Robin Wasserman - Wrath

“Twenty minutes. That’s it.”

Kaia clicked the phone shut, cutting off his laughter. So, new plan: two guys in one night. She’d double-dipped in the dating pool before, but this time felt different.

Kaia pulled out onto the road, turning toward Powell’s dingy side of town. She refused to let herself slip into some kind of juvenile relationship, imagining that she and Reed were “going steady”-it was a slippery slope and, before you knew it, she’d likely be sucked into a downward spiral of gooey love poems, Valentine’s Day candy, pathetic pop songs, and dithering about whether “he loves me” or “he loves me not.”

That was unacceptable, and even if she didn’t particularly want to see Powell tonight or suffer through his groping fingers and pompous Brit wit, she would, anyway, just as a reminder that she was free. Kaia had never let herself be obligated to anyone-as far as she was concerned, it was a step away from ownership, and no one owned her. No one ever would.

“Now that is a fine piece of ass!” The second-string point guard leaped out of his chair and pushed his way to the edge of the stage, waving a wad of dollar bills in the air.

Adam looked around the table searching for a bemused expression to match his own, but saw only naked desire in his teammates’ eyes. So what was wrong with Adam? Three half-naked women dancing onstage a few feet away, their perfect bodies gyrating to a hard, driving beat-and all he could do was stare into his glass and wallow in his own pain?

“You’re pathetic, man!” one of the guys complained, clapping him hard on the back. “Stop sulking and look where we are.This is heaven .”

Heaven, or Mugs ‘n’ Jugs, a triple X strip club on Route 47 that promised Live! Nude! Girls! and failed to card even its most obvious underage patrons. Adam had made the traditional pilgrimage out here for his sixteenth birthday, but hadn’t been back since.

Now he remembered why. Sure, a few of the girls were hot, parading across the stage in their barely-there costumes, this one a tiger-lady, that one a vampiress, all of them flashing the same fuck me look at their loser clientele. But once you tore your eyes away from all that bare skin, you couldn’t help but notice all the depressing details: the worn-out speaker system, piping the same five songs on a maddening continuous loop; the overpriced drinks and underpaid waitresses; the middle-aged businessmen who’d snuck away from their dreary lives to spend a few hours pretending that the strippers were performing just for them, that their bored come hither expressions were more than just business.

“Why’d you drag me here?” he complained, shouting to be heard over the loud techno beat. “I thought we were just going to shoot some pool.”

“What are you complaining about?” the center asked. “Look around you and tell me this isn’t better than pool.” He looked up at the waitress, who’d stopped at their table to clear their drinks, and was leaning so low across Adam that her bare midriff brushed his shoulder. “Hey, baby,” the center leered, and pointed toward the stage. “Why aren’t you up there with the rest of the hotties?”

Adam cringed, but thankfully, the waitress ignored the idiot. She turned to Adam instead. He cringed again.

“Hey, sweetie, why so glum?” she asked, stroking her finger across his jawline. “Don’t see anything you like?”

Adam took a deep breath, almost choking on the heady mix of smoke and cheap perfume.

“It’s not that,” he stuttered. “I’m… uh…”

“Distracted,” the waitress guessed. She slapped a small glass down on the table and poured him a shot. “It’s a girl, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s-” How to answer that? He couldn’t get his mind off a girl, yes, but which girl? The one he wanted to kiss, or the one he wanted to throttle?

“It’s always a girl,” the waitress said knowingly. She poured a second shot, then lifted the glass herself. “She’s not worth it, kid. You’re too young for that face.” She squeezed his cheeks together and gave his face a gentle shake, like a grandmother doting on her angelic little boy. Then, in a decidedly un-grandmotherly move, she wrapped his fingers around his glass, clinking hers against it.

“To forgetting,” she toasted, and downed the shot. She looked at him expectantly, and so he tipped his head back and dumped the drink into his mouth, trying not to choke as the cheap tequila lit a fire down his throat.

“You’re still frowning, kid.”

“I-”

“Let’s try this.” And the waitress put down her tray, grabbed his face with both hands, pulled it toward hers, and kissed him. Hard. Fast. Wet. Sloppy. And incredible.

She pulled away, and Adam just gaped at her, dazed, as the warm tequila buzz spread through his body and the cheers and hoots of his buddies beat dimly against his ears.

“There, that should do it,” she said, using her thumb to wipe away a lingering smudge of lipstick on his lips, just as his mother had done when he was a child. “Now enjoy the show.”

“ That was fucking unbelievable,” the center said in a low voice.

“You are officially the luckiest guy in the world,” the point guard added, back from his failed trip to the edge of the stage.

Adam tried to smile as his buddies clapped him on the back and roared with approval. A couple years ago, this whole scene would have been a dream come true. But he wasn’t that guy anymore. Not even a hot kiss from a hot, half-naked woman could change that. The kiss just made things worse; he was ashamed to be there, because he knew Beth would be ashamed, if she ever found out-if she even cared.

“Woo-hoo, baby!” the center cried, waving a fistful of cash at the blond bombshell who was sliding up and down a metal pole a few feet away. “Bring it on!”

Adam sighed and closed his eyes. If he couldn’t leave, he could at least pretend he was somewhere else, with someone else. He’d gotten good at pretending, lately; real life was so much easier to handle when you just ignored it.

Kaia tipped back her head to catch the last few drops of liquid in the glass, then sucked in an ice cube. She needed something bitingly cool to distract her. Sitting this close to Reed, with a table keeping their bodies apart, was driving her crazy.

She’d met him at Guido’s as planned, and they were sharing a free pizza before making their escape. She of course hadn’t mentioned anything about her unplanned pit stop on the way. Not because he would have had any right to know, she reminded herself, and certainly not because she felt guilty-it just wasn’t worth the trouble. She’d met Powell at his apartment and used his desperation as leverage to achieve an unprecedented goal: open windows. Usually obsessively paranoid about keeping every moment of their encounter shut off from the public view, Powell had let himself be cajoled into pulling up the blinds, giving Kaia her first ever look at the view from his apartment. It was, as she’d expected, just as squalid as the apartment itself. Then came the true triumph: persuading Powell to open the sliding-glass door at the back of his bungalow and actually take her outside, if you could count a five-by-five-foot fenced-in square of weeds and gravel as “outside.”

They had stood for a moment at the threshold gazing out at the claustrophobic patch as if it were the Garden of Eden and they were considering a rebellious return, and then Powell had taken her hand and led her into the not-so-great outdoors. It was dirty and uncomfortable, and something about the fresh air or the fear of discovery had made Powell more insatiable than usual, nearly endangering her twenty minutes-and-out plan, but it had been well worth it. She’d talked him into breaking his own rules, just for the privilege of being with her, and there was nothing sweeter than that. Or at least, that’s how she had felt until Reed had greeted her with a kiss, fully unaware that he was getting used goods, and her victory began to feel unsettlingly hollow.