Best Served Cold

She could tell he didn’t recognize her—his eyes, bleary with alcohol and the late hour, had a difficult time focusing on anything for more than a moment. And even if he was sober, she could tell they wouldn’t have looked above her chest.

She recognized his hands, first: slightly more liver-spotted, the sprinkled wiry hair a lighter shade of white, but familiar in their look, their feel, their weight. In another lifetime they’d been so constant, she’d hardly realized how closely she’d memorized them. By the time she made her way up to his face, her stomach had already begun to clench.

“This one right here,” he said, that hand of his on the small of her back, guiding her through heavy wooden doors and into the dark recesses of his hotel room. It was an added bonus that this was where he’d taken her; he was only in town briefly, just passing through. No possibility of another chance encounter, his ghost reaching out through the foggy past again.

“Wow,” she murmured, keeping her voice at a husky whisper in the hopes that her natural falsetto could remain unidentifiable. “This place is just as nice as it looks from the outside.”

“You’ve never been?” He asked, unfurling the cashmere scarf from around his neck, too drunk to smooth out the messy peaks it created when it dragged across his still-thick silver hair. “I don’t usually make it this far north, but when I do, I always try to stay here.” He leaned against the wet bar, appraising her for a long moment. “The view is incredible.”

She smiled, hoping it came across as demure and flirtatious to effectively conceal the urge to grimace. Her work had become complicated this evening, the ease with which she usually manipulated these situations already fading into something more complex: tinged with urgency, anxiety, and above all, anger.

“Are you going to fix me a drink?” She asked, studying his face closely for any sign of a reaction. He remained stoic, pleased; unphased by the words that he had spoken to her so many times all of those years ago.

“What’s your poison?” He asked, lucid in a way only a seasoned drunk can be after hours of drinking.

“Scotch with water,” she said. On some level she wanted him to pick up on her hints, to tease the past out of him, if only for the validation. She craved the knowledge that all that had happened was not for nothing; that she was not so meaningless, so invisible, that he couldn’t bother to remember his own callous destruction. “Scotch with water,” he used to always say, even as he saw her reaching above the bar to grab his favorite bottle, because he liked to feel like he was calling the shots.

“Ah,” he said, his eyebrows disappearing into his hair. “Good looks and better taste.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” She asked. She sunk into a winged chair, not adjusting the sleeve of her dress as it slid over her shoulder and down the length of her arm. She could hear his sharp inhale from across the room.

She thought about him as he kissed her neck: the way he used to sit at her bar for hours, ordering watered-down scotch that he covered with a napkin once an hour to smoke cigars on the patio. He didn’t care for any of the other girls – he came only when she was working, arriving an hour or so after she clocked in and leaving as she began putting lids on bottles. At first, it was flattering to have the attention of an older, wealthier man, though the gleam faded as annoyance took hold and, eventually, fear. She began to look over her shoulder as she walked to her car at night, wondering if he would slink around a corner in a cloud of cigar smoke. She had considered having management politely ask him not to return, but as her apprehension became more apparent, his gratuity became more generous, the cash he slid under his empty glass doubling, then tripling, then quadrupling as he sensed her weariness.

She was a young mother, only nineteen. His tips went from being a pleasant surprise to keeping her afloat some weeks; ultimately, she’d come to rely on his visits to the bar to pay for doctor’s appointments and car payments. Realistically, he’d probably prevented her from having to pick up a second job. And what harm was it, really? A few hundred dollars on a slow Wednesday night was certainly worth being ogled at by a distant acquaintance with too much time and far too much money. She denied his offers to put her through school, to buy her a new car, to put her up in a nicer apartment; those willing acceptances would have made her accessible to him, a direct recipient of his insidious generosity. She couldn’t help it if he left cash for her, though, and it would be foolish not to take it once he was gone.

His hands stayed across the bar. They gripped cold, sweating barware. They held up his head when he’d crossed the threshold from buzzed to drunk. They pulled crisp piles of cash – always cash, never card – from his smooth leather wallet. She watched them for months as she counted change, shook cocktails, polished wine glasses. She began to let her guard down around them. And one night, as she took the recycling around the back of the building and slid a cigarette into her mouth, the hands gripped her arms, hard, and pressed her back against the wall.

“Let’s have another,” she said, peeling his body away from hers where they lay on the uncomfortable hotel sofa. “I want to know more about you.”

He paused his insistent plight against her throat, his breath spilling hot across her face as he pulled away. His eyes were so unfocused she wondered if he knew where he was anymore. When she first started doing this—back when everything had first been taken away from her, when she needed a way to live— she had felt a twinge of pity, here and there. She wondered if there wasn’t a better way to make a living, one that didn’t require deceit and moral transgression. But at the end of the day, she was so like many others: a woman who needed a way to survive.

“Scotch again?” He asked, clearly unenthused but still hooked enough to go with whatever she requested.

“Of course,” she said.

“You’re going to make me wait forever, aren’t you?” He asked, and she stilled at the potential double meaning in his words. For a quick moment, she wondered if he did recognize her after all of these years, after all; but when his hip clipped a side table as he wove towards the bar, she saw once again that he was too intoxicated to have any sort of hidden agenda.

“Not if you play nice, baby,” she said, hating herself for it.

As he fixed another round of drinks, she began to grow antsy. It was well past two a.m., and she knew the longer he remained conscious, the slimmer her chances of accomplishing her goal would be. By the slowing of his gait and the clumsy way he pawed at her skin, she knew he was about one drink away from unconsciousness. The question was how quickly she could get him there.

When he sat down beside her again, he moved his hands to her legs—those fucking hands, always those hands. She lifted her drink and swallowed until she could see his aging face distorted in the warped, empty glass.

“Your turn,” she said and pressed his cup to his lips, relishing in the way he coughed as the liquid poured too quickly down his throat.

“Are you trying to kill me?” He asked, his smile lopsided. She laughed in response.

“Let’s go to bed,” she said.

She watched his body splayed across the sheets, belt unbuckled, shoes still on. His wallet was heavy in her hand, the same fine leather he used to smack against the marble bar counter. She usually swiped watches, wedding rings, heavy gold cuff links—losses that would never come to fruition on the off chance a wealthy older man would try to pursue police intervention. This time, though, this man, was different. She didn’t just want to give back to herself; she wanted to take from him. She wanted him to feel it.

Those years ago, when he’d pushed her against the outside wall and kissed her, she’d shoved him away and told him he would never have her. She’d banked on losing his weekly stipend of tips, the small luxuries the extra cash flow had given her. What she hadn’t banked on was the depth of his pride, the weight of it compelling him to ruin her the only way he could: telling a lie that would take away her job, and with it, her whole world.

She lost her job the very next day. The next month, with no income and no savings to her name, she lost her daughter. And with nothing left, she lost her moral compass. But she was young, beautiful, and had nothing left to live for—only the desire to take in the same way that she’d been taken from.

He gave a stuttering snore from the bed. She opened his wallet to find it was filled to the brim with cash, an amount so obscene only a person who could afford its loss would keep on hand. She stared at him for a long while, weighing the possibility of killing him against the possibility of getting caught. Finally, she slipped the cash into the pocket of her dress and threw the wallet against the wall, biting her fist to suppress the urge to scream. Nothing felt better, even with his money flush against her body.

She turned the lights off to ensure he stayed asleep. As she crept past his body, his mouth fell open in sleep. She leaned over him and studied him, the miserable planes of his face. She spit into his sleeping mouth. And then she left, walking heavily through the halls of the hotel as if burdened with limbs weighed down in a nightmare.

In the parking garage, she smoked a cigarette with her windows rolled up and counted bills. She opened her glove box and retrieved her little black book, filled with the names of bars and clubs, places she made sure to not return to in case her tricks had been pointed out. She wrote the name of the hotel over and over again until they looked like another language, and his name until her eyes were too full of tears to see. Then, she fixed her makeup, shoved the book where it belonged, counted out $20,000 in bills, and put the car in drive, feeling no better than she had before.