Page 14 of Café Diablo

“Happy Birthday, Edwin,” she says quietly, her whole presence a gale of wind that’s hovering over my body—then gone.

She steps back, her bruised mouth open, her brown eyes hooded in the lack of light. She looks hot and sex-flushed and I know she’s pleasured me beyond compare, and it’s my turn to return the favor—but then, she turns and walks away. She struts down the patio rooftop in those heels and pencil skirt, her hands floating at the sides of her hips with sticky alcohol on them. She doesn’t look back as she walks around the corner and disappears from the dark corner where I’m left.

For a whole minute—maybe longer—I can’t move. I don’t even know what to think. I just stand there completely stunned. I look down at my feet to the abandoned handcuffs and the overturned drink. Black alcohol pools at my toes next to the oversized glass and it looks like a crime scene, as if something dark and depraved has happened.

And God, it did.

And like an asshole—I just let her walk away.

7

Olivia

Itell Connor and Arie I’m done for the night and that I’m going to go call myself an Uber. Connor presses me, wanting to know where his brother is, and I flash my naked, uncuffed wrists with a shrug.

“I’m not your brother’s keeper,” I say hotly, avoiding Connor’s eyes as I slip out the back, the sticky nectar of the Café Diablo drink still clinging to my arms, and the hot taste of Edwin still in the back of my mouth.

I take the elevator down to the main level, and instead of going to the parking lot and calling a ride, I walk out to the beach in the dark.

The tide is high and the black sheet of shimmering moonlight looks like an onyx desert that could swallow me. I sit down in the sand, and thousands of tiny grains attach themselves to my hands and arms from the sticky drink. I lie back and feel the soft cool grit pillow me, the stars above vast and infinite. My arms and legs stretch wide and I flap them, creating a sand-angel on the seashore like a child. It feels silly and liberating.

I’m drunk.

My head and arms and body are all buzzing.

I stare up at the peak of the building, where I was only minutes ago and my mouth salivates. My lips recount the raw and meaty feel of Edwin between them—thick and velvet and throbbing. God, that was hotter than I expected. I knew he’d be shocked. Hell, I was shocked at myself for even doing it. But the sound of his gasps, the taste of him thickening between my teeth, and the way that hand ghosted against my check and in my hair—reverent, like I was a goddess he wasn’t sure how to be in the presence of.

I don’t know if it’s the alcohol, or the lust, or if there really was something intimate passing between us. It felt more weighted than I want to admit. Sex has a weight to it, if you let it.

I’m still so hot and turned on that I have to dig my feet and fists into the cold sand, digging past the soft surface to where the ground is firm and damp. I dig till my fingers and feet and fists are completely submerged in cold, hard ground. I breathe deeply, trying to calm the match that’s ignited between my legs, still flickering with heat and aching desperately for me to go find that beautiful, powerful, maddening man that makes my pussy swoon and mourn the lack of him.

I’m drunk—definitely drunk and sentimental. It’s a lovely place to visit—hopeful, romantic, wish-drunk and idealistic. But hopefully, my sanity and wits will return in the morning and I’ll remember that one-night things are nothing more than one-night things. Reality has proven that enough times to be scientifically foundable … founded… funded?

Yes, drunk.

I unearth myself from the sand and walk toward the water, washing off my hands and arms and calves. I feel achy and powerful—proud to have taken him like that, proud to have unraveled him so perfectly, proud to have stolen his breath and given him a sharp stunning moment of ecstasy. It’s almost poetic. Jeez, drinking really does make me sentimental.

I bathe my knees and don’t worry about my skirt getting wet. Thinking about tonight makes me want to paint. Though, I’m reluctant to be hopeful again.

I have the brushes and the canvas and the paints, all of them are back at my tiny house, but that spark—that prick of inspiration—I keep dancing around it like an elusive flame. It keeps flickering in and out of my vision, but never stays long enough for me to capture it and to turn it into paint and canvass.

I’ve started a hundred paintings in the last few months, but I haven’t finished a single one of them. Ideas. Beginnings. Flirtations. The flash of a spark, but nothing to hold on to. None of them go further than an initial sketch and exploration. They’re all frustration and confusion and lack of direction, leaving me angry and hollow.

I’ve painted my whole life, but I never knew you could get sad and depressed when the muse is not in your corner. All through art school I learned discipline, technique, composition … and how to finish the assignment and push through the momentary artist’s block. But that was all for the sake of learning and building my skills. What happens when the flame dies and you have the knowledge and the skill and the technique but everything falls flat and lifeless and uninteresting? At least on the canvass. My life is fine. I’m not depressed or any of that jazz. I’m just … frustrated. I haven’t found my next series, my next body of work. It’s like the air and the ocean—large and everywhere and somehow truly unfathomable.

Did I say I was drunk? Yes, definitely. I’m obviously in a sad-sack look-at-how-I-can’t-make-art-right-now self-pity cycle. I kick up the water and let it spray over my humid body like a soft salt-water baptism.

Something about this night feels hot and intimate. The chill of the water-spray soaks into my skin and the spark of possibility feels like it is dancing over the night’s fragile wind. I want to trust it, to believe it might lead to something solid and possible. But like every painting I’ve started, I know it’s just a tease. Tonight—Edwin—it feels more powerful and vibrant because of the alcohol and the heat and the crisp ocean on my calves and body.

All momentary.

All fleeting.

Tonight was a wonderful fantasy.

But tomorrow, I’ll go back to my life, and Edwin will go back to his life as well. This is the sort of hot, intoxicated fun that flames brightly, and simmers out in the morning. In my drunken state it feels important and paintable, but as drunken states are, one shouldn’t put too much stock into their shimmering certainty and penchant for making one delusional. I’ve had enough warm nights and heat in my breath to know the sting of tomorrow’s sun will be perfectly sobering.

I turn back to the shore and pull out my phone, calling myself an Uber. I walk back up the beach and grab my sand-strewn heels. Iwantto paint. It’s like wanting to breathe when you’ve been under water too long. It’s powerful and desperate. But I know—like this night—I will get no more than a single gasp of breath, just a small spark of heat that is better left abandoned and forgotten.

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