at her brother when he was trying so hard to be her protector, and she needed one so badly.
"Because you need someone to watch out for you, and I spend every night lying awake in my room waiting for you to come home so that I know your safe." Brady ran a strong hand through his unruly blond hair. "Tink, I know Shawn's gone, but this is not the way to deal with it."
"It's the only way to deal with it," his little sister bit back. "I'm not going to wander around the Loft in a daze just because my lover left me! I will not do it!"
"Tink," Brady stood up, towering over his small sister. "Shawn didn't leave you. You drove him away."
"He ran away," Belle forced tears back, trying to make the anger take away the pain, "he ran away from me and JT and the whole god damned messed up situation, leaving me to deal with it by myself."
"No, Belle," Brady took one step forwards and grabbed her by the shoulders, "You drove him away, and now he's gone, you're punishing him for leaving."
Belle's back straightened, "I'm not punishing him for loving me!"
"Belle," Brady felt the small weight of his sister's body trying to pull away from him. "I didn't say 'loving'. You did."
"Bwady," Mark slurred after his fifth Tequila slammer. "Man, this is go.od stuff."
"You know what's better?" Shawn's voice was almost as incoherent as his shipmate's but not quite, though he was on his sixth shot.
"Wha?" Mark tossed back another drink, avoiding the tequila for a moment as he tried to count his friend's heads, and stared at him blearily.
"Whiskey," Shawn answered slowly, "my great-great-grandfather's," he waved his shot glass in the air, and Chris, almost as inebriated as the two boys, licked the liquor off his wrist as it spilled, "Irish whiskey, on the rocks."
"Ain't got none," the rather surly bartender replied. Though overweight, balding and well past his prime, he had a crush on the young and lovely Christina, and viewed her blossoming friendship with Shawn and Mark as a blight upon his own chances.
"But you should," Chris added in Spanish. "Add it to your stock."
She poked Shawn's arm, and he turned to stare at her. "I didn't know your great- great grandfather was Irish," she stated more clearly than he could have.
"He was," Shawn grinned, "Only he was really Greek, cause my Granda ain't my Granda, see?"
"Nope," Mark burped, "but I'm ready for a woman, how about you Shawnie boy?"
"Not drunk enough yet." He licked the salt off of Chris's hand, chucked down his tequila and sucked the lime quickly, not even bothering to splutter. "Chris?"
The senorita was staring off across the bar. "That bastard!"
Through a drunken haze, Mark managed a "What?"
"Who?" Shawn asked more correctly, and in a slightly less drunk voice.
"My ex." Chris searched for the word then remembered a Janet Jackson song she had loathed. "Honey?"
"Aww, sugar," Mark slung an arm around her shoulders and laid a kiss on her lips. "I knew you'd come round to my way of thinking."
She pushed him back so that he fell off his barstool and hit the floor laughing.
"Who?" Shawn asked again, searching behind the bar for the tequila bottle so that for a moment, all Chris could see was his back in its tight white T-shirt and the back of his legs, in their tight fitting jeans.
"Er." She paused, then caught sight of her old lover once more. "The son of a bitch is my old, American, bad boy boyfriend."
"And the obvious idiot's name is?" Mark asked, pulling himself off the floor with the help of the busty waitress he had flirted with the night before, and who was still distinctly interested. "And who's the very hot bimbo on his arm?"
"He is Eddie J. Wheeler, wannabe singer and all round jerk, but I don't who the girl is," Chris took the bottle of liquor from her friend and poured herself another shot.
"Let's go introduce ourselves then," Shawn moved forwards, feeling as though he was still on board ship, and linked arms with Chris, mostly to keep his balance but partly for show, so that she was forced to leave Mark to the tequila bottle and the busty waitress and confront her past.
"Christina?" Eddie moved forwards jerkily, and Shawn could scent the alcohol on his breath even more strongly than on Mark's. "Is that you?"
"Got it in one, Edward," she snarled, and then turned to stare down at the blue eyed, dark haired girl sitting in the chair opposite to her ex-boyfriend's.
"And who's this?" Eddie, ignoring the intended insult as Chris used his hated full name just as he had used hers, pointed at Shawn.
"Shawn Brady," Shawn said in a friendly voice and then looked past Eddie to the girl. "Chloe?"
"Hello to you too, Shawn D.," Chloe replied, being as deliberately offensive as Eddie had been.
"You two know each other?" Chris was shocked, she thought her Shawn had better taste than to hang around the low life opera wannabes Eddie liked.
"We met in high school," Chloe smirked.
"Unfortunately," Shawn bit out, and wondered if he could legally break a bottle over Chloe's head and stab it into Eddie's heart for hurting all the people they had.
Chloe was staring at him, wondering if she could make him forget about this girl Christina and Belle back in Salem enough to lure him into her bed. "So how are the Merchant Marines? A good escape from that cheap little tart of a girlfriend of yours?"
"Even better as an escape from your kind," there was a red mist in front of Shawn's eyes, and Chris could feel his heart rate increase in the pulse of his arm that she gripped more firmly than ever.
"Christina," Eddie drawled, "I see you found yourself a new piece of meat to hook up with."
"He's no piece of meat, Eddie, he's a real man," Chris snapped back furiously, and then it was Shawn's turn to calm her down. "More than you could ever be."
Chloe caught on to this and cattily asked, "Forgotten Belle already, did you, Shawn? God," she swore, "you two were so high and mighty in high school. The new Romeo and Juliet was what they reckoned you were back then. Well guess what? R & J crashed and burned, and from the looks of you, so did you two."
"At least Belle and I broke up before I started going after people," Shawn's fists clenched, he didn't know how much longer he could keep his temper. "Unlike you."
Eddie jerked his head at Shawn. "You serious about him, Chrissy?"
"As serious as a heart attack," she lied, using one of his favourite expressions. "What about you?"
"I'm just fooling," Eddie answered. "We had a concert here last night, and figured, why not have a fling? So we did. And if you're wondering, she's better in bed than you ever were."
A slow hiss escaped Chris's lips, and she squeezed Shawn's arm until he nearly winced from the pain.
Chloe wasn't listening, but continuing her own fight with Shawn. "Really? Haven't you heard the latest from the Salem Gazette?" Chloe's face was suddenly full of a wide eyed innocence far more dangerous than any straightforward malice. "It seems your little Miss Perfect is pregnant, and even she doesn't know who the father is!"
"You lying bitch!" Shawn's hands reached for Eddie's throat, not Chloe's, because as if by mutual consent he and Chris swapped fighting partners. She got a hold on Chloe's still luxuriant locks and Shawn felt his fingers close around Eddie's flannel shirt with a sensation of pleasure as his right hand balled into a fist connected with the guy's nose.
What should have been a simple bar fight between drunk patrons, Manuel thought sadly from his hiding place behind the bar, had turned into an all out slanging match as everyone in town had shown up to see Christina Milliera slug it out with her new boyfriend's old enemy and the new guy, who incidentally had a very sizeable set of muscles, attempted to murder Chris's old flame. Now her family was taking sides and half were blaming Chris for ever believing that Eddie was ever good enough for her and the other half defending her because her taste in men had so evidently improved since that last disastrous relationship. Barstools were flying, tables crashing over, fists were going everywhere, and Chris had been hacking handfuls of hair off the head of Eddie's new girl, and Manuel couldn't blame her. He only wished he had a bottle of tequila as well as a camera and the drunken American Merchant Marine sprawled behind the bar with him and Rosa, his favourite waitress.
He lifted his head in a moment of calm to see if it was safe to come out yet and was greeted by the sound of smashing crockery. Someone had started on the plates already. Damn.
"One tequila," he muttered, quickly fetching the bottle from one of Chris's uncle's hands before they threw it at another of Chris's uncle's heads. "Two tequila," he added, pouring a second into a shot glass next to the first. "Three tequila!" He gasped as a chair whizzed past his head and threw back the first two shots, holding the third and last tenderly in his big hand. Then as the police entered, looking stern and completely sober, he knocked it back and dove back down behind the bar, yelling as he did so, "Floor!"