AN: This chapter is fairly long. It's also, um, perhaps controversial. Also, it's been prepared on my desktop computer which I never use and hate, so you'll have to forgive me for any errors made and not fixed. I have no word processor with a spell checker yet. And I miss my laptop already :( So anyway, reward me for updating without my laptop and making it a nice long chapter. :) The comments I've gotten have made me realize things that I didn't explain well and some parts of the story have already been changed because of it, so keep it coming.
The Funeral of a Good Girl
By - TempestRaces
Chapter Thirty - Of Choices and Dripping Sin
Vince wandered around the parking lot of Hector's club, making the rounds talking to people he knew outside. And avoiding going inside the building proper. He was putting off bumping into Tempest. Literally, he figured, because he felt like they were very likely to bump heads and lock horns if they met up after what had been said at races. He knew he was still pissed off, and he couldn't imagine she was over anything either.
He'd love to be able to tell anyone who asked that he'd enjoyed going to Edwin's after party with Dom and Letty, but he couldn't. Not if he was going to be honest at the same time. His best attempts to allow himself to simply pick up a girl for the night and take her someplace reasonably out of the direct path of traffic to get it done hadn't amounted to more than angry self admonishments that that was exactly what he should do. What he had done was drink too much and look very pissed off with the world instead. A fact that both Dom and Letty had gone out of their way to point out at regular intervals.
So now here he was, stranded by his drunken condition where there was no place else he'd like to be less. He liked Hector, and often had a good time when invited to the other racer's club. But not when he was ripping for a fight that would preferably take place with someone who was herself likely present and loaded enough to make a fight between the two of them very, well, tempestuous. And, as he'd already decided that fighting with Miss Trouble again was out, that left the first male who looked at him sideways open for the ass-kicking he couldn't deliver to her ass. Don't think about her ass! he admonished himself. But Mia's car was most definitely still parked around the back of the club, and that meant that the second half of his team was all still present and accounted for.
With a shrug he decided he couldn't fill the whole stay at Hector's in the parking lot. Sooner or later he was going to have to go in and see what Dom and Letty were doing. With a sigh he headed to the door and pushed it open. The interior was darker than the night outside and his eyes didn't adjust to the dim lighting right away. It took him a moment to find his friends. The male portion of the team was sitting together in a back wall booth. The women were no where to be seen. He strode over to where Leon, Jesse and Dominic were sitting together, drinking Corona.
"Hey Dawg, how's it goin'?" Leon asked Vince when he had made his way over to the side of the table.
"It's goin'." Vince's answer was surly and delivered with a frown.
"Didn't enjoy Edwin's as much as Dom and Letty?" Jesse asked.
"I guess you could say that."
"You gonna sit down with us, or stand there and glower all night long?" Dom asked. He had a funny feeling he knew where things with Vince were headed. Straight to hell in a handbag. A handbag belonging to a certain Canadian chick who was presently doing a dance with his sister and girlfriend guaranteed to send Vince into a tailspin. A loud, violent tailspin, complete with yelling, cursing and perhaps even physical violence, if he looked up to see it.
"I dunno how long I wanna stay here brotha. It's gettin' late."
"You aren't in any better shape to drive than me'n Jess," Leon said.
"Well, no shit," Vince growled. "Dom's the one who's on sucker duty tonight, and I'm tellin' him I wanna go home. Soon."
"Damn, someone's in a bad mood." Jesse stood up. "I'm gonna go get another beer. Anyone want anything?"
Everyone declined and Jesse wandered off.
"What'd you do wit' the girls?" Vince asked Dom and Leon.
"They're all dancing with a bunch of Mia's friends," Dom said. "I gather they actually got Mia tipsy earlier."
Leon grinned. "Yeah, watchin' her shoot that tequila did my heart good."
"Tequila?" Vince asked.
"Yeah, Temp wouldn't take no for an answer. Mia told me later she felt like she had a little devil on both her shoulders, and she had serious concerns for what happened to the good one, but that she was likely tied up in the back room of some dark, abandoned warehouse someplace."
Even Vince couldn't prevent the laugh that escaped him. He didn't call her 'trouble' for nothing. He scanned the crowd, looking for her when Leon brought thoughts of her to the forefront of his mind. He couldn't pick her out right away. He found that strange, given she was still dressed from head to toe in white, and was one of only about three white girls in the whole place. As he was looking over the mostly female, dancing crowd, three girls took to the poles at the front of the stage. They were trying to get someone else to join them, and weren't having much luck.
At first, that was. When the succeeded to drag their victim into their midst, Vince wished very much they hadn't. They had just pulled a laughing Tempest and Letty up onto the stage to take the two extra poles.
"I got no clue how to do this," Tempest told her new, Latina friend. The only reason she had for even being willing to get up on the stage and attempt pole dancing for the first time was her extremely drunken state. That, and the fact that Letty was willing to try too. The fact Dom and Letty had shown up without Vince helped too. No way would she have ever decided to swing around a pole for the first time in front of him.
"I'll show you," the girl who had dragged her on stage answered. Her name was Karli and she was easily as drunk as Tempest, which was to say she was loaded for bear. Earlier in the evening Karli had confided that she was a part time stripper-though she preferred the term exotic dancer-to make money to pay for college. Good money, at that.
"Ok, but I'm too drunk to be graceful or co-ordinated." She felt like she was twice as likely to fall flat on her ass as manage to do any kind of graceful movement.
"Just watch." With a motion to the DJ, the girl had him spinning 'Pour Some Sugar on Me' by Def Leppard. "Ok, take the pole in the crook of your arm, like this," she illustrated her point by doing as she was explaining, "and walk around the pole, slow and sexy, like this."
Tempest watched for a second before copying the motion. She saw Letty doing the same out of the corner of her eye. When they looked at each other they cracked up laughing at what they were doing. Neither could believe they were on a stage parading around trying to look sexy with a stripper pole.
Tempest watched as the next thing her instructor did was stood behind the pole, grabbed it at chest level and leaned back, pressing her lower body into the pole as she arched her back over, head going toward the floor. She copied her again, still trying not to crack up laughing at the embarrassed absurdity of it all. The third move they did as a group was to stand in front of the pole and slide down to the ground, still holding the pole with a hand over their heads. As they started to get more athletic, the sense of absurdity started to fade, being pushed out by the all out concentration needed not to fall flat on one's ass on the stage.
"See, you're pretty good."
"You haven't done anything tricky yet," Tempest roared back over the music.
"Ok, you want tricky, try this!" Karli grabbed the pole up high over her head and with a little jump up, wrapped one leg around it, sticking the other out straight. She used her upper body to execute a spin around in a three sixty around the brass pole. "Try that."
"Here goes nothing," Tempest answered, laughing. She grabbed and jumped, managing the spin only a little shakily.
"See, it's not so hard. Now, slide down, and end up in the splits if you can do 'em." Karli illustrated her instructions by doing what she wanted her 'student' to do.
Lower lip caught between her teeth in concentration, Tempest copied the move, ending up on stage in the splits. She followed the given instructions to haul herself back up to standing using the pole as the song changed to 'Living Dead Girl' by Rob Zombie. Tempest couldn't help the laugh that overtook her. She was learning to pole dance to music from an album titled 'American Made Music to Strip By.' Instead of feeling foolish as she had expected she would-and had started out feeling, for that matter-she felt very sexy. It wasn't like she was actually stripping, after all. She was just dancing with an accessory. The only thing that would have made the whole thing better for her would have been if Vince had been there.
She knew it wasn't well done of her, but a large part of her wanted to rub his nose in the fact that had he just been a bit smarter, she would still be acting like she was his. Thinking how pissed off he would be with himself over it all if he could see her was like salve to her abused ego. But because he wasn't smart, they were done and she was free to go home and perfect her stripping technique with anyone she might chose. Then Karli showed her another spin, one where she ended up hanging upside down using the grip of her thighs up high on the pole to remain in position and the only thought she had left was of not falling off the pole onto her head.
After a few more very athletic moves involving her sweaty body and a brass pole, not to mention spinning around said pole and sometimes so fast she felt like she must be a blur, she decided that she'd had enough 'fun' for one evening. "I gotta get outta these lights and get a glass of something cold," she told Letty.
"I hear that. Let's go for a drink and a walk."
With a nod, Tempest agreed and the two climbed down off the stage and headed for the bar.
"Is that what I think it is?" Dom asked Vince as he watched his girlfriend and her friend being hauled up on the stage. The stage where the stripper poles were.
"If you think Letty and Tempest just got up on the stage where there are poles for stripping, than sure, that's what you think it is," Vince growled.
"Do you think they're gonna strip? I really didn't think Letty was that drunk," Dom said.
He sounded genuinely curious, and almost intrigued, Vince thought. He was ok with the fact Letty might be considering taking all her clothes off in front of a room full of strange, drunk men? "I wouldn't put it past either one of 'em. But the first piece of either of their clothes that comes off, I'm gonna go up there and haul her out over my shoulder. I don't wanna see either one of them stripping in here. I mean, I don't ever wanna see Lett without all her clothes on."
As the girls started to dance, each of them fell silent, each lost in different thoughts.
Blood on her skin, dripping with sin. Living dead girl.
The lyrics of the song summarized how he felt about 'Trouble' neatly. The way she was able to move her body fully clothed and make him think of things he wanted her to be doing without any at all was staggeringly easy. It was like she was dripping sinful thoughts straight into his mind when she moved.
When the girls finally got off the stage, Vince allowed himself a sigh of relief. All their clothes had stayed where they belonged. He watched them head to the bar for drinks before they started to walk the perimeter of the room, drinks in hand. Mia found them about half way around the room, laughing at them for what they'd done.
They took it good naturedly, laughing together before allowing Mia to drag them out onto the dance floor again. Much as he tried to stop himself, he couldn't stop watching them dance together. Couldn't stop himself from comparing the movements of one girl to the other. Mia danced well. Likely even as well as Tempest. But there was an added element of something to the way Tempest moved. A layer of bad girl who knew she was bad and knew what she was doing to the people watching her. But it was just a shimmering element to her. It didn't completely mask the good girl inside. And she managed to do it all without even half as much self-consciousness as the darker girl. The way she slunk back into the girl behind her, a girl she hardly knew at that, and moved in unison with her was like liquid sex, right there on the dance floor. He knew he'd never, ever, see Mia dancing all over another girl like that. It wouldn't matter if the other girl was Letty. Mia just didn't have it in her to go that far.
He wasn't sure what he was thinking. He wasn't sure if he was more intrigued by the total innocence of Mia's movements, or the purposefully enticing movements of the curly haired witch he still wanted as much as his next breath of air, no matter what he told himself every few seconds. He moved to get up out of the booth. He wasn't sure what he thought he was going to go do, or where he thought he was going to go, but he had a moment thinking he couldn't sit still for even a moment longer. But then he sat back down with a huff. There was no where things could go between her and him that wouldn't get ugly. He settled back into the seat instead, deciding to watch them dance instead of getting into the fight to end all fights with Tempest in the middle of a crowded bar. Instead he watched her wave her arm in a controlled circle over her head to the beat of 'Cowboy' by Kid Rock.
"I can't dance any longer," Tempest told Letty as soon as the current musical selection ended, starting to slur her words slightly from fatigue and drunkenness. "Too tired."
"I hear that. I feel like I've been on my fuckin' feet all day. Let's go find the boys and get outta here."
"Ok, sounds like heaven. I just gotta go the bathroom before we leave. Never make it home before I need to go."
"Ok. I'll start roundin' up Mia and the rest of the team."
"Meet you back at the booth in five."
Letty waved her understanding of the plan before heading toward where she had left her boyfriend. Tempest headed down the hallway which led to the ladies room, a place she had been repeatedly over the course of the evening.
Letty slid into the booth beside Dom and sat down with a weary sigh. "I'm so wrecked right now. I don't know how I'm still standin'. And I really don't know how T is, 'cause she's so drunk." Letty laughed. "She's straight up hilarious though. Did you see her on the stage?"
"Yeah, I saw her," Dom answered, grinning at his very inebriated girlfriend. "Saw you too. You wanna show me some of those moves again later? Up close?"
"Maybe," Letty said, grinning cheekily.
"Where is T, anyway?" Leon asked.
"She had to go to the bathroom. She's gonna get us here when she's done and we're gonna go home."
Tempest walked down the hall toward the bathroom unsteadily. When she got in the bathroom stall she closed the door and sat down before she could fall down. "Why do you do this sorta thing, girlie?" she asked herself rhetorically as she leaned her head onto her palms and propped her elbows onto her knees. She was so drunk and tired, falling asleep where she sat had a lot of appeal. Only thoughts of conning her way into a soft place to sleep with Leon got her up and mobile once she was finished. There was no way she was sleeping on the couch. Not as miserable as she was going to feel tomorrow morning.
She finished up, washed her hands and let herself out of the bathroom. She could only surmise that both her drunken state and tunnel like focus on getting home and finding a bed made her miss the man standing in the shadows of the men's room door.
Well, she certainly missed him at first. Once he had grabbed her by the tops of her arms and pushed her into the wall, he was hard to continue to miss. "What're you doin?" she asked. She tried to make it sound angry and cocky. She wasn't sure how well she succeeded. But she knew somehow it was important to keep her cool and her confidence.
"You looked like you needed a man while you were dancing out there, little girl. You looked like you needed to find someone with the right equipment to grind on. So I figured I'd step up to the plate to do the job, since it don't seem like none of those guys you showed up with is gonna do it." He fisted a hand in her hair to hold her head steady and lowered his mouth toward hers.
"Get offa me," she answered and began to struggle. "Why is it every man thinks all a woman who isn't interested needs is one demonstration of how 'great' he is in the sack to change her mind? Some girls just don't want dick, asshole." He wasn't holding her in the most careful fashion, and she cursed herself as ten times the fool for getting so inebriated that she wasn't able to take advantage of his uncareful stance. She tried to raise one leg to knee him where it would bring the most effect, but she couldn't keep her balance on one foot. When she tried she shifted sideways and the grip her assailant still had on her hair stung so bad that her eyes started to water. Her pain tolerance wasn't so hot when she was so drunk, she was finding out the hard way.
"Play hard to get, really. I like it like that. I'll still show you in the end."
He was drunk, she realized. She could smell a strong drink on his breath. "Pal, this is going to be something you really regret doing when my friends wonder why it's takin' me so long to take a piss and they come lookin' for me. Just let me go and they don't need to know what you almost did."
"I don't think anyone's comin' lookin' for you or they would have already. But that's ok sweet thing, 'cause I'll show you a good time instead."
His mouth finally landed on hers. She tried to flip her head to the side, but he tightened his grip on her hair so she couldn't move her head at all. She kept her mouth firmly closed and tried to shut her brain off so that she didn't have to feel his free hand starting to wander and his unwelcomed mouth on hers. It wasn't quite that easy, but she just kept focusing on keeping her mouth sealed and telling herself that surely Letty or Leon would realize she'd been gone an uncommonly long time just to use the bathroom. Surely Leon or Jesse would get worried that she'd passed out in the can sooner or later, and come to check on her.
"Gimme some of that sugar, sweet thing," the drunk man crooned against her lips.
"Ain't you figured it yet? There ain't no sugar here for you, you arrogent prick. Get the fuck off'a me before my boyfriend comes down here. He's not the sharin' type." She threw the mention of a boyfriend in on instinct. Maybe if the creep thought he'd get his ass kicked by a jealous boyfriend he'd fuck off.
He pushawed. "If he wasn't much for sharin' and was in the building, than why'd he let you dance like that in front of the whole place all night long, little girl?" He didn't wait for her to answer, but crushed his mouth against hers again instead.
She slowly became aware of his hand moving down her body. Sure, one of her friends should come looking for her sooner or later. But would it be in time to stop him from the plan he was clearly planning to perpetrate against her?
"What the hell is keeping Tempest so long?" Dom asked the group in general. He'd been around drunken party goers sober long enough. He was ready to go home and go to bed. Letty doing a rendition of her pole dance for him in private before they went to sleep optional.
"You know how females are in the bathroom Dom," Jesse answered with a grin.
"As long as we're stuck here waiting for her highness to finish with her throne, I need another beer," Vince told them all with a sneer and got up out of the booth. He stalked up to the bar and ordered his drink gruffly. He was unreasonably pissed off with everything. He was pissed off about what had gone down at races between him and Tempest. He was pissed off about the joke Leon, Jesse and Tempest had perpetuated against him earlier in the evening. He was pissed off about watching her dance like she was having sex with various girls and the odd guy on the dance floor all night. He was just plain pissed off. And now, because of the troublesome female at the center of most of the causes of his anger, he was pissed off again, because she was keeping them waiting when all he wanted to do was go home.
He turned around to face the room, holding his beer around the neck of the bottle as if he was trying to choke the life out of it and leaning back on the bar on his elbows. His tired, annoyed gaze scanned the room, starting over at the main entrance and slowing going around the perimeter. At the end of the visual sweep, directly opposite the main door on the opposite wall was the hallway to the bathroom. He looked down the murky hall and looked back the other way. It registered there was a couple making out down the hallway, but that wasn't uncommon in a club like Hector's.
As he watched his team joke and tease each other in the booth he fumed. Because of her, he couldn't even have a good time. He was too wrapped up in all the anger and all the frustration over how things were between them. Where the hell is that god damn woman? I wanna go home, so isn't it just fuckin' like her to keep me waitin'. He glanced down the hall again. He realized with a start that the girl making out with the guy down the bathroom hall was dressed from head to toe in white, and had a pair of mile high flip flop shoes on her feet.
Almost in a daze, he started across the room toward the dim passage. He had to get a closer look to prove to himself that on the same night she'd dropped him, she had decided to make out with another guy. He had planned to stop at the mouth of the hall, once he had managed to confirm to himself that it was her leaned back against the wall. And he did pause there for a moment. That was when he got really angry. So she was too good for a casual relationship with him, but not for some loser that she had just met in a bar? She wasn't too good to allow some stranger to kiss her. To slide his hand down the top of her pants in the hallway of some second class bar. Where did she get off?
He started to walk down the hallway, stopping only when he was right beside the pair. "What the fuck are you doin'?" When he growled his question, the man who had been kissing Tempest looked up in shock, as though the question had been directed at him, and not the fickle bitch he was still leaning into. When the man's face wasn't blocking his view of hers, he saw there were tears in her eyes that she was stubbornly refusing to let fall, and that she had managed to bite her own lip so hard it was bleeding slowly out of several crescent shaped marks along the lower surface. She wouldn't look at him. It was like she refused to meet his eyes. Once again he realized he had placed a blame onto her shoulders she was totally undeserving of.
The reality of the situation was so incomprehensible to him that it took him several seconds to get his brain around it. Tempest hadn't been making out with another man. She had been accosted in the hallway on her way back from the bathroom. And they had waited almost fifteen minutes for her to come back, even though they knew it didn't take anything near that long to use the washroom and walk down a hall. And he had thought about just walking away in anger, thinking she was participating willingly with the other man. His anger at himself multiplied his anger at the unknown man in the hall until he didn't know how he didn't have his hands around the other man's throat.
"What the fuck is it to you, pal?" the other man finally found his voice, and grunted out this question with it. As the last time he had seen the group of the girl's friends, the large man in front of him now had been no where to be seen, he didn't think there was a connection between the two of them.
"What the fuck is it to me?" Vince asked. He said it to himself in a low tone. The tone seemed to belay curiosity. What it really belayed to anyone who really knew the large man asking the questions was an intense white hot anger that was more likely to end with someone's death than with any other conclusion. "What the fuck it is to me is that the woman you're forcing yourself on is mine, and you're forcing her to kiss you in the club of a very good friend of ours. What the fuck it is to me is that the woman whose pants your hand is in is mine." His vehement claim of ownership came out without conscious thought. She could yell at him over it later if she was so inclined. For now he had a point to make, and that point was that people didn't mess with what was his.
"The fact the club is owned by a good friend is the sole reason why I'm not going to kill you in it tonight. Because I don't want to have to ask Hector to help me clean up the mess your blood would make, and have to have him help me get rid of your body after I ripped you into pieces with my bare hands. So if you get the fuck outta here right now, and never come back, you'll live. If you chose to hang around here and make something outta this," Vince chugged the rest of the beer in the bottle he was still clutching around the neck, before smashing the bottle against the wall, rendering jagged glass edges all around the center and fashioning a very brutal, impromptu weapon, "I'm gonna make sure it's the last thing you ever make into somethin'. We clear?" Only knowing the last thing his woman needed on top of everything else was seeing him spill the blood of another human being until that person's heart stopped beating stopped him from using his homemade blade. After the violence she had already suffered, the last thing she needed was to see him perpetrate more. The very real threat of it would have to be enough.
"Yeah, I hear you," the man stammered before darting unsteadily down the hall.
Vince watched him go, and started fighting to get his breathing under control. Started the struggle to get his temper in check. Once the other man was out of sight he dropped the glass he still had a stranglehold on. He was so wound up angry he had to physically force each of his fingers to open and allow him to drop the symbol of his almost uncontrollable rage and penchant for physical violence to the ground. He almost couldn't believe that he had managed to make what she needed from him come before his need to bleed the man who'd dared to trespass against his woman dry. "You ok?"
She nodded yes but didn't speak.
"You sure?"
She shook her head no. "Not really," she whispered. She finally looked up at him. "Nothing like that ever happened to me before. I don't know what to do about it. I don't know what I'm supposed to think."
"That that guy was an asshole. If it'd make you feel better I can still catch him and beat the shit outta him."
She seemed to give his offer some serious thought before answering. "I just wanna go home," she told him. A tear finally broke free of her lower lashes and rolled down her cheek. "I just wanna go home."
"Aw, come 'ere." He pulled her into his arms. "I got you now. He ain't comin back Trouble. And if he does it'll be the last thing he'll ever do."
She didn't doubt it. Much as he'd tried to hide it from her, the rage on his face had been plain to see. She allowed herself another moment of leaning on his strength and breathing in his comfortable and familiar smell before she tried to do anything else. She wanted to calm down and find normalcy before seeing any of her friends again. "Let's just get outta here." She seemed to pull herself together fractionally. "When did you get here anyway?"
"With Dom and Letty." He kept his arm around her shoulders and started to head for the booth where he'd left his friends.
"I didn't see you before now."
"I stayed outside for awhile. Knew some people."
It forced a small laugh out of her. "Where don't you?"
He chuckled. "Around this scene, not very many places."
She stopped walking and due to his hold on her he stopped too. She looked up at him where he stood, still several inches taller than her despite her platform sandals.
"Wha'?" he asked, puzzled as to why they had stopped moving while still inside the hallway and no where near their friends.
She lifted one shoulder in a flippant, noncommittal answer before standing on her tiptoes and pulling his face down the short distance needed to allow her to press her lips against his. His shock lasted only a fraction of a second, maybe less, before he felt into what still felt so right between him and her. His hands on her hips, hers on his shoulders, her body fitting against his like it was moulded to rest there. Her hand sliding around to tangle in the hair on the back of his head. His sliding up along her side to cup the side of her face. The fingernails of her free hand scraping gently against his nape, hinting of other places they could be scoring. His hand sliding from her hip to the small of her back to hold her closer to him. Nothing having relevance in the world beyond the sensation of her heat melting into his. When he finally gained enough sanity to stop trying to fuse himself with her in the middle of a still crowded club he rested his forehead against hers. He felt like he could cheerfully drown in her. The whole situation made him so angry, he almost had to go find the man he had let escape to have someone to take his frustrations out on. She broke up with him. What was she doing kissing him like she couldn't wait to get him alone after what she had said earlier in the evening? "What the hell was that?"
"You mean other than incredible?" she asked on a breathless laugh, her hands locked together behind his neck.
"Yeah, other than that."
"Right," she said, on another shrug. "Something I chose because I wanted it. Something that felt right."
"It's a little confusin' to be dropped-to quote Leon-like I was hot, and then kissed like your starving and I'm a snack later the same night."
"Yeah, sorry 'bout that." She grinned at his words, couldn't help herself. Dropped like he was hot! Did we get our ego bruised tonight, Darling? When she thought about why she'd up and kissed him again after giving herself a strict hands off policy, she sobered. "Someone tried to take that from me. My right to chose what I want. I guess I just wanted to prove to myself that when I want to give it to someone, it's just different, and it's still my choice who I actually enjoy myself with."
He sighed. It was pretty hard to stay mad at her after that admission. He couldn't hold back from the instinct telling him to kiss her again so he did. He was still angry. But now he was dealing with being both angry, and some other emotion he couldn't quite place. He wanted to be able to make everything better for her, but there wasn't any way for him to accomplish it and the feeling of helplessness frustrated him. "He was an asshole, Trouble. You didn't do anything wrong. And I'm assumin' that he didn't really get to take anything from you other than what I saw." If he had, he'd be dead and it didn't matter how long it took to track him down.
"No, he just tried to make me kiss him back. He didn't get very far with," she stammered to a stop, unwilling to continue. "With the other stuff he tried. I was in the washroom for most of the time I was gone. He only had me stopped there for two or three minutes before you came along."
"Good."
"I'm so tired right now that I don't know how I'm still standing." She sighed. "Too bad I doubt I'll unwind enough to sleep tonight anyway." She looked up at him with a rueful smile. "I know from first hand experience how hard it sucks to be awake to see the hangover comin'."
"Once we get home you'll be ok. Let's go before Dominic sends an away team. He was getting to the end of his rope when I left him to get my beer."
"Ok, let's go." She allowed him to start walking, taking her with him. "V?" She stopped walking again.
"Yeah?" he asked, and a hint of his impatience at being stopped again when all he wanted was to be out of the bar and on their way home showed through in his tone.
"Don't tell them what happened."
"Why the fuck not?" He was obviously angry with her request. "They should all know so they can keep an eye out for him if he comes around you again."
"After the scare you gave him?" she asked, both her eyebrows arched in disbelief. "Please! We'll never see him again. I'll be surprised if he ever grows enough balls to so much as darken the door of this place again. 'Sides, if they didn't get a good look at him, how would they ever know him even if he was walking right behind me?"
"It don't seem right not to tell them."
"It don't seem right to tell them, to me. It'd just worry Jesse for no good reason. There's nothin' anyone can do about it now that hasn't already been done. Unless we're gonna go find the guy and call a cop to charge him with assault or whatever the fuck, what else can anyone do about it?"
"Find the fucker and cut his nuts off is the first thing that comes to mind."
"And you could still do that without telling the rest of them. You're the only one, aside from me, who knows what he looks like in the first place. Let's just say you got impatient to get outta here and came lookin' for me and found me asleep in the bathroom. You woke me up and waited for me to wash up so I didn't fall back asleep."
"You'd rather be embarrassed by that stupid story than tell the truth?"
"I'd rather be a bit embarrassed by the stupid story than worry Jess and Leon and ruin the rest of the night for everyone, yes. So can we drop it at that, please?"
"Fine! Have it your way. Still think it's stupid," he finished in a mumble.
"Come on Slick, let's go home."
They finally made it out of the hallway and started toward the table.