For nobody else gave me a thrill
With all your faults, I love you still
It had to be you
Wonderful you
It had to be you
- It Had To Be You, Frank Sinatra
The club appeared to be more dignified than he thought. But, that was all it was–appearance, and underneath the varnish of sleek interiors and frail respectability, it was a house of ill-repute in the end. The smell of perfume overwhelmed all else, and past the light, flirtatious chatter at the front lounge, he could hardly call the back rooms anything near innocent. He grimaced to see a few familiar faces. Men whose wives hired him to follow, on account of suspicion of infidelity. Rich, well-to-do men whose money could hardly buy happiness, but could, in fact, buy sex. In his opinion, the worst sort of man.
"Another brandy, if you will," he signaled, sickened by the atmosphere, and swept his hand over his face, despairingly. Where the hell was she?
From the corner of his eye, he saw her slip into the stool beside him, not so gracefully and with a quite audible grunt of indignation.
"What did she say?"
"I didn't meet her," she seethed. "Said she's busy at the moment, though I'm certain she's entertaining a man in there. We will have to wait until she is available."
"Available? Who is she, the Queen of England?"
"No, she is the madame of a sex club," she gritted between her teeth and raised a finger. "A brandy, please."
Grinning, he raised a glass in her direction. "Good of you to join me."
She let out a haughty scoff and simply sipped her drink. "I told her I'd be here earlier, so she must be doing this just to vex me."
"How do you even know a woman like that?"
"Through an unfortunate mutual acquaintance," she answered blandly, with a hint of accusation. She finished her glass (even her manner of drinking seemed practiced and refined!) and slid it to the end of the bar. The bartender stared, unamused, to which she responded with an innocent smile.
"What exactly is it you do that you have such acquaintances?"
"Debt collection of sorts." She raised her finger again. "Another glass, please."
It made him cruelly wonder how many drinks it took to make her spit out something useful.
He sighed. "Look, if we're going to do this, I need to know these sorts of things."
"Why? I did not hire you to interrogate me."
"No, you didn't," he said wryly. "I don't know why you hired me at all. It seems you are perfectly capable of getting the girl yourself. It makes a man wonder."
"Keep wondering then. But you are free to leave whenever you want. I don't have a gun to your head. Yet, you're still here because you want to find the girl, maybe even more than I do."
"It seems you know of my indiscretions, so it's only fair I know one of your own."
Slamming her glass on the counter, she turned to him and regarded him with unadulterated loathing.
"Indiscretion?" she spat. "Fine. I thought it a wise idea to marry a man after the war. But, the cruel man that he was, he took everything from me, leaving me to rot. So, not very wise in the end, was it?"
"Your husband. Where is he now?"
"Gone."
He paused. "…Any children?"
"Gone," she whispered, and the slew of hatred was wiped away, replaced with a poignant melancholy, her face contorted with a pain he knew he was not meant to see.
Looking away, offering what little privacy he could, he handed her his handkerchief and waved over the bartender (who was, at this point, severely irritated by these two patrons).
"Two more, please."
It was then when she accepted his offering, the handkerchief like an olive branch, and it was in her gentle manner that expressed her rarely seen gratitude.
Belle Watling arrived the moment they finished their drinks. In one hand, a lit cigarette. In the other, a wad of cash which had wordlessly explained her disheveled appearance.
"Scarlett! How nice to see you!" she lilted.
"Belle! You're doing well, I presume?" Scarlett replied, her cheeriness so clearly artificial that he wished to laugh aloud.
"Is this your fella?"
Her smile dropped and only then did he express his amusement.
"No," she said shortly, glaring at him.
Before approaching the record player, Belle chuckled and brought the needle to vinyl, at a pace so leisurely, and unhurried, that it was at complete odds with his companion's impatience. After a series of muffled scratches, the soft tune of a french horn began to sound, interwoven with the brush of piano keys and a sweet ensemble of strings.
"Oh, I do love this one," she drawled and took a drag of her cigarette. "Me and my ex-husband danced to it the day before our divorce."
"Look, Belle–"
"Why don't you two dance?" The woman laughed gaily, interrupting Scarlett whose blatant displeasure took form in her downturned mouth, struggling to hold back unkind words.
"I don't dance."
"Oh, honey, you were made for dancing. Now go, before I forget what I was gonna say to you," she demurred, accompanied by a sickly sweet smile.
After a few curses left her mouth, she grabbed his hand and led the other to her waist, before settling her own upon his shoulder. Swaying lightly to the music, she did not look up at him once, her eyes fixed upon some point in the distance, listlessly. As if one glance at him would scathe her.
Such a mood did not suit her, nor the music, he thought, and drew her closer, an action as natural as breathing. With this movement, he hardly saw her surprise for his head was thus riddled with an ache, more profound and enduring than the one he suffered earlier. His own voice echoed in his mind, malicious and arrogant yet with a vitality he hadn't known in several years.
"One-hundred-and-fifty dollars in gold for Mrs. Charles Hamilton!"
His form staggered and Scarlett held him by his arms, anchoring him for the quiet moment in which he recovered.
"You look unwell, Mr. Butler," she murmured, and he could not tell if his condition concerned her.
"It's nothing. Just this migraine I get, once in a while…"
No other comments were made after his brief spell, though she ceased her self-imposed rigidness and observed him with much sharper scrutiny. At first, he had thought he was mistaken, but she seemed to be a fraction of an inch closer, her eyes shed their usual glint of distrust, and her body leaned into his gentle touch. It must have been the music that softened her demeanor. The sultry jazz crooned as they swayed together at a pace so familiar, he wished to not part from her at all.
Though the music came to an end, the bass reverberating one final hum, and Belle clapped, appraising the two with blatant amusement. Reluctantly, he pulled away from her and watched his own hesitation reflected upon her face.
"Bravo! What a show!"
"We've danced Belle, now spill it," she demanded, abandoning all pretense of civility.
The woman merely chuckled and rose from the tufted lounge chair from which she sat.
"You," she pointed at him. "Are you the girl's father?"
"No, I was her guardian," he swallowed, feeling his voice catch in his throat. "Before I lost her."
She raised a brow as if to say "You lost her in a sex club?" and he felt the urge to deny and defend himself, though that would lead to certain questions of where he lost her, and he found himself growing ashamed at the answer, for it was no better than what she implied.
"I see," she paused to press the white stump into the ashtray. "Well, she was here, but not for long. She was such a small slip of a thing, I didn't catch a glimpse of her until they walked out the door."
"They?" he pressed.
She stared at him for a moment, pondering. "Yes. They. She was with a man. One of my regulars until he stopped showing up one day and boom, there he was, with a child. In a place like this, who knows what that sort of man could do with a little girl?"
Belle did not try for a moment to hide her accusing tone.
"This man, do you know where he could be?"
"My bet is Atlanta. He has business there. What kind of business, well… it's not a thing for a lady to tell."
"Thank you, Belle, that is all that we need."
Pulling a bill out of her pocket, she slammed it on the bar counter and walked off, to which he followed, though the sound of the Madame's voice halted his eager step.
"Careful, sir. That woman will take you where you don't wanna go."
He hung unto the foreboding of her words, which seemed to be the verbal manifestation of his own doubt. Though he still had all his limbs and very little would deter him from his track of willful defiance to so clear a danger.
"I'm sure I've been to worse places. Good night."
Pushing through an arriving party, he rushed past the glimmering lights, the businessmen, the tacky attempts of glamour and mystique, and towards the exit that lay on top of a flight of stairs. There she stood, unmoving, with whitened knuckles clutched unto the railing, her other hand cradling the wall, pressing her entire body into the solid, sturdy form. As he drew nearer, he saw her trembling.
"Scarlett?"
"I'm fine." she insisted, unconvincingly.
For the next few seconds, she did not move and far from the plush velvet and dim sensual light, she seemed but a girl in vixen's cloth, her pained, vulnerable face incongruent with the fishnet and rouge. He knew her mind was not at the present, far and distant as she gazed solemnly at the descending steps. He approached her, a tender hand upon her shoulder.
"Here, hold onto me. We'll walk down together."
She said nothing, but the strong, unrelenting grip on his hand told all of her anxiety without words. She clutched at it as if she were drowning and he a mere piece of wreckage upon forceful waters, her despair inexplicable to him, yet he asked no questions.
"I slipped," she whispered, "I nearly fell down…"
"Hush, we are almost at the last step."
Guiding her till the very end, they alas reached the sidewalk, lingering in each other's touch for a brief moment before she pulled away, embracing herself tightly. In a second, it was as if her fit had never happened for her shoulders straightened and the trembling ceased and she was once more that hardened woman that had first approached him.
"Let's go."
He knew his response was of no significance as she ambled away with that same admirable resolve, shunning her moment of weakness without a second of reflection.
And like a fool, he followed.
Author's Note: Here is a brief summary of events so far to clear up any confusion:
After a (thus far) unnamed incident involving "the girl", Rhett suffers from spells where he hears snippets of memories that do not belong to him, yet seem familiar. Scarlett enters and offers him a chance to find this girl, which in this chapter, is revealed that he lost when he was her guardian. As Scarlett's unbothered facade begins to break, she offers hints of her past to an unwitting Rhett. Now, Belle leads their search to Atlanta, where they hope to find answers.