Closing time. I sat at the bar, sipping my scotch, waiting for security to get all the drunks out of the club. My head was somewhere up in the stale cigarette smoke, which lingered near the ceiling like fog. She approached me from behind, stood at my side and playfully nudged my shoulder with hers. “Where have you been all night?” she asked.
“If I knew you were looking for me, I woulda made myself easier to find.” I nudged her back and smiled. I had no idea she was even in the club. It had been a busy night. She didn’t come in early, otherwise I would have spotted her, which meant she came late and had to wait in line to get in. All she had to do was drop my name to bypass the crowd, but she didn’t. You had to love a dame like that. “Have a seat. Cool your heels for a while. Pick your poison.”
She scanned the rows of bottles from one end of the bar to the other, then quickly decided on a gin and tonic. I went behind the bar and mixed the drink, then placed it in front of her before returning to my seat. We clinked our glasses.
It was about three months prior that she’d walked through my doors. She wasn’t your run of the mill club chick getting wasted on a Saturday night. Nightclubs weren’t her thing. Her girlfriends were on a bar hopping campaign and she was conscripted for their mission.
When I bumped into her at the bar that night, it felt like Cupid stuck me with everything he had in his arsenal. We talked to each other as if the crowd didn’t exist. The drunks stumbled past us and the typical Saturday night drama unfolded around us, but I was too engrossed in our conversation to care.
I introduced myself late in the conversation, and before she could do the same, I was whisked away by one of my bouncers to address an emergency near the kitchen. Meanwhile, she disappeared with her girlfriends. Probably off to another one of the dozens of other gin joints in the area.
As the weeks turned into months, I started losing any hope of her wandering through my doors again. And just when I stopped hoping, there she was. We exchanged the obligatory pleasantries, then made small talk for a while. When our conversation came to a pause, she hit me with the news: “I’m moving out to New York tomorrow.”
I’m sure the smile on my face couldn’t mask my disappointment. I could sense that she also wished things could be a little different. She grabbed a cocktail napkin from the bar and a pen from her purse. After carefully writing her name and number on the napkin, she put it in my hands.
I tried reading her name, unable to pronounce it at first. She looked into my eyes, told me her name and repeated it slowly. “Don’t worry,” I told her, smiling, holding her fingers in my hands. “I won’t forget your name.”
“This number will be good for a few weeks. I know I’ll be in a different time zone, but I won’t mind staying up for your call.” She smiled, kissed my cheek, stepped back and looked at me before slowing turning around and walking out the door. I watched as she rejoined her girlfriends outside. She looked back one last time, waved and disappeared.
After turning back around on my stool, I poured myself another drink. I thought about what might happen if I dialed her number. The worst case scenario was love, which was something I couldn’t afford to fall into. Especially with a girl in a different time zone.
Maybe it was a good thing that she was moving away–it helped me to see things in Technicolor. I had business to run. A crew depending on me for work. What was I going to do? Fly back and forth across the country and play the sap for some dame I barely even knew?
I looked up at the ceiling. The fog-like mist of stale cigarette smoke was gone, and my feet were once again firmly planted to the floor. After lighting up a cigarette with a match, I watched the flickering flame for a moment before setting the cocktail napkin on fire.
Tags: love · nightclub
