Page 24 of Cruel Games

I shot him the fakest, plastic Barbie-doll smile I could muster as I shoved a towel into the highball glass I just cleaned. “It’s not your money I’m worried about, Charlie. It’s your ability to drive home to that wife of yours who you think I don’t know about.” I glanced pointedly at his left hand, where the telltale pale shape of a very much missing ring still circled his second to last finger.

He had the decency to blush as he tossed his card on the bartop and mumbled things he thought I couldn’t hear.

Fucking bitch.

Buzzkill.

Interfering whore.

He’d just as soon kill me as tip me if given the chance, but Charlie and I had an agreement of sorts. I didn’t open my mouth about his extracurricular studies in the bar, specifically the one-on-one sprints he ran in the bathroom with whatever floozie was desperate enough to get railed ten feet from a urinal. And in return, he didn’t hassle me when I cut him off.

He knew better than to try that shit with me. The other girls might put up with it, but he knew what I was capable of.

He used to haunt theDevil’s Lair,about two miles further downtown, back when I worked there. That is until I stabbed a man through the center of his fucking nasty ass hand when he dared to grab me over the bar and try to take what wasn’t his.

Working atSinner’s Slumson the Dread River wasn’t too taxing. The clientele wasn’t the upscale shit I was used to, but their money was good. I didn’t care who paid me. As long as they kept their hands to themselves and paid their tab at the end of the night.

Charlie didn’t linger at the bar when I handed him back his card. He signed it without arguing about the automatic gratuity I added to the bill, too. And when another man sat down to take his place, I started the same old song and dance all over again, fawning over them, supplying them endless drinks, playing therapist to some of the most fucked up individuals I’d had the misfortune to ever meet.

Sometimes, even the darker clientele came in and sat down at my bar.

Tonight, one such man sat alone in the corner of the bar, his back against the wall, facing the room like he was preparing to fight his way out of a den of snakes. Those sharp eyes were dark and ominous, but I’d bet they didn’t miss a thing. He scanned the crowd while he sipped on the only drink he’d ordered that night–a boring-ass bottle of beer. Not even an import, either. It was the sort of swill you saw rednecks drinking at mountain parties when they were seventeen and had to pool summer job money to buy as much beer as possible to impress their friends.

Though his clothes and the way he carried himself didn’t suggest he lacked for cash.

“Hey,” a voice yelled from my left, startling me out of my deep thought, “another beer here and a margarita for the lady!”

I turned around, back to playing wind-up circus whore forthese drunken trash pandas, and plastered on my fake smile once more, letting the strange, mysterious man slip from view.

Thirteen million drinks later, we closed up shop, and I slung my bag over my shoulder and trotted up the steps and out the door. Good thing about working this new job was that people didn’t seem to mind when I slipped out unannounced after closing. As long as I got my shit done and nobody complained, they let me be.

After my second shift, I wasn't even assigned a barback. The boss figured out I knew what I was doing, so he gave me what I asked for: autonomy and peace.

And now, it was time to recharge and repeat it all over the next day.

I waved at the bouncer as I slipped out the front door and onto the still-busy street, headlights bathing me in a constant on-again, off-again glow of white, yellow, and occasionally blue. A few straggling people kicked out of bars for last call meandered drunkenly up and down the sidewalks, mostly keeping to themselves as they tried to find another place to serve them, or their homes. A few even tried hailing cabs that would never come. It was too late to get a sane person to take you home in the River District.

Only place worse than this was South End.

But I wasn’t scared. I knew enough to survive in this little slice of the world. After all, this was where I ended up when I left home and turned my back on everything I’d ever known.

“Your father’sbeen dead for a year now, Ivy. It’s time to move on.”

I stood in my father’s study as men my mother had paid filed in and out with his belongings, one after the other, giving no care to anything he’d ever loved or cherished. It was as if they were erasinghim, taking him away for good, and with his things went memories that I’d never get back.

I clung stubbornly to a book he’d often left sitting on his desk, next to a notebook filled with strange symbols and words that didn’t make sense. I found the notebook in the fireplace the night he died and stuffed it under my mattress. And now, my mother was determined to take the rest of him and make it disappear, too. The book was one he used to read to me at bedtime—A Little Princess. It told the story of a girl who came from riches and lost it all, only to find, years after her life changed, that she’d been wealthy all along. She went on to help people lesser than her with her wealth and never forgot those who stayed with her in her lowest moments.

I used to tease him, insisting that he’d never lose his fortune. That I’d never have to worry about that kind of life because he would never leave me.

And now look at us.

He was dead, and I was alone, save for a mother who didn’t give two shits about her child now that she was grown. I could stay or leave; she’d likely never notice the difference. It was all the same to her once she started to drink.

“You’re not taking this book,” I spat at her, determination scrunching my facial features as I fought her the only way I knew how. “It’s mine. I’m keeping it.”

She stared at me for a long moment before deciding that it wasn’t a battle worth fighting and turned her back to me, pointing things out to the men across the room who awaited her orders. “Take the old stack of encyclopedias and the globe in the corner. I want nothing left of that man when you’re done.”

He’d built his empire from the ground up, and now my mother was determined to slowly but surely turn it into something unrecognizable. She would run it into the ground in her quest for pretty things and fake friends who admired all the ‘things’ she had.

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