Kristin Hardy - Hot Moves

“Honey, there’s nobody like the McMillans. They’re a force unto themselves.”

BRADY AND MICHAEL STOOD on the threadbare carpeting and looked around the Odeon Theater. The seats had been upholstered in plush red velvet some seventy-odd years before. Now the worn fabric was faded to a rusty dun color, mottled with stains. Overhead arched a trompe l’oeil ceiling, bordered by gold-leafed carvings. The stale air smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.

Michael scanned the rows. “Don’t really want to think about what’s on those seats.”

“Given that the last movie they showed here was Horny Coeds Going Wild , that’s probably smart.”

“They all come out, first thing,” Michael decided.

“Probably smart, too.”

“It’s a great space. The question is, how do we turn this into a brewpub?”

Brady began to amble down the aisle. “Same way we did with the jail and the Lincoln School. Think outside the box. The two floors above here will be the hotel. This is the common area. We add a bar at the back, take out a lot of the seats and put in tables. Leave in the box seats.”

“And what, show movies here, too?” Michael followed Brady to the stage.

“Naw. We’re already doing that at Suds n’ Celluloid. We need to do something else with this.”

“Such as what, idea man?”

Brady boosted himself up onto the chest-high wood platform. “I dunno.” He stood staring around, hands in his pockets. “We’ll figure it out.”

“It’d be nice to figure it out before we pop a couple million buying and renovating it,” Michael said dryly.

“Yep.” He could see it, Brady thought, even through the shabbiness. It had been built in the heyday of the thirties movie palaces, with the sweeping curves of gilded wood, the opulent carvings, the private boxes that rose along the walls. High overhead soared the crenellated wood arch that framed the stage. Heavy gold velvet curtains, now falling apart under their own weight, hid the wings. He could see it cleaned and painted and polished, hear the laughter and the buzz of conversation as the tables of diners held their beers and looked up at…

What?

“We’ll figure it out,” he said again.

At the sound of a throat clearing, they both looked up to see the seller’s agent standing at the top of one of the aisles. “Have you gentlemen seen everything you wanted to see?” she asked, making a show of checking her watch. She had better things to do at eight o’clock on a Friday night than show real estate, her posture clearly telegraphed.

Brady and Michael glanced at each other and nodded. “Yeah, I think so,” Michael said. They started back up the aisle.

Outside, the air was warm in the last light of a summer evening. “Where are you parked?” Brady asked.

“By the Cascade Brewery,” Michael said, naming their flagship brewpub on the other side of the downtown.

“Me too.” They ambled along to turn onto Front Street. “We’ve got a great entry area,” Brady said. “Classic old-time theater. We keep that the same. Maybe have someone in the ticket booth to take people’s names.”

“Stuck out there in the middle of that coved entry area? Is that going to be practical?”

Brady shrugged. “We find a way to make it practical. It’s like the Lincoln School, we keep as much of the vibe as we can. Make up sheets that look like movie posters advertising the specials and seasonal beers, mix ’em in with pulp movie posters, sheets pushing whatever the entertainment is.”

“Yeah, whatever the entertainment is,” Michael echoed with a sidelong glance at him.

“You can’t push creative brilliance,” Brady said mildly.

Michael laughed. “I’ll remember that. Lindsay keeps telling me we’re nuts.”

“The woman’s going to be giving birth to your kid for the third time—”

“Kids,” Michael interjected. “Twins, remember?”

“Kids. And she says we’re nuts?”

“She says the hormones make her forget what labor’s like.”

Brady snorted. “It’d take a lot more than hormones for me.”

“You’re right about the property, though, it is a great property. Not that it shouldn’t be, for that price.”

“Hell, we convert the levels above the hotel floors to lofts and offices, we can probably make most of the mortgage off the rents.”

“Possibly.”

Brady shook his head pityingly. “You’re a pessimist, Michael.”

“And you’re way too much of an optimist.”

“One of my many fine qualities.”

“It’ll cost to renovate the office space, too, you know,” Michael reminded him. “We won’t get to it right away and there’s no way we’ll rent them all.”

“That’s okay. We’ll start small, give the place a chance to get hip, generate some buzz.” Brady grinned. “We can put signs up by the bar, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’ Hell, I’d live there.”

“You’d live anywhere that was close to your beer.”

“You know, that’s not a bad idea. I could read it bedtime stories before I went to sleep.”

“There’s something twisted about you,” Michael muttered.

Ahead of them, the broad swath of the Willamette River bisected the city on its way to join with the Columbia. The lights of the Hawthorne Bridge glimmered in the fading light. On the broad sweep of the waterfront park that paralleled the riverbank, a crowd of people were gathered. Music floated across on the night air.

“Oh, gee, let me guess,” Michael said, “another festival.”

“The joys of culture. Maybe we’ll be lucky and find out it’s a beer festival.” Brady hooked his hands in his back pockets.

“You really are an optimist.”

“They’ll have food, anyway. I’m starved.”

“You just ate dinner two hours ago.”

“Exactly. Time enough to get hungry again.”

It wasn’t about eating, though, he saw as they crossed the street to skirt the edge of the park. It was about the sound, the motion.

It was about the dance.

Moonlight and Tango read a banner. Curious, Brady wandered closer.

“Thinking about auditioning for ‘Dancing with the Stars’?” Michael asked.

Brady grinned. “Never know. I might need a backup if the theater doesn’t work out.”

Piano and strings, the slow, insistent thud of percussion. The exotic rhythms of the music whispered of passion, of dim, intimate cafés where couples embraced in the dance. Paper lanterns dangled from the trees. Ahead, people clustered around a spot in the open, watching. And beyond them, he glimpsed motion, color—a couple, dancing.

Something about the music intrigued him. Something about it had him wanting to see more.

“We don’t have all night,” Michael reminded him.

“Relax, will you? You can head out, I’ve got my truck. I want to see this.” He ignored Michael’s grumbling and moved closer. And when he got near enough to look past them, he saw.

She wore red, a narrow dress slit all the way up the thigh on one side to reveal a long, sleek leg jackknifed up to the hip of her partner. A matching red blossom was tucked into the dark hair gathered at the nape of her neck; her back, her arms were naked.

Brady swore that his heart stopped, or maybe it was just the music. When she moved again, with an almost catlike grace, he gulped oxygen out of self-preservation with the same rush of adrenaline he felt when shooting the rapids in his kayak.

He stared at her as the pair moved through their intricately choreographed…seduction. It wasn’t one of those artsy dances with all the feathers and floaty dresses. Dark and driven, it was a dance of lust, pure and simple. The woman prowled around her partner—her lucky, lucky partner—with a sort of predatory sexuality, every line of her body, every movement eloquent of heat and demand, every glance one of temptation.