Thirst Trap [https://i.imgur.com/oxezwME.png]

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The song hiding in the background changed from Down She Goes to The Faithful Come. The former was not about a sinking ship, and the latter very much did concern the clergy, in more ways than one.

“To be fair, I didn’t—hic—I didn’t mean to break into prison,” Rocco said.

At that, the woman sitting by Richard’s side grunted, pushed her empty glass across the bar, and excused herself with a soured mumble. Her stool squealed against the floorboards and she had vanished into the music beating around them before either man even managed to turn his head.

“They didn’t let me out—hic.”

Richard’s eyes darted from Rocco’s glass to the three shots the bartender had set down. “Can’t imagine why.”

“Well, probably ‘cos it’s a prison. Not supposed to let you leave.”

“I guess,” Richard said, nodding to the bartender in Rocco’s stead, “but how many people really go around breaking into prison, though?”

Rocco’s brain fizzled for a second in the wake of Richard’s back-of-the-net response, helped in no small part by his double-decimal blood alcohol high score. “True, s’pose.”

Beyond the bar and the gaudy, nearly tacky neon striping tacked gaudily to its edges, the club was alive with sounds and smells best faced with a strong stomach of stronger spirits. Only a sucker would’ve mingled in the sea of back-rubbing touchy-feelies ebbing and flowing through the building. The best seats were right in the berth of the bartender, in all her low-cut glory, so long as you kept your hand on your wallet and some wits behind your eyes.

Richard’s date, if she could be called that—the woman whose dinner Richard had paid for, at any rate—was nowhere to be seen, and in her haste to rid herself of Rocco’s sodden philosophical musings had left her handbag sitting on the bar.

“This belong to your friend?” the bartender asked, tapping the wood by the bag’s side.

Richard turned. “Uh, yeah. It does.” He made a half-assed courtesy of scanning the floor and pretending to look. “No idea where she went.”

“I’ll keep it here,” the bartender said, lifting the sequinned thing over the glasses and the taps and shoving it onto the shelf beneath the bar’s surface, from which could be summoned a seemingly endless supply of ice and napkins.

Richard rested on his bare forearms and quickly found himself glued by his hair to the alcohol-lacquered surface, though a new disgust soon replaced that unsettling sensation when one of the three shots was placed in front of him—a deathly black liquid that looked and smelled of tar. The bartender materialised a glass of water and set it in front of Rocco, who too readily accepted it.

Richard toasted God once he realised hesitation wouldn’t be his saviour, and the shot went down after a fashion, sticking to his mouth and gumming his senses with the obnoxious taste of pitch. Rocco’s shot disappeared as easily as the water that chased it. Man of many talents.

“I should probably go and find her,” Richard said. He stared straight ahead at the train of to-be drunkenness as it barrelled towards him, whistle screaming.

Both Rocco and the bartender nodded at different speeds as Richard got up from his stool. He pushed it back against the bar with his foot and cracked his broad shoulders, and set several pairs of eyes aflame. He oriented himself as best he could against the clamour of other people and shuffled his way through the crowd of drunken, unwelcome advances.

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Around ten seconds passed, long enough for Richard to exist at the bar only in smell, before the bartender leaned over towards Rocco. His eyes immediately snapped to her.

“What the hell are you doing!” the bartender said, sliding Rocco’s water away from him.

“Oh, that’s a good question. My job, Kirsten.” Rocco glowered at her.

“You’re this close”—she gave him an inch—“to losing him.”

“I am not.” Rocco slid his water back towards himself. “You’re just bad with men.”

Kirsten moved to protest, but clenched her jaw instead. From the corner of her eye, she checked if those sitting closest were sober enough to understand them. They weren’t. “We need those keys. I can’t get in the safe otherwise.”

“Well, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’ve already got her handbag under the bar!” Rocco said, seething through immaculate teeth as he gestured downwards with his eyes.

Kirsten closed the tiny gap further. “They’re not in there. I’ve already checked. He never gave them back to her.”

“Never gave them back? What do you mean—”

“Rocco!” She nodded towards Richard, who was bobbing up and down on the dance floor in fruitless looking, and her accomplice turned to spy him as well. “He fetched her phone from her car, remember? He’s still got her keyring. Back pocket. Don’t screw this up.”

“When have I ever screwed someone—something up?” Rocco said. “Just play along.”

“You’ve got an idea in mind?” Kirsten drew back as Richard, defeated and womanless, began making his way back towards them.

A curt grin spread across his lips as Rocco’s eyes grew hazy and unfocused the way of all drunks, and Richard scooted himself back onto his stool. Kirsten took up a clean glass and polished it, wiping away specks that only existed for her.

“No idea where she is,” Richard said. “I think she’s pissed.”

“Drunk?” Kirsten said.

Richard shook his head, apparently anticipating a great weight about to drop upon him, a fantastic bitchy stone to rival even Atlas’ burden. “Have you got whiskey?”

“Do I have whiskey? I hope so.” Kirsten set a hand upon her hip. “What sort of scuffed bar doesn’t!”

“Now that’s thinking I can get behind.” Richard tapped the edge with his hands. “Two, please.”

His pleasure was her command, and a flurry of activity soon produced two tumblers full of the ever-tempting tipple, golden-amber under the strong bar lights. “Neat, or?”

He turned to Rocco, whose eyebrows arched. “How do you take it?”

“That’s—hic—a dangerous question,” Rocco said. “If one’s for me, no ice. Raw, I guess.”

As she handed the two men their drinks, Kirsten spotted the flush across Richard’s chest. If that was from the alcohol, then she was Mother Teresa.

Some anguished seconds later, several deliciously naïve students came to the bar and stood idle in a queue of their own design. They argued among themselves about drinks and prices and whether one of the girls had by some miracle managed to bundle into a taxi without her cards, so Kirsten excused herself of the two men and went to attend to the gathered mass. Perhaps she was Mother Teresa, charity and all.

Rocco watched her shuffle off before turning his attention back to his new companion. “She hates it here—hic.”

“That makes two of us,” Richard said, swirling his drink.

“Could be worse,” Rocco said. “Could still be on y’date.”

Richard grimaced. “Don’t remind me. We went to Stucci’s before—you know, the one off the main street?”

Truth be told, Rocco hadn’t a clue, but nodded nonetheless.

“She spent almost all of it on her phone.” Richard downed the tumbler’s honeyed contents.

After a second of consideration, he reached across Rocco for the third pitch-shot that had up until that point been sitting by its lonesome. He twisted it off the sticky surface and whisked it through the air, only for Rocco to pluck it from his hand as it travelled, as one might a low-hanging apple. Richard quizzed the man with a tilt of his head before he pinched the rim of Rocco’s whiskey tumbler and shimmied it over to his own empty one in turn. Both met the other’s staring.

“Seems we’re at an impasse,” Rocco said.

“Apparently it takes two.”

“To tango?”

Richard looked down at the stolen tumbler and caught himself within, a brownish reflection of someone a little unknown, their face a little unfamiliar, liking it all a little bit too—

“You good in there?” Kirsten tapped Richard on the shoulder and he jumped.

“S-Sorry, ma’am. Just thinking.”

“Don’t have to call me that, love.” She pursed her lips. “You should get some air.”

Only then did Richard realise how hot it was, and how much he was sweating, and what lightning felt like on the skin in its arcing from his lips to his stomach and the tips of his toes and all places in between and back again. He flexed against the shudder that overcame him.

“I’ve got a few table orders,” Kirsten said, turning her side to Richard and almost burning holes in Rocco’s own eyeballs with her glare, “so you go with him.”

Rocco got the hint. There were certainly worse places the keys could’ve been.